Jess Tanck

[Extreme Environments]

What constitutes an extreme environment? I suspect that anyone reading this issue near its release in August 2025 will have images that immediately rise to mind: water surging through streets and into homes, skies choked with wildfire smoke, heat that presses even when day turns to night. And I fear that readers in the future may be armed with far more searing imagery.

By just about any metric, the environments around us are growing more extreme. 3.6 billion people currently live in areas vulnerable to environmental impacts ranging from hotter temperatures to crop failure to rising sea levels, worsening storms, increased sickness, poverty, and displacement. [1] What’s more, “greater uncertainty”—linked with climate change but also rapid changes in social connections, education, job security, and health—is increasingly being identified as a key driver of depression and anxiety, especially among young people.[2] Recent years have also seen a drastic rise in the suicide rate among youth, with an increase of 57% for Americans ages 10 to 24 from 2007 to 2018.[3] As the spaces around us grow increasingly extreme, how can we reckon with our relationship to the environments we have created, and those which have formed us?  

To start, the very use of the word “extreme” makes this topic deeply subjective: one person’s extreme environment is another person’s Tuesday. Who, after all, would call a slightly chilly spring morning or a lunch at home “extreme”? Someone, perhaps, who is ill, grieving, lonely, or in pain. And so we’re back at my initial question, which I think is worth asking because it is difficult, maybe even painful, to answer—and because asking it is a path into both deeper compassion and fuller imagination.

The pieces in “Extreme Environments” engage with the wonderful as well as the terrible, exploring the possibilities that language and art can make available to us in these spaces. In “Prayer for a thousand tomorrows,” Leslie Harrison’s speaker incants, seeks out beauty as something more than a mere consolation. Conversely, Sara Eliza Johnson’s speakers in “The Crooked Forest” and “Pastoral” turn a scalpel to their desire, examining what might render a person’s language untranslatable. Christopher Kondrich tests what truths both image and metaphor can reveal to us—as well as the ways in which they might lie—and silas denver melvin’s poems show how we might simultaneously savor both softness and iron, turn our blood to a rallying cry, a song. Meanwhile, Elinor Ann Walker’s “What We Swallow” and “Watershed” interrogate the relationship between creation and destruction, each poem’s ending serving as an opening rather than closure. And in a story that is equal parts devastating, funny, and tender, the titular character of Adam Peterson’s “KEITH, or: the Last Man on Earth” narrates the end of mankind and all that has happened to him since “The Big Drop,” an unspecified cataclysm that continues to strip words away from him even as he speaks.

The artists in this issue deftly explore, too, how extreme environments have a way of climbing inside us: we can never really separate ourselves from the spaces we inhabit, just as they can never be entirely untangled from us. Jane Morton turns, in their story “Unknown Caller,” to where home and liminal space bleed together, taking on the language of myth to ask, “What miracles might be allowed tonight?” Kaitlin Miller, in “Altar Service” and “An Act of Contrition,” uncovers the seams where the sacred slithers into and tears at the physical world. Meanwhile, Carl Phillips’s “I’ll Miss Most What I Loved Best” engages tenderness as “particularity made visible,” turning the double-edged blade of savor and suffering, devotion and loss, in his hands. In “resiliency, or tardigrades,” Matty Layne Glasgow examines the intersection of ecological resiliency and poetic form, asking what it means to endure, to be resilient, to be queer in the midst of environmental catastrophe and capitalist ruins. On the other hand, Easton Smith’s story “Aquifers,” which follows its narrator home to the family farm where their mother recently perished, explores how and where place, loneliness, isolation, and horror meet, asking: where is the line between love and hate? And in what ways is the past embedded within us, something we can never really shake? Finally, Paige Webb’s “Defense Supply Chain” interrogates the relationship between violence, language, landscape, and abstraction, asking how the language we use might enable, disseminate, or resist the violences of our nations and our world.

In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Tsing et al simultaneously ask and insist:

“Somehow, in the midst of ruins, we must maintain enough curiosity to notice the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible and terrifying… How shall we retain the productive horror of our civilization—and yet refuse its inevitability?” (M7; G4)

The poems, stories, visual art, and hybrid works in “Extreme Environments” offer a range of responses to this question. Maybe we start, as Scott Brennan does, by bringing our attention to the places where life persists in the midst of austerity and neglect. Or maybe, like Celeste Connor, we turn to speculative art, inviting in what we struggle to imagine or know—even seeking out a sort of productive psychological pain. Perhaps, like Emily Zhang, we seek to understand the environments that surround us through light and shadow, and the rage, joy, fear, or vulnerability we can see in others’ faces. Or maybe, as the speakers of William Fargason’s poems do, we break and remake our prayers—“return to the wound / to heal the wound.”

—JVT

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[1] “Climate Change,” World Health Organization, October 12, 2023, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health#:~:text=Research%20shows%20that%203.6%20billion,diarrhoea%20and%20heat%20stress%20alone.

[2] Alessandro Massazza et al. “The association between uncertainty and mental health: a scoping review of the quantitative literature,” Journal of Mental Health, 32:2 (January 2022): 480-491, https://doi.org/10.1080/09638237.2021.2022620.

Susanne Schweizer, Rebecca P. Lawson, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. “Uncertainty as a driver of the youth mental health crisis,” Current

Opinion in Psychology, no. 53 (July 2023): 1-9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101657.

[3] Awais Aftab and Benjamin Druss. “Addressing the Mental Health Crisis in Youth—Sick Individuals or Sick Societies?” JAMA Psychiatry, no. 80.9 (June 2023): 863–864, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2023.1298

[EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS]