Last summer, I went on a hike in the Bucegi Mountains with my husband. Besides the picturesque landscapes, the Bucegi Mountains are home to one of the richest ecosystems in Europe, with a variety of flora and fauna, including thousands of brown bears.
My husband was worried about the bears. I, on the other hand, felt at ease. I had hiked twice in the Bucegi Mountains and never met a bear. Everyone said bears shy away from humans. That was in 2006.
We took the Valea Cerbului trail, one of the longest and most arduous but also scenic trails. There’s a wilderness in the Romanian mountains that I haven’t experienced in Western Europe. A feeling that the mountain is a sacred sanctuary for much more than humans and their recreative activities.
We were alone in the forest for many hours. At some point, I started to get a funny feeling. The rumbling of an airplane startled me, and the sound of wind rushing through the trees made me franticly look for bear sights on the trail. We laughed with relief when we reached the alpine region and were finally out of the forest. The second half of the hike was steeper but also busier. I noticed that many of the hikers had some sort of bear protection equipment: a walkie-talkie, bear spray, a bear horn or all three dangling around their necks.
We didn’t meet a bear on our hike!
But two days later, a 19-year-old student tragically lost her life after an encounter with a brown bear in the same mountains.
I realized many things had changed since my last hike in the Bucegi Mountains.
In 2016, the European Union declared brown bears a protected species, and bear hunting was made illegal. As a consequence, the bear population doubled in Romania between 2016 and 2024, from 4,000 to 8,000 bears. Many of them live in the Bucegi Mountains.
The hunting organizations stopped feeding the bears. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough food for the bears in their shrinking natural habitat. So what do hungry bears do? They go where the food is: down the mountain, searching trash bins, begging for food on the highways, or stealing a sheep or two in the villages.
The death of the young woman and nature lover shook the nation and led to a tense public debate that didn’t end up well for the bears.
As our efforts to restore Earth’s ecosystems and rewild our forests increase, I wonder how we will manage the clash between humans and bears. What is the future of nature and the human-nature relationship?
The Future of Nature: A writing prompt
A hike and an existential question led me to partner up with
from to organize a writing prompt: The Future of Nature.To celebrate Earth Day 2025 on April 24th, we invite you to use your imagination to explore the future of nature and the human-nature relationship in a fiction story.
You know those picture books we had as kids when animals could talk and implausible things happened as a matter of course? Why are those just for kids? The human imagination is a wondrous faculty, but in adulthood we limit it mostly to our human-made environments, our human culture.
Is fiction a good medium to reflect on our relationship with nature, and dare to explore a different, less one-sided, more restorative one? Is it even possible to use the rational tool of language to conjure our long-lost intimacy with brown bears and beetles, clouds, crabs, herons and honeybees, humpbacks, lemurs and larkspur, monarchs and maize, oaks and uncountable others?
Let’s find out!
We use our imaginations to inhabit other human consciousnesses through literature all the time. Why not a tree? Or a salmon, or a river, or a raven, or moss?
Utopian or dystopian, science fiction or fantasy, xianxia or Japanese surrealism and cat fiction, any fiction genre that reflects on the future of our relationship with nature, is welcomed and encouraged.
How to participate
Confirm your participation in the writing prompt by March 13th in the comments section below.
Write a fiction story of any genre and length based on The Future of Nature writing prompt.
Publish your story on your Substack on Earth Day 2025 on April 22nd.
This is more than a writing prompt! We invite you to be part of a community, learn and grow as a writer👇.
The art of science & fiction
Reimagining the human-nature relationship is about reimagining connection. In the spirit of our writing prompt, we invite you to participate in a series of events to explore our story ideas together as a community.
We partnered with two ecologists to help you get the science behind your story right!
This is a unique opportunity for all of us to learn and deepen our fiction writing.
The Future of Nature: Our curriculum
These are the live sessions that we prepare for you in March and April:
March 20th → Explore your story idea with
: A live session about writing with nature to help you explore your story idea.March 31st → Build your secondary world with
: A live session on worldbuilding to help you develop your story idea.April 3rd → Enrich your story world with
: A Q&A session with an ecology professor who will look at your story through a science lens.April 17th → Make your story more believable: A Q&A session with
an evolutionary biologist to help you get the science right.
All the sessions will be recorded and emailed to you. That’s why it’s important that you confirm your participation in the comments section!
Research & Reading
Research is an essential part of every fiction writing endeavor. We prepared a list of inspiring books and articles for your Earth Day writing prompt.
Books
Here are three book recommendations from your hosts:
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by
: An introduction to some of the most celebrated and imaginative works of sci-fi paired with insights into the sci-fi journey of the celebrated author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake—one of ’s favorite cli-fi novel. Part memoir, part lecture series, part essays, this book will get you excited about exploring your own imagination for our writing prompt.Open Throat by Henry Hoke: The narrator is a queer, lonely, and very hungry mountain lion roaming the hills of L.A. observing highways, money, water bottles, homeless camps, and more. It’s a triumph of the imagination that reverses our objective gaze on the natural world by instead casting people as the objects of a wild lion’s gaze, senses, curiosity, and opinions. It’s weird and heartbreaking and laced with pathos and humor. The writing is spare, self-effacing, poetic, and never contrived or showy writes
.The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric: Are you being a good ancestor? In our world of quarterly profits and election cycles, this might be the most important question we face today. Krznaric’s beautifully written book challenges our short-term mindset, offering a visionary framework for thinking across generations and inspiring choices that shape a more sustainable future. Recommended by
.
Articles
Here’s a selection of articles with in-depth information about nature writing and ecological explorations, which you can use in your research.
A selection of Jonathan’s articles:
A selection of Julie’s wonderful nature interviews:
Kate Bown interview about cultivating trust and encouraging a sense of responsibility for the natural world
John Lovie interview about the resilience of nature
Angie Kelly interview about the beautiful, harsh places that inspired her fantasy novels
A selection of Rebecca’s articles:
all we will not know, about the wonderfully rich and complex lives of jackdaws
faultlines, on living with monkeys, and friendships, and rain
threads, on empathy, non-humans, and where we draw lines
Stories
Here you’ll find inspiring climate fiction stories to get you going.
We hope you’ll join The Future of Nature—our writing prompt for Earth Day 2025. Please confirm your participation in the comments👇!
From my side, a huge thank you to today’s co-organizer and collaborator 💚!
- is an architecture professor and writes the newsletter where you’ll find a NatureStack journal, Building Hope essays, climate fiction stories and meet her singing dog.
- is a ecology professor and he writes the newsletter where you’ll find personal reflections and actionable information about climate, biodiversity and water from a working scientist.
- is a writer, evolutionary biologist with a phd in animal cognition, and author of a weekly newsletter about life, death, oceans, animals, poetry and finding joy.
I hope you’ll check out their work and subscribe to their newsletters!
Thank you once again for being part of this amazing community. I’m looking forward to writing and reading more great fiction with you. A special thank you to my paid subscribers for supporting this space and the publication of my upcoming novel.
I appreciate you all 💚!
—Claudia
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