Elizabeth Kurucz is another one of our brilliant authors who contributed to the anthology No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet. Her short story Ground Up was a winner in the 2022 Green Stories short story competition. This lyrical story explores the connections between personal and ecological flourishing, taking the reader on the psychological and agricultural journey of a rural American man who repairs both community and soil relations.
Ground up was later included in the anthology No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet. This anthology emerged from a project where we teamed up climate experts with great writers – including Kim Stanley Robinson and Paolo Bacigalupi – to deliver 24 short stories. Each has one or more climate solutions at its heart. No More Fairy Tales was shared at COP27 and COP28, and at net-zero meetings with UK MPs. It includes links to webpages featuring climate solutions in case readers would like to take further action.
What attracted you to contribute a story to this anthology?
The anthology was an opportunity to bring together my love for creative writing and my passion for making the world a better place, in collaboration with a wonderful group of writers. For years, I have been writing poetry and fiction ‘on the side’, while working as an academic. I research leadership and organisational practices that enable societal-level sustainability transitions. I co-authored a scholarly book, Reconstructing Value: Leadership Skills for a Sustainable World (Rotman/University of Toronto Press), based on a decade of research with managers in organisations recognised for their sustainability leadership. This work led to an epiphany about the importance of meaning-making in sustainability and how storytelling plays a vital role in personal and societal transformation.
I work with practising managers who are trying to make sense of sustainability in their day-to-day lives. Implementing change isn’t only about having more tools, techniques or policies to shift organisations or society toward a better trajectory. More often, transformation comes from an individual connecting personally with a reason why they need to change. Figuring out what they care about is the first step in that process. Stories help build empathy and allow us to reflect on who we are in the world, so are powerful provocations for seeing problems and related opportunities in new ways. When Ground Up won the Green Stories writing competition in 2022, I was invited to participate in the No More Fairytales anthology. This was a great next step for sharing these ideas with a wider audience.
What inspired Ground Up?
My dad’s German and Hungarian family immigrated to Canada in the 1920’s and took up farming in a German-Canadian agricultural community. My dad was born in a very small town in Saskatchewan with a population of a few hundred people. His family farmed in Saskatchewan and British Columbia, eventually helping to establish a community farm near Waterloo, Ontario.
My dad would tell me stories about life on the farm. At the age of eight, he was harnessing his two Percheron draft horses and ploughing fields on his own. We had a beautiful garden which my dad tended to with great care and skill. He shared many lessons with me about how to prepare, grow and harvest food. So, I’ve always had a very immediate connection with agriculture and soil health. My dad’s voice, including his rural dialect and expressions, came through as I was writing the dialogue for this story. I hope this gives my characters an authentic feel. I devoured many bedside-table books about soil health, regenerative agriculture and permaculture which also informed my thinking in this story.
Ground Up started with the idea that through poor farming practices, we’ve created a vicious cycle where the soil has been so poorly managed that it has developed a chemical dependence on pesticides and fertilisers. This only further decreases resilience. Often, this is driven by industrial agriculture interests and reinforced by our ignorance of ecology. The story explores how destruction of the earth and destruction of community often go hand in hand, and considers the causes and solutions of these interconnected problems.
I think abstract ideas can be difficult for people to connect with, so I subscribe to the ‘head, heart and hands’ approach to sustainability in my research and teaching. I had the idea to create a personal story about a young man who has bought into a patriarchal narrative about individual competition as a way to escape his dying community. This journey leads him away from his family, his love interest, the land and, ultimately, himself. Jake becomes trapped in a cycle of toxic masculinity and a related dependence on opioids to dull the pain from his physical and mental trauma.
In this story, I wanted to challenge the idea that salvation from our ecological problems can only come from outside forces. Such a myth creates a lack of agency and engagement as we wait passively for ‘organisations’ or ‘governments’ to make change. I did this by playing with the trope that the love of a good woman is enough to change a man. In the relationship with Jake and Amy, I worked to flip the classic view of earth as ‘mother’ and women as caring and solely responsible for emotional labour. The story considers how shifting narratives about masculinity are essential for developing a positive relationship with the earth.
When Jake is hospitalised, Amy visits him, bringing a bag of rich soil from an untouched field on his farm and the mysterious provocation ‘solastalgia’ to reflect on. When Jake is discharged from the hospital and begs for Amy to guide his next steps, she won’t let herself be used as a temporary solution to his problems. Amy tells Jake to connect directly with the soil, as he might a lover, and work to find his way back to the land.
Caring becomes the first step to Jake listening to the land and responding to it. This is an essential element of success in permaculture. Opening his senses to the soil pushes Jake to become engrossed in receptive attention. I drew this concept from philosopher Nel Noddings’ work on the Ethics of Care in her book Caring. Ultimately, this deep listening to the land is the context for Jake reconciling with Amy. By healing the soil, they can truly connect with each other and the earth becomes an extension of their own bodies that receives and sustains them.
In this story, I wanted to show nature pushing back against our attempts to dominate and control it with practices that don’t respect ecological principles. I wanted to suggest that a caring connection to the earth is essential for breaking this cycle. Robin Wall Kimmerer, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and author of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry, shares an Indigenous worldview of the land as a teacher and the importance of mindfulness and listening to the land for ecological and personal well-being and resilience. Multispecies feminist theorist Donna Harraway’s idea of ‘making kin’ inspired the opening sentence of Ground Up and informs this ‘solution’. It highlights the importance of caring for human and non-human species, intentionally cultivating kinship, strengthening these relationships which are fraught with tensions and recognising essential interdependencies in this epoch of environmental damage she refers to as the ‘Chthulucene’.
Solastalgia is an ‘earth emotion’ that I was particularly interested in exploring in this story. Philosopher Glenn Albrecht described it as a ‘homesickness at home’ or the eco-grief we feel when we can no longer return to our home because it has been negatively impacted by environmental issues such as climate change, pollution or industrial development. I wanted to consider how solastalgia might not just be a source of grief but also an opportunity for transformation, and what this would look like on a personal level.
Developing my main character, Jake, as a college football player allowed me to draw some parallels. The story compares our historical use of the plough and agrochemicals to increase yield and support the economic imperatives in industrial agriculture with the violence, personal damage and related drug addiction issues in college football that come from pursuing ego and individual competition in support of a massive, multi-billion-dollar industry. The story’s title Ground Up has two meanings that relate to the problems and the solutions it explores. First, this idea considers the machinery of industrial systems that have the potential to grind people and communities up and spit them out. Second, it considers the importance of building systems from the ground up, respecting social-ecological relations to form authentic connections with people and place based on mutual well-being.
Permaculture and regenerative agriculture discourage use of the plough or deep tillage and encourage a no-till approach of minimal disruption to protect soil structure, improve water retention, maintain microbial communities, and reduce carbon emissions. An idealised vision of the community farm and the tension with individual aspirations that came from my dad’s early experiences allowed me to consider the destruction of our communities that leads to solastalgia and how personal healing is an essential component of regenerating ecosystems.
There are a lot of technical ideas about permaculture and soil health in Ground Up that I’ve hinted at in a poetic way. I try to leave clues and avoid over-explanation and trust the reader to delve more deeply into the meaning of the story – so providing this detailed description here is quite a different approach! I hope the love story of Jake and Amy is engaging enough that it draws the reader in and inspires them to reflect on why Jake’s own life, the health of the soil and the sustainability of our world are all connected.
Were there any other stories that inspired you in the anthology?
One of the great things about being part of an anthology like this is having the opportunity to participate in a community of people who share a vision of having a positive impact on the world through storytelling. Writing is a solitary pursuit and working in the field of sustainability can be emotionally draining, so collaboration is a great way to fill your soul with energy by engaging with others’ ideas.
I particularly enjoyed The Caretaker by Matthew Hanson-Kahn for how it builds empathy with non-human species through the point of view from which the story is told, while also informing the reader about coral health. I really loved the playful tone of Mostly for You by Jenni Clarke and how the main character, Miriam, struggles with the ethical dilemmas in her home cleaning business. The story develops insights about green cleaning solutions while exploring how Miriam’s actions are motivated by the environment and personal relationships. The Forest Awaits by Linsey Croal is a beautiful and poetically written story that shows how ideas from one generation can influence future generations while also enlightening the reader about the importance of kelp forest restoration in developing resilient habitats for marine flora and fauna. I just admire how all of the stories in the collection are striving both to enlighten and to entertain.
What’s next for you?
I’m finishing up a short story collection where each of the ten stories focuses on deeply exploring different ideas that have emerged from my research as essential for social-ecological transformation. I’m also working on my second novel in an eco-feminist trilogy that unpacks the psychological and emotional dynamics between four graduate student friends and lovers as they struggle with the role of imagination, community, idealism and love in their personal and ecological survival. It’s a sustainability rom-com that travels from the east to west coast of America, and draws on philosophy, geology, history and magic realism elements. It has been so much fun to create!
Writing fiction is very rewarding for me because of the freedom it offers to imagine possible worlds and to share ideas I’ve learned through my academic research to inspire new ways of thinking. The next step for my writing will be to work on finding good homes for all of these stories so that they can contribute to a wider audience beyond academia.
On the research side, I’m leading an interdisciplinary, multi-university, Canada-wide initiative focused on transforming education in Canada. Our focus is on understanding elementary, secondary and postsecondary education innovations that develop youth engagement and well-being and that build individual and community leadership capacity for social-ecological resilience. We’ve called this the Flourishing-focused Learning Innovation Partnership (or ‘FLIP’) and are currently in the process of co-creating education innovation ‘experiments’ with 10 partner organisations engaged in community-school partnerships. We’re aiming to develop the related skills and competencies in teachers, staff and students to support these efforts and to scale impacts from these local initiatives to create a national social learning network that encourages multi-species flourishing through education.
Storytelling will play a big role in our knowledge mobilisation efforts so that we can share insights from our research and engage in collective learning with a growing partnership of individuals and organisations. I’m also working to incorporate some of my short stories and other relevant works of fiction into the design of elementary, secondary and post-secondary courses. We are doing this as one of the ‘experiments’ that will allow us to study contributions to learning through storytelling in the FLIP project.
In my teaching, I strive to develop student focus, engagement, creativity and optimism in an age of distraction and cynicism. Experiential learning and storytelling are ways that help to build capacity for mindfulness and opportunities for reflection. Stories allow individuals to connect personally with ideas so that they have more meaningful learning experiences and will be empowered to make the world a better place.
I’m so grateful to live on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario – a 725 km, 450-million-year-old geological feature that runs from Queenston Heights Park in Niagara to Tobermory on the Bruce Peninsula. This area was designated a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve in 1990. The place I call home is situated upon the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and the Mississaugas. The Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant was an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek to share resources peacefully and to care for the Great Lakes region.
Acknowledging the cultural and natural history of this land motivates me to engage in caring practices in my writing and research. I draw so much inspiration from this beautiful and biodiverse landscape and have spent many hours hiking, exploring and connecting with nature with my family and our White Swiss Shepherd ‘Cali’ (pictured here from our visit last summer to the shores of Georgian Bay on the Bruce Peninsula).
Thanks for contributing to No More Fairy Tales and for being our Author of the Month!
A pleasure!
