Twenty-twenty, the year I began to conceptualize and write this book, was a year that left many of us feeling lost, confused, and hurt. The global COVID-19 crisis and all the associated crises across the world caused an array of fears and uncertainties. Urgent discourses about climate change and the political and social crises triggered by climate change temporarily moved into the background. People across the world felt vulnerable and scared of the virus and of getting sick, but also of losing their jobs, incomes, and sense of security, as social and political systems threatened to collapse under pressure. In the midst of those tensions, social inequalities became even more glaringly obvious.

I wrote most of this book physically located in the US, in a country where police violence against Black people continues to highlight persistent racisms. In the summer of 2020, California had some of its worst wildfires in history and hurricanes struck the gulf states. It was also the year of the highly anticipated and anxiety-provoking US presidential election of 2020, which led to a violent mob contesting the election results and storming the US capitol building on January 6, 2021, the day congress was to certify the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I finished the first draft of this manuscript in the summer of 2021, during my first visit to Germany in two years, as the pandemic still raged in parts of the world while the rich countries were slowly emerging out of their lockdowns and restrictions. As I edited my chapters from my parents’ house in rural southern Germany, I listened to trees being cut down, crashing down, falling to the forest floor with loud thumps. Pine trees (specifically Fichten) in the monocultural pine forests of Southern Germany are dying: they are dried up and infested by pests after years of insufficient rain. Only a few weeks later, in the summer of 2021, parts of Western Europe and China experienced the worst floods in decades.

The cover image of this book, a watercolor painting by my youngest daughter, shows a beautifully lush line of pine trees, the bright orange sky of a sunset, and a yellow flower meadow. The image also evokes a sky lit by the hot glow of forest fires.