Earth Day 2025: Video, Poetry and Prose Special

This Earth Day, we have brought together films, interviews, poems, essays and, perhaps importantly, manifestos. When environmental protections are being rolled back, when the temperature is more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era, when genocide continues without intervention, when wars rage around the globe weaponized by Western arms dealers, when immigrants are deported to foreign prisons without trial, when those traditionally marginalized within our communities are targeted more than ever… —yes, it’s time to declare our aims, motivations and intentions. It’s a time for manifestos to imagine new ways of being in the world.

The two manifestos included in this Earth Day issue offer differing approaches to ecological crisis. Özge Lena’s manifesto coins the term “catapoetry”, a form of writing that faces the catastrophic ecological conditions in which we live, and records “the chaos of today’s collapsing world” to wake people from inaction. The other manifesto is from a group of Thrutopian writers, who, in conversation, describe writing that “guides us through the climate emergency to a future that is sustainable and achievable” (Ilse Pedlar). It is more urgent than ever for writers to concentrate efforts on ecological emergency, whether that means facing the crisis or seeking a way through it.

With this in mind, we offer here a variety of ecological themed texts which highlight the importance of the natural world and outline why it is worth fighting for. We present an original film, The Dunes, where an ‘edgeland’ comes to be a site of discovery and realisation for a neurodivergent, working-class teenager, and we present three nature-themed video poems from Maggie Harris, Joshua Jones, and CJ Wagstaff produced with Taz Rahman’s channel, Just Another Poet. We review an important new film from Wales’ National Poet, Hanan Issa, dealing with flooding and continuing a theme begun earlier this year in Modron via Hywel Griffiths’ Welsh-language essay on floods in the Rhondda.

A video-talk by Leila Mimack discusses the environmental awareness of actors’ unions, showcasing strategies which might inspire others to follow suit. Rebecca Goss’s thoughtful nonfiction essay explores the tangled nature of our lives, where thoughts on a stepdaughter living across the Atlantic are complicated by distance, the need for plane travel and the presence of big tech companies in our lives from Meta to Google. Finally, Jonaki Ray is interviewed about her poem ‘Night Shifts in the Jungle’, where a driver for Western tourists wryly observes his passengers, highlighting the tension between environmentalism and tourism.

Thanks to the writers included and thank you to the Books Council of Wales. This special edition for Earth Day would not be possible without New Audiences 2024 funding. Last month, our editors Kristian Evans and Taz Rahman attended a celebratory event in Wrexham for the fund, seeking to highlight the huge difference that this kind of funding makes in the arts. Though New Audiences (sadly) has not continued in 2025, we are profoundly grateful. Modron would not have existed without it.

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WITH THANKS TO THE BOOKS COUNCIL OF WALES & NEW AUDIENCES FUNDING 2024. WITHOUT THIS SUPPORT, FILMS INCLUDED IN THE EARTH DAY SPECIAL COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE.