In response to a recent article I published in The Conversation, I got a wonderful email from an author, Herselman Hattingh, who wrote a short story for the Boston review about a sound recorder’s who sits out in the desert recording the sounds and tracking, through these recordings, the demise of the ecosystem around him. The story was awarded first prize in the 2018 Aura Estrada Short Story competition. The author was so struck that I am sitting out there recording and doing time series analysis to examine climate impact based on my own sound recordings that they sent me the link to the story they wrote, saying

In September 2017 I wrote a short story. I just had this idea of a guy with an old-fashioned tape recorder out in the desert. I did not know what he was doing there, but it turns out he was recording the end-times and that he is not alone.

I read your story yesterday and was really surprised to find that a fictional character with a fictional job turned out to be based on something very real and very interesting.

I too was surprised and so here I share a link to the wonderful story by Herselman Hattingh