In this episode, I chat with author Sarena Ulibarri about her story in the upcoming Bright Green Futures anthology, why she picked Climate Restoration as a theme, and her adorable giveaway item.
Text Transcript:
Susan Kaye Quinn
Hello friends! Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode 29: Climate Restoration with Sarena Ulibarri.
I'm your host, Susan Kaye Quinn, and we're here to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there. Today, we're going to have a quick chat with Sarena about her story, What Kind of Bat is This? in the Bright Green Futures anthology, releasing soon on Earth Day, April 22nd.
But first, there are three things listeners should know.
The anthology is a collection of hopeful climate fiction stories from guests on the pod. It's available for pre-order on a wide range of retailers, including bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores.
Second, Sarena's story is published separately as an ebook and is free right now. So make sure you go download that after the show.
And third, we're running a giveaway of cool stuff handpicked by the authors in the anthology, each item having a connection to their stories. The links for all of those things are in the show notes and also on the Bright Green Futures website.
All right, Sarena, thank you for coming back to the pod.
Sarena Ulibarri
Thank you so much for having me on it and thank you for putting together this amazing anthology.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I'm super excited to have it out very soon. Soon after this podcast goes live, we will have it in people's hands, but I am confident they're going to love it. Part of pulling this together and finding all these stories fitting together so nicely, I asked each of the authors in the anthology to pick a theme word, something that resonated with and represented the story and you picked CLIMATE RESTORATION. But it was a close tie between that and CLIMATE REWILDING. And I feel like we could have a whole podcast on the distinction between those two terms. And I want to have that podcast at some point because I really would love to get into that. But for now, why don't you just read for us the one line description of the story and then tell us how your theme relates to the story, but no spoilers.
Sarena Ulibarri
All right. So the one line description we came up with was:
A young volunteer joins the Climate Corps to fund college, but a strange discovery changes more than she expects.
So you're right, there's a surprising amount of discussion and controversy around terms like restoration and rewilding. One of the questions that always gets asked about restoration is restoration to what? Right. Like, what's the save point you're trying to get it back to? And is that actually what's best for the land?
And the same thing with rewilding, like how wild is a rewilded area? So just a little context behind like the setting that I chose for this story. So I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is a mid-sized city. And we have the Rio Grande that runs right through the middle of it. So historically, indigenous Pueblo people lived and farmed right along the river. And then when the Spanish colonized, they also used that area along the river to create big farms and estates. And some of those are still here. Like you'll be driving through the city and it's all like houses and strip malls. And then suddenly there's horses and vineyards and farmlands. And then you cross the river and then it's back to houses and strip malls.
So, yeah, some of those farms that they created are still there. Some of them have been like parceled off. Some of them have been converted into open space. So I had the opportunity for a while to volunteer at one of those farms that's being converted to a nature preserve. And that's what I used as the basis for the setting of this story.
So in the story, the character is, I think I said it in like Texas or something, and it's a little bit more rural, but it's it's again, like an old corporate farm that's being converted and rewilded, restored, however you want to say it, into a nature preserve.
So back to that question of restoring to what? Again, here in Albuquerque, the river, used to rove across the floodplain. And in the early 1900s, there were flood controls put in. And so, when we're restoring this land, it can never be restored entirely to what it was before, because it's land that's been impacted by humans so much that it requires human stewardship to maintain it.
So, anyway, everything that I put in the story about how the characters are restoring the land, it comes from my experience of this nature preserve here in Albuquerque.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That is so interesting because I knew both sides of that. Like I've read this story many times and I knew about your work and I still did not connect them in my brain. So I'm glad that you actually connected those dots for us because it does actually come out in the story. It feels like she's kind of done this. Like she's very familiar with this sort of process.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah. The seed of the story came from one day when we were doing some like soil remediation. The land has been impacted by herbicides and the soil compaction and, you know, mono farming and all that. There was a field that we were like, we just can't grow anything. A lot of rewilding and restoration, a lot of it is just take away the plants that aren't supposed to be there, all the invasive species, and then plant the things that are supposed to be there, the things that are going to grow there now.
So we couldn't do that in this one field, it was just too compacted and the Johnson grass had just completely taken over. We were laying down a biodegradable paper and then putting kelp and manure and straw and things like that to create a new layer of topsoil. So it was while we were doing that… the manure we got had some like trash in it. And so part of my role that day when I was volunteering was just walk through and like gather the trash out of the manure.
Susan Kaye Quinn
What a fun job!
Sarena Ulibarri
It sounds horrible, but it was actually kind of fun. So, anyway, one of the pieces of trash I found was a little rubber dragon toy. And so I was like, of course, the science fiction and fantasy writer was the one who finds the dragon out here. But that was sort of like the spark for this story. The character in the story is doing this restoration work and finds something strange out in a field, right? So it's not a dragon in the story, but that was kind of the inspiration. I found this little toy and then, you know, the writer brain just kind of runs with that.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I love that. What a great origin story for the story. The whole idea of rewilding into what? And restoration into what? I have a personal experience of that, which is very, very tiny compared to what you have. But I have this small patch in my backyard that I'm trying to plant native, like from seeds. And like I'm super bad at it. So my efforts extend to like, go out and pull invasive species and then plant native seeds and hope that the magic happens. And it's like an endless battle though, because there's a seed bank essentially in the soil. So these things keep coming up. I'm learning, like this is partly about me figuring out how does this work with my little tiny bit of the Earth that I have some direct influence over.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah, absolutely.
Susan Kaye Quinn
As a larger project, the whole concept of this… I think people don't really understand how much we've messed up the ecosystems and spread species all over the Earth to places that they didn't originally evolve and disrupted a lot of the ecosystems. So the more you learn about it—and I only know a tiny bit—the more you're seeing the scope of the problem.
Sarena Ulibarri
That's really true, yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
And it's hard, it's rough, because you're like, oh dear. This is not just: Let's just keep our hands off of it and it'll be all fine, it'll go back to nature. Like, that's not how that's gonna really work.
Sarena Ulibarri
Right, that's like what I was saying earlier, like this is land that humans have impacted. And so human stewardship is necessary to bring it back into balance. And that's really what it is. And I took what I learned at the nature preserve and I took it back to my own backyard too, in the same way that you're doing and tried. It really is just finding that balance point because you have to take away the things that are damaging to the land and add the things that support it and eventually you find that balance point where the things, the plants and the animals and things that are supposed to support that area will take over, and then it just works the way that it's supposed. But it takes time to find that balance point where the invasive species don't have such power in that land anymore.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right, right. I was telling a story to a friend. I have a friend who has just decided to move to Hawaii, which is like, we're all just crying tears for you that you're going to go live in paradise. But I mean, it's a very vulnerable paradise in many ways.
Sarena Ulibarri
It is.
Susan Kaye Quinn
And one of the things that I didn't know but learned recently about Hawaii is that every plant species that exists there—and it’s one of the most incredibly diverse places—just basically it's a seed that floated there or came on a ship or something like that. And that it has, because of that, it has a very delicate ecosystem. And oftentimes there are species there that exist nowhere else. And because of human impacts, those species are going extinct. And so there are these botanists who will travel across the Earth to get to Hawaii. There's this one in particular that goes and sits and has a vigil with the last of the remaining species…
Sarena Ulibarri
Oof.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right? I'm like, Oh my God. Like, I'm telling my friend this and he's like, first of all, you have to write a story about that. But also: why did you tell me this? This is really hard knowledge to hold.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It is. But you know, I feel like we do need to know these things. And so I love that your story at least kind of partially touches on things like species and our impacts on them and our choices around that. So really great story.
Sarena Ulibarri
And my story kind of relates back to what you were just saying too, because the character isn't sure if what she's found is like the last of an old species or the first of a new species. And so, yeah, that idea of sitting with the last of a species, that's heartbreaking and really quite poignant.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, I'm like, I don't know if I'm mentally prepared to write that story, but you know, it's out there waiting to happen.
OK, let's get to…because we're going to keep these episodes short and mostly to give people a taste of what they will find when they dive into the anthology. But we also have the giveaway and your giveaway item is an absolute runaway winner in the cuteness category with this plushy bat named Mildred. I mean, come on. But even better the proceeds go to support the Bat World Sanctuary, which I suppose is a pretty obvious tie-in considering Bat is literally in the title. But I actually had no idea there was an illegal pet trade in bats. I'm glad somebody's looking out for the bats. And also that bats are being retired from zoos. I guess I could have figured that out and unfortunately, research as well.
So I love that there is an organization that is taking care of these little guys, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you discovered the organization and whether you've had any exciting bat encounters yourself.
Sarena Ulibarri
Sure. I don't know. I love bats. I've always loved bats. They're little like misunderstood creatures of the night just like me. I have followed the Bat World Sanctuary on social media for years and years. I think it's a great organization. I have one of these little Mildreds on my desk, I have one of those desks that has like all the little toys and action figures and tchotchkes and stuff like that all kind of lined up along, above my computer. So Mildred is one of those, that sits there and watches me write.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Nice.
Sarena Ulibarri
I've always kind of followed the Bat World Sanctuary. They post cute pictures and also calls for support and informing people about some of these things like the illegal bat trade and things like that. So it's just a great organization. And then exciting bat encounters. There was the time we had a bat in our house or I think it was an apartment at that time. But yeah, we just saw this little little black spot on the wall. And that's too large to be a bug. What is that?
Susan Kaye Quinn
Oh my god.
Sarena Ulibarri
And it was a poor little tiny bat that like had found its way inside somehow and was cowering in a corner of the ceiling, just not sure what was going on. Yeah, and so my husband was able to capture it by just using kind of a shoe box and like kind of putting it over and then sliding a paper. And so the poor thing's like flapping and terrified now and carried it outside and then it flew away to freedom.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Oh my god, that's like the method I use to get rid of bugs, but I would never think that like something on this scale of bat, like let's just trap that in a box. That's amazing.
Sarena Ulibarri
It was a tight, it's still pretty small. I mean, it was a little guy. It was one of those that's like maybe four inches. So, we got it outside and it was fine. And of course the Bat World Sanctuary is the type of organization that if it had been injured, they take in injured bats and help to rehabilitate them. But fortunately this one was perfectly fine and just able to fly out into the world again. It was daytime. So I felt bad for it. Had to go find a place to sleep, but it was okay.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Well, that's a great story. I love that. Not everybody has a chance to like, liberate a bat from their house. I feel like that bats have been in your life for a little bit in different ways.
All right. We're going to wrap this up and I'm going to end with the question I've been asking everybody. And it seems like… I've been doing the podcast for like a year now, and I’ve asked some version of this question of everybody and it's always relevant every single time. What are you doing in these crazy times to stay grounded and keep working for a better world?
Sarena Ulibarri
It's a great question and a tough one. Yeah. I think one of the things I'm doing is just tending to my little backyard, and just trying to make my space as as caring and supportive of nature as it can be. And also just writing and reading. I find when the news is too much and when reality is too much, finding those stories, either solarpunk, hopepunk kind of things that are about better futures or something that's just kind of escapism, just being able to take that portal into another world really helps me stay grounded.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, same. And I really hope that this anthology in particular will serve that function for folks. That's part of why we're getting these stories out there, just to be able to take a breath and have some fun, but also have it moving in the direction of opening up that imaginative thing where we have this tendency to close everything down. Like the reality is dim. I'm just going to like keep my eyes averted and hope it all goes away. And opening up the imagination is a lot of what these stories do, but in a way that makes it positive so you can actually stay engaged. So I hope readers will get that out of it. Thank you so much for your story, but also for coming back and talking with us about it. It was great talking to you.
Sarena Ulibarri
Thank you so much.
In this series of episodes, we'll have each of the authors of the anthology on to talk about their story, their theme, and their giveaway item. The links for everything are below. As a quick review, the six themes for the six stories are:
CLIMATE ANXIETY
CLIMATE RESTORATION
CLIMATE ROLES
CLIMATE CONNECTIONS
CLIMATE RESILIENCE
CLIMATE HERITAGE
They fit together almost like a meta story, and the themes and the stories showcase what hopeful climate fiction can look like and the breadth of what we need to tackle.
Pre-orders boost the visibility of the anthology, so please do that if you can.
Anthology Giveaway
That giveaway will be ongoing until the end of May.
Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists.
LINKS Ep. 29: Climate Restoration with Sarena Ulibarri
Sarena’s story (FREE until 4.30.2025): What Kind of Bat is This?
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These hopeful climate-fiction stories include clicky space centipedes, sentient trees, a flooded future Rio de Janeiro and characters trying to find their place in a climate-impacted world. Each story imagines a way for us to survive the future, together.
Bright Green Futures: 2024 contains six short stories plus a bonus prose-poem.
The Doglady and the Rainstorm by Renan Bernardo
What Kind of Bat is This? by Sarena Ulibarri
Centipede Station by T. K. Rex
A Merger in Corn Country by Danielle Arostegui
Ancestors, Descendants by BrightFlame
The Park of the Beast by T. K. Rex
Coriander by Ana Sun
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