Embracing Change: Living and Writing from the Ecotone
- realityskimming
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
by Nina Munteanu
About the Story Thing (2025) - 10
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"About the Story Things" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces will appear every other Monday Jun 2 through to the end of 2025. Query us about contributing at https://facebook.com/relskim or Lisa.RealitySkimming@proton.me
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I’m an ecologist. We study ecosystems and how various components interact and relate to each other in a network of vitality and growth. The study of ecology is really about how things change. Without embracing the dynamics of living and nonliving things, we would just be classicists, quantifying and classifying static things—fated to be as outdated and extinct as the things we study. Ecologists look at relationship, process, movement. And no where is that more apparent than in ecotones. Ecotones exist where two ecosystems meet and are changed by that meeting. These are often the richest and most biodiverse places. Like an estuary or marsh or verge of a forest. These areas provide opportunities for greater interaction, new material, learning and ultimately higher diversity. In 1905, Clements described ecotones as “tension zones” with increased productivity between plant communities. According to limnologist George K. Reid, an ecotone “constitutes a ‘buffer’ zone between two communities.” Ecotones represent a boiling pot of two colliding worlds.
For me, ecotones are a fitting metaphor for life and my writing career, given that the big choices we must face usually involve a collision of ideas, beliefs, lifestyles or worldviews: these often prove to enrich our lives the most for having gone through them. Evolution (any significant change) doesn’t happen within a stable system; adaptation and growth occurs only when stable systems come together, disturb the equilibrium, destabilize, and create opportunity. Ecotones are places where “lines are crossed,” where barriers are breached, where “words collide” and new opportunities arise. Sometimes from calamity. Sometimes from tragedy. Sometimes from serendipity.
All ecotones are verges that provide opportunity for sharing of information, discovery and change. Ecotones are the synergistic blending of two ideas in the evolution of science. They are the vortex energy of a stream’s eddy currents generated by the meeting of interfaces and boundaries. They are the stable, coherent domains—the glassiness—of polarized interfacial and intracellular water in cells and tissues. They are the birefringent optical trompe l’oeil of Goethe glass.
Ultimately, these verges are places of great transition.
Funny thing about transitions though. While we’re experiencing them we usually don’t realize that’s what they are; they feel more like chaos. And that frightens most people. We are creatures of habit and comfort, after all. Despite my love for comfort (I like nothing more than chilling back in my favourite comfy chair with a London Fog, watching an awesome political thriller), I find myself consistently tossing that comfort aside for adventure and the unknown—Like getting divorced and travelling across Canada, living here and there, as itinerant, doing odd jobs like house-sitting, landscaping, and teaching university. Writing that great Canadian novel—which itself kept morphing.
Transition occurs when we learn from the chaos. And this may be why I embrace chaos;
I find learning very satisfying and ultimately fulfilling. When I’m learning—when I’m in the ecotone—I feel very alive. I feel young, vulnerable, alert, and in the moment. I’m in transition. This is ecology in action: when we learn from chaos, we are making meaning and fulfilling what all life is doing. This is biosemiosis: the notion that all life embraces a process of signification and meaning-generation—from mammals to bacteria—that recognizes its Umwelt (species-specific environmental reality) through the production, action, and interpretation of non-linguistic signs and codes in the biological realm.
My writing has transitioned over the years as I changed and matured and learned. It changed in ways I had no possible way of anticipating when I started my career as a writer. My writing changed in two key ways: 1) how I approached ‘story’; and 2) how my stories were marketed and perceived.
To the first point, I first approached my storytelling like a scientist: with logic and deliberation. My early novels were mostly ecological thrillers; they still are, but their form and how I approach them has changed greatly over the years. Much of the change came from my changing relationship with chaos and the ecotone. I approached my early novels from a position of control; novels were written to a loose outline and I always knew the ending. Because I knew a novel’s trajectory, based on my character’s journey, I wrote it quickly and efficiently. If my story was a dog, I kept it on a tight leash. My scribe was wound tight.
Over time, I approached story from a place of less control; I gave my characters more agency to determine where the story went. I didn’t know the ending. I barely knew where the story was going, though I learned this as I got to know the characters more. This new way of writing took longer, mainly because I had to give it room to learn on its own. I had to loosen the leash. Sometimes, I would take the leash off altogether. This was far more exciting. It made me feel young, vulnerable, alert, and in the moment.
I don’t think I was capable of losing control when I started my writing career. Strangely enough, even though I’d embraced chaos in other parts of my life and career as an environmental consultant, my writing remained harnessed by logic and control. But in the last few years, I don’t mind waiting a little longer to finish a novel (as it sorts itself out) because I’m confident that it will; I just wait patiently.
To the second point, I started branding my writing as eco-fiction only recently. Prior to that—even though my stories were strongly driven by an ecological premise and strong environmental setting—I described them as science fiction and many as technological thrillers. Environment’s role remained subtle and—at times—insidious. Climate change. Water shortage. Environmental disease. A city’s collapse. War. I’ve used these as backdrops to explore relationships, values (such as honour and loyalty), philosophies, moralities, ethics, and agencies of action. The stuff of storytelling. The change in branding was motivated mostly through learning about my environment—my Umwelt—with the accompanying realization that we are all awakening to humanity’s existential threat from climate change and the environmental catastrophes of our own making. Eco-fiction has since become its own genre. No longer veiled by the shadow of an imposing hegemony, eco-fiction has come out from the verge to inoculate its significance into all forms of mainstream writing.
In truth, environmental fiction has been written by many writers for years and it is only in the last few decades—partly with the genesis of the term eco-fiction—that the “character” and significance of environment is being acknowledged beyond its metaphor; for its actual value. It may also be that the metaphoric symbols of environment in certain classics are being “retooled” through our current awareness, much in the same way that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four are being re-interpreted—and newly appreciated— in today’s world of pervasive surveillance and bio-engineering.
I am definitely seeing more eco-fiction out there. Is this because ecosystems, ecology and environment are becoming more integral to story: as characters in their own right? Or is it simply because we are finally ready to see it? Just as quantum physics emerged when it did and not sooner, an idea—a thought—crystalizes when we are ready for it.
Welcome to the ecotone.
Nina Munteanu
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist, novelist and award-winning short story author of eco-fiction, science fiction and fantasy. Nina teaches writing at UofT and writes for various magazines, including essays on science and futurism. Her short work has appeared in Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine, Chiaroscuro, subTerrain, Apex Magazine, Metastellar, and several anthologies. She currently has 10 novels published and several non-fiction books on writing and science. Her book “Water Is…” (Pixl Press)—a scientific study and personal journey as limnologist, mother, and teacher—was Margaret Atwood’s pick in 2016 in the New York Times ‘The Year in Reading.’ Nina’s award-winning eco-novel, "A Diary in the Age of Water" by Inanna Publications, is about four generations of women and their relationship to water in a rapidly changing world. Her eco-novel “Gaia’s Revolution” is currently in production with Dragon Moon Press.
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References
Barbieri, Marcelo, ed. (2008). Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis. Springer, Netherlands. 525pp.
Clements, F.E. (1905). Research methods in Ecology. University Publishing Company, Lincoln, NE. 368 pp.
Reid, George K. (1961). Ecology of Inland Water and Estuaries. D Van Nostrand Company Inc. 390 pp.
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