Rising tides, solarpunk cities, ghosts that haunt us. This year’s winners of the Sustainability Writing Awards looked beyond the now to imagine what the places we love might look like in a world shaped by unchecked climate catastrophe. The winning essays, all written by students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, explore the tension between hope and despair, the local and global, individuality and community, in search of an answer to a question we all share: what will the future look like?
Applicants were invited to build on last year’s theme, climate realities, which explored their distinctive, place-based experiences of global climate change, including the repeated 100-year storms in the Midwest, intensifying coastal flooding on the eastern seaboard, and record-shattering heat in many countries across the world. This year’s theme shifted the focus beyond the present moment, which can distort our ability to look forward. Writers were asked to focus on the implications of the present, extrapolating them outward into futures that may be hopeful, dystopic, techno-utopic, pastoral, degrowth-oriented, or fantastical.
The Office of Sustainability accepted both fiction and nonfiction submissions this year and received over 50 entries, giving the review team the difficult job of picking winners for three $500 awards. Essays and short stories came from undergraduate and graduate students across campus, from the medical school to the literature department, and spanned the globe. Across departments and fields of study, students are grappling with what comes next, imagining how they’ll live in the world they’ll inherit.
One of our winning submissions came from Devin Guthrie, a senior double-majoring in Environmental Science and Environmental Studies. Guthrie is from Milwaukee and imagines his hometown decades into the future, utterly transformed both by climate change and human efforts to adapt. In his solarpunk future, Milwaukee is nearly unrecognizable, a city home to thousands of climate refugees and heavily invested in clean energy, yet also completely recognizable, as efforts to adapt to climate change haven’t fixed social, economic, and geographic divides.
Guthrie’s story dazzles with its lush worldbuilding and creatively wrought setting, while also functioning as a meditation on grief and loss, bringing the reader into a new world beset by the same choices: What do we do for those we love? How much can we endure?
“Everyone wanted to build a harmonious world but few agreed on how.” — Devin Guthrie, The Metal Grown in Her Nursery
This story isn’t the only one set in Wisconsin—Ross O’Donnell keeps us grounded by setting their story on the Isthmus, even as his characters fly high. O’Donnell, a senior majoring in Environmental Science with experience in a botany eco-physiology lab, brings that knowledge into his imagining of Adon, a new Madison built on the ashes of the old. As O’Donnell writes, the city is “a survivor of catastrophe, built on the damaged bones of what came before.”
The reader gets a glimpse of a new world through O’Donnell’s slice-of-life style story, wherein the protagonist, Jaz, muses on the past, present, and future as she navigates a mundanely beautiful day. In this setting, O’Donnell explores what it means to rebuild—how human beings are resilient, able to survive disasters scarcely imaginable, and then make something beautiful out of the wreckage. What’s special about Adon is its residents’ insistence on growing, but not without remembering.
Our final story comes from Lily Smogor, a second-year double majoring in Environmental Studies and Political Science. “Songbirds and Other Farewells” asks, in Smogor’s words: “What happens to the places on the edge of climate vulnerability?”
By situating her fiction in geographical margins, Smogor teases out the complexities of adaptation and resilience by wondering which places (and which people) will be sacrificed as climate change worsens, and how we can retain our individuality and hope in such a world.
“Josey’s story,” writes Smogor, “is one of loss and stubborn beauty, showing that even in the face of destruction we can find futures within ourselves.” Stubborn beauty comes up repeatedly in the story, like green shoots after a wildfire, as Smogor’s protagonist navigates finding agency and joy in a landscape cracked with loss and abandonment.
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This cycle of the awards was the first in which we’ve had three fiction finalists. In each story, our finalists use their futuristic, solarpunk, and/or science fiction settings and plots to ask much larger questions. Even beyond the painfully human musings around survival, loss, and love, our finalists tease out complex geopolitical, strategic, and policy questions: Is adaptation the way forward? Can techno-optimism save us? What sacrifices are necessary? How will climate migration change our landscapes? What can restoration look like? Such is the power of fiction, to take a world created out of simply our own experiences and use it to ask questions and search for possible answers.
We invite you to read the three winning submissions here. Previous years’ winners are also featured on this page. Please note that the order in which these essays are presented does not designate a first, second, or third place. They are all equal winners.
By: Laleh Ahmad