The Nerves and Their Endings

The body as a measuring tool for planetary harm. A nervous system under increasing stress.

In this urgent collection that moves from the personal to the political and back again, writer, activist, and migrant Jessica Gaitan Johannesson explores how we respond to crises. She draws parallels between an eating disorder and environmental neurosis, examines the perils of an activist movement built on non-parenthood, dissects the privilege of how we talk about hope, and more.

The synapses that spark between these essays connect essential narratives of response and responsibility, community and choice, belonging and bodies. They carry vital signals.

The Nerves and Their Endings is a beautifully written, original collection of essays that explores identity, place, home, and hope. These essays ask how we might not only live in a time of climate collapse but how we might work towards a better future also—one of community, shared understanding, and tenderness, even in the face of such terrible inequality, cruelty, loss, and disaster. This is a book that's truly necessary for our moment.

—Rebecca Tamas, author of Strangers

The Nerves and Their Endings is a deft, clear-eyed, and deeply felt essay collection that not only articulates the immense loss, complicity, and powerlessness felt in the capitalist West against the rising waters, but also the hope that enlivens good political writing always—the hope that when we look and think and move together—implicated, entangled—we grow the nerve to align in action. Jessica Gaitan Johannesson is a humane, original, and extremely talented writer, and this collection is a true pleasure to read and think with.

—Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries

Jessica Gaitan Johannesson "stays with the trouble" of climate, environmental, and social injustice with a searching honesty. Tangled, raw, and sparking with intelligence, The Nerves and Their Endings shows how the personal and the political, the human body and the earth's body, are knotted together. As living, feeling, thinking beings our nervous system connects with the world's systems. When the world is sick, we are too. Gaitan Johannesson challenges the tunnel vision of fear-based responses to the multiplying crises of our times, while alert to the unevenness of the suffering caused, the cushioning afforded by privilege, and the responsibility to act that this implies. She asks the hard questions and tackles them with integrity and an open heart. There are no trite answers offered here, rather, an honest exploration of what "hope" might look and feel like in these times, and why we need it in order "not to feel responsible but to ably respond".

—Samantha Clark, author of The Clearing