Hot Mess

No longer is the climate emergency purely an external threat to our wellbeing: this profoundly political circumstance is deeply personal.The summerafter giving birth, Sarah Marie Wiebe and her baby endured the 2021 heat dome inBritishColumbia, with temperaturesover 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 separatedfrom 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, Wiebeinvites collective envisioning and enacting ofcaring,ethical relations between humans and the planet, including our atmospheres, lands, waters, animals, plants and each other.