A Superhero for our Times
Local author seeks to inspire environmental activism with ‘EcoQueen’
BY SUZANNE CHEAVENS, ASSOCIATE EDITOR • TELLURIDE DAILY PLANET • TELLURIDE, COLORADO
For someone who has spent a lifetime advocating for the environment, it should come as little surprise that Joanna Measer Kanow has penned a novel that features a remarkable female protagonist whose mission it is to save the Earth. EcoQueen is a hero for our times, working with her autistic twin brother Rio to stem the tide of climate change, traveling in remarkable ways through cables and wires, forestalling Earth’s demise in dramatic fashion. Her superpower? Reversing climate change. “EcoQueen” has an official release date of April 22, Earth Day — of course — and is available for preorder now.
Kanow had been sitting on the book for eight years, working on it in fits and starts, when the pandemic steamrolled onto the scene. In lockdown and with a back-burnered story that never let her go, Kanow got to work.
“It was a story that really needed to be told,” Kanow said. “That’s why I didn’t give up on it. The lockdown gave me a good opportunity to finish it.”
The young adult novel features EcoQueen, aka normal 17-year-old Kora, a diminutive powerhouse of a biracial girl with the power to reverse climate change. With few superhero females in popular culture, Kanow decided, “it’s time.”
“As a culture and as a country, we’re ready for a female to take on these problems, like climate change,” she said.
With such a powerful character, Kanow hopes to inspire environmental activism in young readers. Her own inspiration stems from the 1990s in college where she majored in conservation resource studies. Her professors were tolling the bell of climate change — global warming — even then, warning of rising sea levels, drought and the dangers of fossil fuel emissions.
“People have been saying it for years and it’s happening,” she said. “We’ve been warned. It’s so valuable to keep young people connected to nature, to help keep the environment clean and healthy and balanced. I hope to give them the rallying cry. This book targets younger kids because they will be the ones most affected.”
Kanow has long walked her Earth-friendly talk and currently serves on Telluride’s Ecology Commission, as well as being behind numerous efforts to recycle, live green and promote renewable energy sources. She has established a nonprofit with her daughters called Seas of Trees, an organization with a mission to purchase and plant native trees in Colorado and around the globe. Proceeds from the sale of “EcoQueen” will go to Seas of Trees. Kanow’s daughters, Ayla and ShaiAnn, are not only her comrades in arms for the environment, but were on-hand as she wrote and revised her almost-decade-long project.
“They definitely helped me in the process,” Kanow said. “They read parts and edited parts, but are waiting on the final product to read the whole thing.”
The story possesses the reader from the start, as Kora, works with her Rio to put an end to a new, enormous coal plant. Not only is it an operation that will pollute the environment, but the software used was created by her own father. It’s quite the conundrum, but Kora knows what she must do. This excerpt puts us inside our young heroine’s mind.
“Something in her aligned with the concept that all life was sacred, like indigenous groups knew, that the earth should be revered, and defending it took precedence over profits. EcoQueen needed to intervene and disrupt the pattern. It’s a crime to kill a human, but what EcoQueen couldn’t understand was how it could be acceptable to kill whole ecosystems, habitats, and species as part of an economic plan. It was clear that her role was to assure that no further significant harm would occur. If the adults were not standing up for the future of her generation, EcoQueen had to use her superpowers to do something about it. Time was running out. Those who created the problem of climate change would die of old age, and her generation would die from climate change. Unless she acted now.”
As Kanow said in the novel’s news release, there was no time to waste in completing her book.
“I originally wrote this novel as a dystopian climate-fantasy taking place in the near future and predicted what the world would look like in 2040 if we did not address the climate crisis unfolding and we did not change our relationship to caring for our environment and our dependence on fossil fuel extraction,” she said. “The worst-case scenarios were starting to play out in the present day. I had to go in and change the near future to now. I would write about rising sea levels, and then the ancient city of Venice flooded from sea level rise. I would write about severe drought, and Cape Town nearly ran out of drinking water for its residents. I would write about the potential of devastating wildfires and then the entire continent of Australia burned, and Paradise, California, got wiped off the map. One by one, the most severe possible outcomes projected were actually happening in real-time. So I had to get this book written and finished.”
Kanow will be holding outdoor events to launch the book in April at Between the Covers Bookstore and Wilkinson Public Library on dates yet to be determined. “EcoQueen” can be ordered at Between the Covers at between-the-covers.com, and on Amazon and Kindle, as well as Barnes and Noble. The ISBN is 978-1-7365987-0.
