Claire Holroyde on the Wayãpi of the Nipukú River and Her Debut Novel January 15, 2021 It was easy to be distracted at the start of 2017 when I was writing a manuscript about a potentially cataclysmic event. It wasn’t the one I feared, nor was it the one lying in wait at the turn of 2020. I focused on a plot with cosmic collisions; comets and asteroids are fascinating, after all. They held my attention until I couldn’t ignore current events that read more and more like the science fiction I was crafting. That year, the incoming Trump administration removed all mention of climate change from the White House website in January, and ordered the US Environmental Protection Agency to do the same. The following month, Trump acted with his majority in Congress to revoke the Stream Protection Rule, which had placed certain restrictions on the disposal of mining waste in waterways, and confirm Scott Pruitt as the new head of the EPA. While he was Oklahoma’s acting Attorney General, Pruitt had often sued the agency to challenge its regulations. All around me, there was a backlash against environmental protection, science, and truth itself.