We began imagining this situation final yr, earlier than Donald Trump gained the election; earlier than he began dismantling FEMA, the EPA, NOAA, and each different company that’s making an attempt to assist us stave off the local weather disaster.
And whereas the nation has modified in drastic methods since final yr, our strategy to this situation didn’t. From the start, we knew we couldn’t take a look at the local weather disaster in a vacuum. We will’t separate it from the remainder of our lives, our work, our artwork, or the way in which we think about the longer term. Treating it as a separate situation simply makes it simpler to show it into one thing large, overwhelming, and unapproachable; or, worse, one thing we are able to faux doesn’t exist—or deny altogether.
And so we constructed this situation with that in thoughts. We’ll be rolling out the content material on-line over the following week or so, and you will discover a bodily situation at a whole bunch of areas—from Tacoma to Everett—beginning at this time. In it, we tackle a few of our area’s massive, scientific questions in regards to the local weather disaster: Workers Author Vivian McCall asks specialists if we’re actually on the cusp of cracking the code on nuclear fusion vitality, as one native startup claims. I requested if the fires that occurred in Los Angeles in January may occur right here.
However we additionally requested how the local weather disaster shapes the artwork we make, and the artwork we search. Senior Workers Author Charles Mudede explored why there’s a pattern of doomsday bunkers on TV, from Fallout to Silo to Paradise. And Stranger contributor Nathalie Graham visited the recycling dump to see how their artists-in-residency program is remodeling trash into treasure.
By means of the method, we appeared for little, compact seeds of hope. Our managing editor Megan Seling discovered one in a Bluesky thread, of all locations, about how some scared, confused, half-pound pocket gophers turned the scorched ash from Mount St. Helens’s eruption into thriving wildlands once more. We put that thread (written by science journalist Margaret Harris) within the fingers of the gifted illustrator Greg Stump, who turned it into a comic book about surviving in a hostile atmosphere—the identical method the gophers stored digging by the ash.
And we’re so excited to introduce you to Drippy, the Soggy Paper Straw. We and our (very actual and by no means made up) readers had a number of questions on environmentalism in 2025. Is it price it to interchange your gas-powered automobile with an electrical one? Are the recycling guidelines nonetheless the identical as those we discovered as children? What number of microplastics are actually in my junk? Drippy (Microsoft’s Clippy’s Zoomer nephew) is right here to reply all that and extra.
Finally, if this situation does something, I hope it reminds you that our future continues to be ours to think about. Virtually each story on this paper is a narrative about making magnificence out of trash, ash, or completely nothing.
So keep in mind to maintain digging.
Hannah Murphy Winter
Editor-in-Chief
Cowl Artwork by Tyler Gross
grossillustration.com
