No longer is the climate emergency purely an external threat to our wellbeing: this profoundly political circumstance is deeply personal. The summer after giving birth, Sarah Marie Wiebe and her baby endured the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, with temperatures over 20 degrees above normal, creating all-time heat records across the province. It was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. The extreme heat landed Wiebe in the hospital, dehydrated and separated from her nursing baby from dawn until dusk. So began a year of mothering through heat, fires and floods. The climate emergency’s many incarnations shaped Wiebe’s politics of parenting and revealed the layers, textures and nuances of the disastrous emergencies we encounter in a world dominated by extractive capitalism.

Drawing on hospital codes to explore the connections, Wiebe opens up tender conversations about intimate matters of how our bodies respond to emergency interventions: informed consent, emergency C-sections, reproductive mental health, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. A critical ecofeminist scholar, Wiebe invites collective envisioning and enacting of caring, ethical relations between humans and the planet, including our atmospheres, lands, waters, animals, plants and each other.

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Rachel yacaaʔał George is nuučaańuł of Ahousaht and Ehattesaht First Nations and grew up in the Metro Vancouver area of British Columbia on the territories of the Qayqayt, Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She holds a BA in history and English from the University of Victoria, an MA in genocide studies from the University of Amsterdam, and a PhD in Indigenous governance from the University of Victoria (2021). Prior to beginning her PhD, she worked as the research coordinator for the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2013-2015). Her research has primarily focused on Indigenous politics, reconciliation, justice and pathways of decolonization through storied practice. Most recently, this has also included explorations of coastal Indigenous relationality and governance.

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“Wiebe’s critical ecofeminist and maternal analysis delves into the slow sensory politics of crisis. She demonstrates how the messiness of our scaling grief – both personal and collective, ecological and otherwise – is intimately tied to structures of neoliberalism, settler colonialism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism, and global extractivism.”

Jeffrey Ansloos, associate professor, Indigenous health and social policy, University of Toronto

“Rooted in her own experience of the climate crisis as a new mother, Sarah Marie Wiebe takes us through the deep and necessary work of care in times of overlapping crises. Combining incisive analysis with lyrical narrative, Wiebe bravely guides her reader through the mess of our times; this mess is sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, and always hot. Timely and gripping, this book is a powerful rallying cry for radical care.”

Rebecca Hall, author of Refracted Economies: Diamond Mining and Social Reproduction in the North

“Hot Mess makes you deeply aware of how fires, smoke, drought, pollution, and climate emergencies are embodied experiences. Wiebe makes a compelling argument for how the world we live in requires a prismatic thinking that considers how these embodied experiences become entangled with structural inequalities, historical systematic exclusions, and relations of domination with the non-human world. However, instead of being flooded with anxiety and powerlessness, the author calls upon all of us to make friends with our bodies, the bodies of others and those of the non-human world. Centering a mother-child relationship, Wiebe asks what our environmental future may look like if we enacted relationships of care, respect and reciprocity with the non-human world and Indigenous communities. This is a text that we all should read.”

Isabel Altamirano Jiménez, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Indigenous Feminist Studies

“A testament to the power of maternal activism in the face of environmental collapse, this book offers essential insights for integrating climate resilience into our lives and scholarship. The book’s acknowledgment of Indigenous practices and experiences with feminist perspectives on care and community are not just compelling, but imperative for our times. Hot Mess is a call to action for parents and policymakers alike to prioritize care and community for the inseparable health of our planet and our children.”

Renée Monchalin, University of Victoria, Public Health and Social Policy