Creativity

Everything Change contest challenges authors from around the globe to imagine climate futures

February 3, 2020

The beating drum of the climate crisis — from calamitous bushfires in Australia to disappearing sea ice in the Arctic — is a constant reminder our planet is a closed, limited system, and that we’re currently living far beyond its boundaries.

But what would our world look like if we actually respected and lived within our planetary boundaries? How would we organize our homes, communities, cities, and nations? How would we live with and relate to each other at the global level? How might politics, culture, relationships and identities — all of the messiness of human lives — change in a world where we’re grappling seriously with climate change?

To help us answer these questions, the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative at Arizona State University has announced its third Everything Change Climate Fiction contest, looking for short stories that explore visions of the future where humans are living within Earth’s planetary boundaries — at the individual level, but more importantly at the level of organizations, communities and societies, and at the level of a global human civilization.

The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize, and nine finalists will each receive prizes of $100. Submissions must be 5,000 words or shorter. The winner and finalists will be published in a free digital anthology, "Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Volume III," which follows two successful collections published in 2016 and 2019. The deadline for submissions is April 15.

The contest’s lead judge will be Claire Vaye Watkins, a former Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Story Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and author of "Gold Fame Citrus," a climate fiction novel that was named a best book of 2015 by the Washington Post, the Atlantic and NPR. Watkins will join an interdisciplinary group of judges with expertise in climate science, sustainability, creative writing and environmental literature.

The contest builds on two earlier global efforts by the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative, each of which drew hundreds of submissions from more than 65 different countries around the world, with finalists hailing from Sri Lanka, Australia, Malta, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States.

“To capture both the enormity and variability of climate change, we need a diverse, global range of voices,” said Joey Eschrich of the Center for Science and the Imagination, one of the contest organizers. “Climate change affects us no matter where we are, but it looks quite different depending on what part of the world you’re in, and its effects are cross-cut by social structures, cultural norms, power and inequality, and a host of other factors. The only way we can hope to get our heads around this crisis and imagine a way forward is to build a better global conversation — so we can see that we’re all in this together, and that we need to work our way out of it together. We believe that compelling stories are an important part of that effort.”

All genres of fiction are welcome in the contest. Growing initially out of speculative fiction, climate fiction has become a wildly diverse field of literary expression, encompassing realistic and literary approaches, science fiction, comedies, fantasy, graphic novels and much more.

“We don’t see a one-size-fits-all approach to the competition. As there is not just one solution to global climate change, there is not one story, or type of story, that exemplifies the issue. Instead there are different opinions and levels of understanding, and a variety of literary styles in which writers are trying to carry on that conversation,” said Malik Toms of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, another of the contest’s organizers.

The concept of “planetary boundaries,” which is central to the contest’s call for submissions, was proposed by an international group of scientists in 2009, led by researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Australian National University. The boundaries range from atmospheric factors like the ozone layer and aerosols to biodiversity, water issues like ocean acidification and the freshwater cycle, climate change in terms of CO2 levels, chemical pollution and more. Together, they provide a framework to support necessary global shifts in governance and environmental policy — establishing a “safe space” in which sustainable economic and social development can occur. All of the boundaries are intertwined, emphasizing the inextricable entanglement of natural systems in the air, in the water and on land, irrespective of political and historical boundaries of nation, state and sphere of influence.

To learn more about the Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest, read full terms and guidelines and submit a story, visit everythingchange.submittable.com.

Support for the 2020 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest is provided by Ingka Group, the largest retailer and a strategic partner in the IKEA franchise system, operating nearly 380 IKEA stores in 30 countries. Learn more about Ingka Group and its commitment to sustainability at ingka.com/about-us/sustainability. Ingka Group and its representatives will not be involved in the judging process, the decision-making around the winners of the contest or the editorial process for the Everything Change book.

Joey Eschrich

program manager , Center for Science and the Imagination

480-442-2682 jpe@asu.edu

ASU researchers seek to solve decades-long Baja California peninsula mystery

ASU Life Sciences Assistant Professor Greer Dolby and her colleagues

There's something weird going on inside the plants and animals that call the Baja California peninsula home.On the surface, everything looks as expected, but close genetic inspection of many individuals reveals a genomically distinct split between the northern and southern populations of dozens of species.A cross-disciplinary team of researchers from Arizona State University, the University of Ari...

Read the article

ASU researchers seek to solve decades-long Baja California peninsula mystery

February 3, 2020

There's something weird going on inside the plants and animals that call the Baja California peninsula home.

On the surface, everything looks as expected, but close genetic inspection of many individuals reveals a genomically distinct split between the northern and southern populations of dozens of species. ASU Life Sciences Assistant Professor Greer Dolby and her colleagues The Baja GeoGenomics geology group reviews the stratigraphy visible in a deeply incited valley during their January 2020 field season. Photo by BGG consortium Download Full Image

A cross-disciplinary team of researchers from Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Oregon and California State University, Sacramento won a five-year, $2.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study how geologic activity, rainfall patterns and climate cycles might have shaped the evolution and biodiversity of the peninsula over time.

The team, which also includes Mexican collaborators, will develop novel methods for combining and analyzing the datasets from across fields including geology, ecology and genomics.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to finally unite these different fields and train established and early-career scientists in how to translate their science to related disciplines. We have volcanologists learning how to look for signs of adaptation in the genome, and ecologists learning how and why Earth’s crust bends and breaks in different places and what that means for the paleo-elevation of the peninsula," said Greer Dolby, assistant research professor at ASU's School of Life Sciences and co-principal investigator on the study.

“Essentially, we’re all getting on the same page to understand how the peninsula’s landscape has changed, and how these critters have evolved simultaneously. But the members of the Baja GeoGenomics consortium will take this experience to their next projects, and we hope it’ll have a ripple effect," she said.

"Biologists say, 'Something had to cause the pattern of divergence,'" said Benjamin Wilder, director of the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill and a co-principal investigator on the project. "The leading hypothesis has been that there was a seaway through a low gap in the peninsula that connected the Pacific to the Gulf of California about 3 million years ago."

This explanation worked its way into scientific papers and was nearly accepted until geologists suggested that there was not enough evidence to support that hypothesis. This is a huge problem for the field, so the team is excited to tackle it. The study will investigate three main hypotheses regarding the physical barrier of the seaway, climate and the changing landscape and rainfall patterns.

Researcher Greer Dolby leads a Baja Geogenomics meeting in ASUs Decision Theater

A cross-disciplinary team of researchers from Arizona State University and several other institutions won a five-year, $2.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study how geologic activity, rainfall patterns and climate cycles might have shaped the evolution and biodiversity of the peninsula over time. The team launched its research with a meeting at ASU's Decision Theater.

Photo by Sandra Leander/ASU School of Life Sciences

Greer Dolby (left), assistant research professor with ASU's School of Life Sciences, is a co-principal investigator for the study.

Photo by Sandra Leander/ASU School of Life Sciences

Baja GeoGenomics geology group photo during the January 2020 field season. From left to right: Mike Darin, Scott Bennett, Greer Dolby, Becky Dorsey, Sam Grandy, Genaro Martinez-Gutierrez, Yahíl Emmanuel Hernandez Salgado and Brian Hausback (front).

Photo courtesy BGG consortium

The seaway

The researchers will first test the original hypothesis that populations could have been isolated by a physical barrier — the seaway. There are two locations near the central peninsula that might have harbored the low pass that divided the species of the north and the south.

Finding refuge

Alternatively, global climate fluctuations over the last million years could have created dynamic changes in the landscape, according to Wilder, leading to hypothesis two: Organisms retreated up and down mountaintops along the peninsula as the climate swung between cool glacial periods and warm interglacial periods.

"The desert expands and contracts as climate changes; the mountains and their diversity of habitats offer pockets on the landscape where they may be able to persist during these transitions," Wilder said. "So the break you see could have been caused by the species retreating up into the mountains and then descending down and reconnecting with the rest of their species, but having been separated for hundreds of generations."

Mismatched rainfall

The northern half of the peninsula is rainy in the winter and dry in the summer. In the south, the opposite is true. The third hypothesis is testing whether opposing rainfall patterns created differences in genetic expression within species.

This rainfall asynchrony might have isolated species through misaligned timing in reproduction or other mismatched adaptations that led to the genetic patterns observed today.

Decoding the data

The team will scour the landscape for geological clues, test the full genomes of six different species that run the length of the peninsula, and create models to test the distribution of these plants and animals against their predictions.

The species chosen — including two plants (the pitaya agria cactus and brittlebush), two lizards (the black-tailed brush lizard and the Baja California spiny lizard) and two small mammals (the packrat and the Merriam's kangaroo rat) — run the full length of the peninsula and are representative of the Sonoran Desert.

"Ten years ago, we couldn't have done a project like this. We can sequence almost anything now, and it's relatively cheap," Dolby said. "And now, there's a big focus on data and how you integrate it."

The research is part of a new and growing field called geogenomics, a term coined in 2014 to describe the use of large-scale genomic data to answer geological questions.

The team expects that after combining all the data, they'll find that multiple causations are not just probable, but likely. Their consensus at the outset is that each of these processes probably has a part to play, but they aren't sure yet to what degree.

"One of the coolest things about this project is that it's all about the biologists learning how the geologists see it, and we're trying to embed the geologists in the biology," Wilder said. "That approach has the great potential to unlock a history of evolution that has been elusive up to now."

The researchers also think this work may shape how future studies are conducted.

“We know that Earth’s landscape is complex and ever-changing,” Dolby said. “As biologists, we often don’t consider this because it’s too complicated, but with these new large-scale genomic datasets, we can start really tackling that complexity to understand the nuance of how Earth’s changes influence organisms’ evolution and allow for the fact that several processes may be important. This is a big deal for understanding how new biodiversity on Earth is generated through time."