Welcome to the sixth "new" issue of Penumbric! This marks a full year's worth of issues since restarting, and I couldn't be happier with the way it's gone. You all have made this a blessing, and hopefully we've lived up to (or even gone a bit beyond) your expectations.

As it's spring, and Earth Day, we've put together an article/interview combination about the climate. Did you know on average the cherry blossoms in Japan are coming out about 10 days sooner than "normal"? This might not sound like much, but it's like the canary in the coal mine—it indicates CO₂ and temperatures much higher than normal (Kyoto is about 6°F warmer on average than in pre-industrial times), and trends over time show this continuing, to the detriment of glaciers, permafrost, "normal" weather patterns, and "normal" human life across the world. And at some point, this average temperature rise and climate change generally (which is not the same as just rising temps) will become self-reinforcing, a sort of planetary fever we've caused ... and fevers are attempts to get rid of infections, in this case, us.

Let's not be the infection. Let's try to be the cure instead.

To that end, our article, "Nature and/versus Technology," discusses not only what's happening out there right now and what we're doing to cause it, but also the things—both natural and technological—we can do to try to stop it, or at least slow it down. And, hint, the Paris climate agreement barely replaces the tip of the iceberg. We talk everything from peat bogs to nanomaterials in an attempt to find something we can do in a short period of time to fix what we've wrought over hundreds of years.

In addition, we interview James S. Cannon, environmental researcher and publisher of the Clean Fuels and Electric Vehicles Report, which for over 20 years kept abreast of the latest developments in alternative fuel and vehicle technology. We talked about Paris, vehicle tech, and what the upcoming generation, the Greta Thunbergs of the world, can do (and what all of us should be doing, honestly).

The works in this issue follow a theme, but it's not quite about climate—it's more about nature and about new beginnings/endings. Some, like Grace Wagner's "Super Volcano," Jennifer Lee Rossman's "Ice," Lizz Shepherd's "The Everglades," and Christina Sng's Starry Night and Carl Scharwath's One in Nature, feature nature or natural systems—as does our cover by toeken, Omi Wilde's An Argument in a World of Wonders. Others feature nature in a slightly different way, as in Claire Smith's "Roses" and Anton Cancre's "Queen of the Fucking Butterflies, Drunk and Expounding on Existence to Her Subjects." Others speak of endings, as in Jay Caselberg's "Fugue," Nyamweya Maxwell's "Death Everlasting," Peter Alterman's "The Book of Father Dominic," and Matthew Hooton's "206." And still others have both beginnings and endings, whole civilizations rising up in Tylor James' "Godly Business" and Nathan Batchelor's "The City Within," more personal worlds being created in Lorraine Schein's "Dream Pillow 1." And sometimes the journey is as important as the ending/beginning, as in Robert Alexander Wray's "Melancholy Echo."

We again are honored to have the art of Martins Deep (self-portrait as a broken boy), Novyl the Mysterious (Marked and Owned), and Elby Rogers (My Son Is Nothing but a Pez Dispenser), as well as Sng's, Scharwath's, and toeken's works mentioned above, and of course the continuing sagas of both T. Motley's The Road to Golgonooza and Jesper Nordqvist's Mondo Mecho. Many of these have been with us since our own "new beginning," and hopefully, along with all the authors we've published, will continue to be as we move forward into the brave new world. I am happy that it has such people in it.

Jeff Georgeson
Managing Editor
Penumbric