September 27, 2024.  Hurricane Helene.

As we watched the waters rise and subside, what did we learn about ourselves?

What did we learn about our rivers and the watersheds through which they flow?

What did we learn about our upstream and downstream neighbors, human and nonhuman?

What did we learn about what we need to unlearn: as individuals, and as a species, sharing the biosphere with all other living beings?

Winding along next to the Pigeon River, Interstate 40 imposes itself through the mountains of western North Carolina: a road that was notoriously difficult to build, and has been equally difficult to maintain.  Mountains were demolished to finish the road.  When Interstate 40 was completed across the border between North Carolina and Tennessee in 1968, NC Governor Dan Moore is reported to have said, “The genius of modern man has shown itself to be superior to the adversities of nature.”

In his recent book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future Of Our Planet, journalist Ben Goldfarb reminds us:  "We built roads to subjugate nature, and by the time we learned the consequences, we had no choice but to subjugate it further. We are forever at war with the world we've built." (p. 109-110)

We wonder if perhaps Gov. Moore’s coffin was found floating somewhere down the Pigeon River in late September or early October of 2024.

Since the reconstruction of Interstate 40 began, controversy has been at the forefront, with the US Forest Service agreeing to build a rock quarry in Pisgah Forest to provide material for rebuilding the Interstate.  Sure, the NCDOT can buy over a thousand acres of adjacent land to “make the forest whole again”, but, well, you can’t exactly put back the rocks you blasted out of the ground.

There will now be a massive hole in the middle of this “whole” forest.

A few questions to reconsider as we recover our relationships with rivers, with forests, with ecosystems, with the biosphere: Why do we need to build back Interstate 40?  Why did it really get built in the first place?  Wouldn’t a smaller road suffice?  

Or, actually, how about this: what if we had no road through there at all?

What’s the big hurry to get so many people in so many individually operated motor vehicles back and forth from NC to TN on that particular route?

The consequences of the flooding brought on by Hurricane Helene were not the result of a natural disaster.  This was a manmade disaster.  This was OUR manmade disaster.  We humans, driven by comfort and convenience, by capitalism and corporations, by greed and growth mindsets… we humans built too much, too close, and too big.

We destroyed the functionality of flooding.  

We got in the way.

Are we really going to return to business as usual, or will we use this as an opportunity for growth?  And not the kind of growth defined by planetary pimps, those among us stuck in the ruts of capitalism (limitless growth, empty value, real estate development, technological salvation, etc.), but individual and collective growth as ecocentric, posthuman, multispecies communities of practice sharing the biosphere and maintaining its habitability through intentional stewardship.

According to Wackernagel & Rees we must focus on our individual and collective ecological footprint as a single species within the shared biosphere: "The first step toward reducing our ecological impact is to recognize that the 'environmental crisis' is less an environmental and technical problem than it is a behavioral and social one. It can therefore be resolved only with the help of behavioral and social solutions. On a finite planet, at human carrying capacity, a society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle. Certainly human beings are competitive organisms but they are also cooperative social beings.”  Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, (p. xi)

Are we ready to start practicing systems wisdom?  To get the beat of the system, to locate responsibility, to build feedback policies for feedback systems, to go for the good of the whole?

The aftermath of Helene will be with us throughout the remainder of our meager human lifetimes, and for generations of humans to come.  Hopefully it will continue to be a lesson for learning and growth as ecologically literate citizens of the biosphere.

We want your prose, your visual narratives, your films showing us your thoughts on how and why we can and should recover our relationships with rivers.  

We want your ecocentric reality checks.

We want your paradigm shifters.

We want to shatter the bottle full of scorpions.

Why is the final deadline for submissions Sept 11, 2026?  This date marks the 50th anniversary of US President Gerald Ford signing the paperwork that protected the North Carolina stretch of The New River as a federally protected “Wild and Scenic River”, finally killing the Blue Ridge Project, an attempt to dam the New River and ship the generated electricity to the cities of the midwest.  This represents one of the biggest environmental protection victories that has ever been achieved in the United States.  

You can read a day-to-day recap of the entire fight leading up to victory in a locally published book The New River Controversy.

Submission Details

First deadline: June 11 2026 11:59pm

Second deadline: July 11 2026 11:59pm

Third deadline: August 11 2026 11:59pm

FINAL DEADLINE: Sept 11 2026 11:59pm

We want fiction and nonfiction, and geolocated photo essays.  We’ll take documentary and fiction films as well, up to 60 mins in length.

Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis, so we encourage early submissions.

Prose works

For all prose works, the minimum word count is 3000 words.  Submissions under this length will automatically be rejected.

Our ideal word count for all prose submissions is between 8,000 and 12,000 words.

The maximum word count for fiction works is 15,000 words.

For nonfiction works that substantially exceed 15,000 words (e.g.20,000-30,000 words), we’ll consider serialization.

Regardless, please ensure manuscripts are properly formatted, including double-spacing and 12 pt serif font, etc.

Photo Essays

Our plan for all accepted photo essays is to build interactive story maps for each narrative.

For each completed photo essay submitted, all original photos must be geolocated.  To submit the photo essay, please create a single PDF or DOCX file that has a single web-resolution (72dpi) image per page.  On each photo page, there should be a Photo Title (“untitled” is not a title), and a Description.  Descriptions should range in length between 2-3 sentences and two full paragraphs.

All textual information on each page of the photo essay document should be 12-point, Times or some similar easy to read serif font.

To be clear, each page contents are as follows:

[the photo]

Photo Title: [the photo title]

Description: [the photo description]

To get a better sense of the Descriptions, if you were to place all the Descriptions in your photo essay in any order, the resulting lengthy prose would still read coherently.

Ten photographs seems like a reasonable minimum number to be included in these photo essays.  We don’t want to establish a hard maximum, but every photograph should fit as a relevant piece of the curated narrative.  If your essay has more than 40 photographs, we’ll need a really good reason to accept it.  If you’ve got tons of relevant photos, please consider multiple narratives, which can be added as “additional submissions” within your primary submission.

Documentary and Fiction Films

As we mentioned, we’re interested in relevant films up to 60 minutes in length (if the credits, etc. extend beyond 60 mins runtime, that’s fine).

For your submission, upload a PDF/DOCX file with a 500 word synopsis.  Below this synopsis, include a live hyperlink URL to stream the video online (Vimeo or something similar preferred).  Obviously, if it’s password protected, include the password.

For every film submission, we’ll watch the first five minutes and keep going if we get hooked.