Nonfiction by Amy Kennedy

✧ Writer’s Regimen Contest Runner-up ✧

The Dark Mountain (1909), Marsden Hartley

I’m With Attenborough

David Attenborough says the Holocene is over, but the geologists disagree. Earlier this year, the International Commission on Stratigraphy said the Holocene is still happening—we are still in it. They decided not to call it somewhere between the Industrial Revolution and Oppenheimer. Or maybe it was between Descartes and the Model T. According to the geologists, the Anthropocene isn’t here just yet.

My kids came home from school in a kayak today. It rained too hard, and there was three feet of water on our street. The dogs followed me around all morning and refused to go outside to pee. The classrooms flooded, but they didn’t cancel school because the Holocene isn’t over.

When my children are older and ask, “Why did we move?” I’ll show them the picture of their dad pulling them home from school in a kayak.

“Was that during a hurricane?”

“No. It was a Wednesday.”

If they remember anything about that day, it won’t be how hot their baths were or the smell of the microbial cleanser. It won’t be the pregnant looks their parents shared over dinner. Instead, they will remember that the neighborhood kids came out and asked for boat rides in the flooded streets. And who was I to refuse? Especially since David Attenborough says the Holocene is over.

AMY KENNEDY writes fiction and nonfiction about the ongoing climate crisis and the industry-fueled environmental issues affecting the South. She created the website ALongNewThread.com, an online space that examines ecoanxiety, ecological grief, and environmental justice. Amy is a Loyola Institute of Environmental Communication Fellow, a DeGroot Foundation Courage to WRITE grantee, and a 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grant recipient. Her first book Vanishing Points: Words for Disappearing received an Antenna Press Publishing Award and will be released later this year.