Artist's Statement

We live in a time of reckoning.

When I first learned about the ecosystem impacts, climate change and mass extinction wrought, in part, by the Industrial Revolution, it was the early 90s and I was a biology student. Rather than pursue the doctorate in whale communication I'd dreamt of, I veered towards telling the stories of what was happening to Life on our planet. As a science writer, I covered these issues for a decade before raising my sons on David Attenborough, indigenous wisdom and nature-based education.

Now, after thirty years of reporting on the collapse of the most stable geologic era humans have ever known, swimming against a runaway obsession with misinformation and deceptive obfuscation of science, and holding fast as a woman in cultural systems designed to drown and suffocate far too many of us, I've come to these poems as a way to breathe undersea.

A way to breathe undersea as we travel from the calm of one geologic era to the fresh unknowns of the next.

During those thirty years, we've definitively left the paradise and stability of the Holocene – and the only era human civilization has ever known – and started our epochal transition across the chaos of the Anthropocene; the era of profound human impact on planet Earth and every one of her stabilizing global systems.

Currently, my reporting work deals with dark machinery and oceanic depths of harm that have literally and figuratively, never been experienced by humans.

Thus, these poems are my own personal escape to the peace beneath the chaotic waves of geologic change. And a place to explore our fresh, uncharted depths.

Because our reckoning is also full of an immensity of light; light I've only begun to see as I submerge. And to trust these undersea lungs.

Lungs I didn't know we had.

Lungs that can sustain us beneath the geologic tsunami roaring above.

Beloveds, these breathes don't require oars or a boat or a ship. So leave your oars ashore.

Take a new kind of breath. And submerge with me into the solace, comfort, and peace of the dark luminescence ignited by humanity's greatest transition.

My hope is breathing undersea brings you oxygen, too.

Much love, Rachel