
Hot Mess
Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergency
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Narrated by:
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Brianne Tucker
About this listen
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.
©2024 Sarah Marie Wiebe (P)2025 Fernwood PublishingCritic reviews
“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.
“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.
“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.
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