New World Coming: Frontline Voices on Pandemics, Uprisings, and Climate Crisis

by Alastair Lee Bitsóí (Editor), Brooke Larsen (Editor)

“In our new world, we will bring cooked food to our neighbors, we will grow plants out of plastic gas canisters, we will decompose borders while we come home,” writes Lyrica Jensen Maldonado in New World Coming. As the warming world emerges from pandemic, what might a collective, regenerative future look like? What can movements for justice and liberation learn from the response to COVID-19 and uprisings for Black lives? Writers of the Southwest, on the frontlines of climate and justice movements, document this distinct moment in history through personal stories and intergenerational imaginings of a just, healthy, and equitable future, inspiring the change we need to survive and thrive.

Genres: Environment, Nonfiction

273 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2021

Reviews

[brinley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m biased because I have a piece in this book 🤪, but honestly so many of the authors featured in here brought me to tears. Really great collection of how we can move forward and practice resiliency despite everything falling apart around us.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This amazing anthology is full of community activists that are experts on their topics. The layout is intriguing using the moon as a guide. This is a book for the southwest that everyone should read. The lived experiences, the poetry, the gritty, the joy.

This was a birthday gift from my friend S, and I read it one chapter at a time. I recommend this - some of these topics are heavy.

Psarah Johnson is a dear friend of mine and I miss her so much. The entry on Margarita Satini was devastating to me. Several other friends and colleagues wrote other entries. And I learned about new people doing important work.

The book centers the marginalized and lifts them up. The topics are all interesting. The people come alive in the words. Also I heard PsarahJ's entry in her voice.

[Anna Brandes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book compiled by two people local to the desert Southwest. The variety of voices they compiled provided a really great look into the experiences of frontline communities facing climate change, racism and the pandemic. A lot of the points were made multiple times by different contributors but it did strengthen the message. The strong point of this book was truly the theme of imagining a new world. What I took away was that to get to a new future we must have the creativity and inspiration to imagine it first-and that imagination and creativity ensures that that everyone can and will included in a future that serves us all and the planet.

[alligatorfisherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

My ceramics teacher recommended this book to me and I'm so glad she did!!!!! please go read this as it will infuriate you and deepen the firey anger in your heart for the U.S government. If you want to know more about how the pandemic has uncovered centuries of neglect, abuse, and meticulous oppression of BIPOC communities (more in-depth on indigenous communities) then pick this up.
Pick it up from your public library or get ur copy from Torrey House Press
link to purchase here: https://www.torreyhouse.org/new-world...

[fire_on_the_mountain · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book absolutely electrified me. When I finally put it down, I had to get up and pace around and rave about it to my partner, raving it's praise. It's one of the very few works I've read that really grasps what we lived through in 2020, and how it's the bubbling head of a nexus of deep-rooted societal problems that have festered for generations in our society. That inflection point where they all intersected-- failing health systems, climate change, racial strife, deepening inequality, the intentional dismantling of the care state, the extractive demands of late capitalism-- was our moment to imagine and define and build a new world. Hearing these individual stories of resilience and creativity and imagination and dedication truly inspired me.

Very frequently in the years since, I've really gotten down on how things are, and how the world we're dreaming of doesn't seem to come to pass. But that's the nature of seeds. They grow and strengthen underground, they need care and attention, before they can burst through and flourish. I think that's what's in here, the seeds of what can come, if we care for them enough. So, my endless admiration to the editors and writers of this work, I'm very glad it exists as a testament and a guidepost into tomorrow.