Watering the Trees Anna Lena Phillips Bell Last fall, the release of the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was—or should have been—a wake-up call. This spring, we got a shocking, though not surprising, elaboration on that news: the United Nations released a report warning that we must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees now or lose the chance of holding to that limit. As we try to survive increasingly volatile fires, hurricanes, and floods, it feels more important than ever to keep our attention on this point. Here in North Carolina, though it’s long since out of the news, communities still suffer from the effects of Hurricane Florence in 2018. The storm closed Ecotone’s offices for a month, and we were lucky that our staff and UNC Wilmington creative-writing community came through relatively unscathed. Still, three years (and what feels like several lifetimes) later, it’s easy to recall the fear and chaos of that time. Even as we respond to the more immediate-feeling violence of efforts to limit democracy and basic human rights, acting to shift the climate crisis is essential to the wellbeing of our bodies, the land, and the beings we share it with—and not at all unrelated to the former crises. It’s not easy. We each operate under our own constraints—of resources, of time, of systemic oppression and violence, of limited energy and attention. So I’m pleased that we’re featuring in this issue the second installment of our Climate Annotations series, in which writers, artists, and scientists help us to engage with climate science. In her annotation, Anne Haven McDonnell writes eloquently of the sounds pine trees make when compromised by the mountain pine beetle, and of the compound effects of the climate crisis. Many of this issue’s contributors lend voice to the complex effects of systemic and local oppression, some with unflinching exactness, some tempered by visions of good relationships and of kindness, and some with wild syntax and rhythm. In a pair of poems, Ibe Liebenberg considers the violence done in the United States to human and wolf bodies. Gretchen VanWormer tells of finding queer community and connection to place after a move to Oklahoma, contemplating artworks by Albertus Seba, J. Jay McVicker, and Allan Houser along the way. Monica Rico’s aching but fierce poem “Get Out of My House” evokes family dynamics with heartbreaking precision—as do each of the three short stories in this issue, [End Page 5] from Jerome Blanco, Chioma Urama, and Vanessa Chan, in strikingly different ways. Read on, too, for a rip-roaring comic from Rumi Hara, and exuberant paintings of Black cultural heroes and a childhood in Harlem, from our cover artist, Lisa Love Whittington. In her essay “The Apologetic Body,” Catherine Pierce writes of the freedom from shame that new motherhood provides. And, bringing us back to the planetary body that sustains us, Catherine Carter writes in her poem “Earth says,” “I am your mother as you are mother / to the mosquito that hovers / over your arm as you write. ” ________ Yes, it’s been a strange and terrible few years. But in them, just before and during the pandemic, it was our exceedingly good luck that Sophia Stid, our first postgraduate fellow, joined our editorial team. Among many accomplishments, she edited a great deal of work for the magazine, was instrumental in helping to bring our fifteenth-anniversary Ecotone almanac to life, and researched and helped to enact our ongoing process of land acknowledgment. She’s been a model for our MFA team of the editor-writer, winning awards for her own work—watch for her forthcoming chapbook from Host Publications!—even as she devotes incredible creative attention to this magazine, its staff and its contributors. With this issue, she departs for new adventures, though I’m pleased to write that she’ll continue to work with us as a contributing editor. Sophia’s steadfast wisdom, clarity, and inventiveness have been a gift to our team and to everything she works on. It’s an understatement to say that we’ll miss her. In...