A NOTE ON PLACE

The following stories were shared digitally between March 2022 and June 2023. We invited young people around the world to share some facet of what it’s like to be alive at this pivotal time in the earth’s long history. Our aim was to capture, in a polyphonic portrait, something of what this climatic moment feels like—not hard facts, but impressions and anecdotes, memories and legends. For our twelve Zoom sessions, we imagined a campfire: a place to gather in crisis, swapping tales.

It is an honor to share these stories authored by 77 incredible young people across the globe. As we celebrate the myriad voices here, we also recognize that the question “where are you?” can be complicated (especially online). In the context of migration, occupation, invasion, and habitat loss, the places from which we speak can be distant from the landscapes where we feel most rooted. At the same time, we recognize intersection as an opportunity, and hybridity as a force. For the following pages, storytellers self-identified their locations, using the names and the number of places that felt most true.

Storytellers also reported their location in terms of biomes. Commonly defined as ecological communities, biomes are regions of the planet that share similar types of vegetation, soil, climate, and wildlife. Several different biome frameworks exist; in consultation with biologists at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons, we used a system of fourteen eco-regions, striving to commission stories from each. (We also included an “other” category where storytellers could note alternative ecological categories with which they strongly identify—including human-altered landscapes, sometimes referred to as “anthromes.”)

We felt that this mode of self-identification, and this rubric of diversity, were important: an alternative geography for perceiving and expressing our place(s) in the world, alongside the other species with whom our own stories are inextricably interwoven.

—Robert Duffley (Project Dramaturg)