I write about climate change, climate grief, and climate justice. I’m based in New Orleans.

Mary Annaïse Heglar - site photo

Bio

Mary Annaïse Heglar is the author of Troubled Waters (Harper Muse, 2024) and The World is Ours to Cherish (Random House Kids, 2024). She is also known for her essays that dissect and interrogate the climate crisis, drawing heavily on her personal experience as a Black woman with deep roots in the South. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The Nation, The Boston Globe, Vox, Rolling Stone, and other outlets. Her work has also been featured in collections like All We Can Save, The World As We Knew It, The Black Agenda, Letters to the Earth, and Not Too Late.

With investigative journalist Amy Westervelt, she co-created the Hot Take podcast and newsletter, which retired in 2022. In 2024, they launched Spill, which fosters messy conversations about the climate crisis. She has taught at Columbia University in New York and Tulane University in New Orleans. In 2020, she received a SEAL Environmental Journalism award.

Mary has been obsessed with the art of storytelling as long as she can remember. She began writing about the climate crisis in 2018 as a way to process her own climate grief. From there, she expanded into other modes of storytelling, including podcasting, teaching, and public speaking. She is based in New Orleans, but her heart is in Mississippi and her soul is in Birmingham.

Books

Troubled Waters

Harper Muse, May 7, 2024

Read sample chapters here.

In this intimate portrait of two generations, a granddaughter and a grandmother come to terms with what it means to be family, Black women, and alive in a world on fire.

The world is burning—and Corrine will do anything to put out the flames. After her brother died aboard an oil boat on the Mississippi River in 2013, Corrine awakens to the realities of climate change and its perpetrators. Now, a year later, she finds herself trapped in a lonely cycle of mourning both her brother and the very planet she stands on. She's convinced that in order to save her future, she has to make sure that her brother's life meant something. But in the act of honoring her brother's spirit, she awakens family ghosts she knows little about--ghosts her grandmother Cora knows intimately.

The world is burning—but it always has been. Cora's ghosts have followed her from her days as a child integrating schools in 1950s Nashville to her new life as a mother, grandmother, and teacher in Mississippi. As a child of the Civil Rights movement, she's done her best to keep those specters away from her granddaughter. She faced those demons, she reasons to herself, so that Corinne would never know they existed.

When Corrine's plan to stage a dramatic act of resistance peels back the scabs of her family wounds and puts her safety in jeopardy, both grandmother and granddaughter must bring their unspoken secrets into the light to find a path to healing. Their world hangs in the balance as past and future meet in the present moment.

In heartfelt, lyrical prose, Mary Annaïse Heglar weaves an unforgettable story of the climate crisis, Black resistance, and the enduring power of family.

The World Is Ours to Cherish
Random House Kids, February 27, 2024 

This hopeful picture book--written in the style of a letter--gives kids an honest take on climate change and urges them to band together to help the planet.

The world is a big, beautiful place full of natural wonders--everything from bees to rainfall can seem magical. The world is also changing. Climate change has already had a devastating effect on the planet. But it's not too late! If we work together and show a little more care, both for the environment and each other, we can keep this world beautiful.

This moving debut from Mary Annaïse Heglar is perfect for budding environmentalists and anyone in need of a little hope for the future of our planet.

Mary Annaïse Heglar - Bio Photo

Bibliography

2023

Confessions of a Green Troll, Orion Magazine, February 2023

“The entire point of oil companies having social media accounts is to greenwash. If you thought oil companies were trafficking in outright climate denial or basking in the glow of right wing delusion, you’re in for a surprise. To look at their social media, you’d think they were ‘just like us,’ rolling up their sleeves and trying to find solutions to the climate crisis. You’d think they were investing more in wind and solar, or ‘hydrogen,’ than in oil and gas. It couldn’t be further from the truth. That’s not only not where their investments lie, it’s not even where their intentions lie.”

2022

What Happened When I Tried to Carry the World on My Shoulders, New York Magazine, December 2022

“While I’ve never met a Black woman with a savior complex, I’ve also never met one who didn’t carry a savior’s burden. In the climate movement, as everywhere else, to be born Black and female is to be assigned ‘strong’ at birth. Our spirits, it is believed, are indefatigable, our backs unbreakable. The assumption is so exploitative, so insulting it’s enough to make you want to holler and throw up both your hands. But, as a general rule, the immediacy of the climate crisis increases as your proximity to whiteness and maleness decreases — which is why Black women can’t just walk away. If we do, we could find ourselves written out of the future, just as we’re so often written out of history.”

Lessons on Resistance From a Child of the First Climate-Change Generation, The Nation, December 2022

“I wasn’t born into a perfect world either. And no one told me that I was. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1980s and ’90s. I was in kindergarten when I learned about the blood that was spilled by children not much bigger than me as they stood up to fire hoses and police dogs and the entire white supremacist machine just one generation before me on the very streets I walked. Back when four little girls were blown limb from limb and the city was renamed Bombingham. I knew about Desert Storm and pollution and the disappearing ozone layer. I knew about child abductions and molestations. In fact, I learned about rape before I learned about sex. No one painted a pretty picture of the present and no one sang me a lullaby about the future.”

Hurricanes Are Pummeling Us. The Media Is Partially To Blame, NBCU Academy, October 2022

“But if the question is how do we keep people engaged with climate stories, that’s a bigger question and it deserves a bigger answer. I would argue that people don’t tune out of climate coverage because it’s too big of a problem, they tune out because it’s presented as yet another problem. But it’s not. The climate crisis is a deeply intersectional problem that is intertwined with every other big issue we face: at its roots, in its impacts today and in its future. That’s how we should be talking about it, and we can’t do it without a thorough analysis of the problem.”  

Climate Denial’s Racist Roots, Atmos, June 2022

“As far as I am concerned, this is the real terror of climate change. Not the storms, not the fires. It’s the hatred—and how far people are willing to take it. White supremacy has always been a zero-sum game that operates on the assumption of scarcity. Well, climate change makes that scarcity real. So now what?” 

Democrats’ Timidity Will Kill Us All, The New Republic, May 2022

“At the same time that the Republicans have metamorphosed, the liberals have sat on the sidelines either willfully ignoring their new reality or, worse, pointing and laughing. Over and over, they fall victim to bad-faith arguments, mistaking pure shamelessness for stupidity. And that leaves Democrats asking themselves two constant but conflicting questions: How are they—i.e., the right-wingers—so stupid, and how do they keep beating us?” 

2021

The Fog After the Storm, The Nation, November 2021 

“What I saw in Louisiana after Ida was not resilience. It was defiance. It was people standing up in the teeth of the most terrifying odds and declaring: I deserve to be here. We deserve to be here. And I will fight for this place and these people as long as there is breath in my body. What I saw, in other words, was love—big, bold, and beautiful.”


Before the Storm, How Do You Know When to Go? The Nation, November 2021 

“By Thursday morning, the meteorologists and climate experts I knew were worried about the Storm That Would Become Ida,  scheduled to make landfall in Louisiana on Sunday. I was torn between the wisdom I’d gathered from a lifetime of watching storms in the Gulf, and the knowledge I’ve built from being steeped in climate work for the past eight years. The first one told me that a storm that hadn’t even reached tropical storm status on Thursday couldn’t possibly get that much stronger by Sunday. The other told me that today’s storms are not like old storms, and that the Gulf, which had recently been on fire, was feeding extremely warm waters to the already powerful cyclone. I tried not to think about the fact that Sunday was August 29, and the last time I was in the region on August 29, 16 years ago, Hurricane Katrina came ashore.”

Forgive Humans, Not Oil Companies, The Nation, November 2021

“Because that’s the thing about abolition—and something I believe abolitionists know all too well—it’s not enough. Abolition is a starting point. It’s stopping the violence so that we can treat the wound. It’s not enough to get rid of fossil fuels or prisons. We have to get rid of white supremacy and toxic individualism and extractivism.”

Nice Isn’t Going to Save the Planet, (co-authored with Amy Westervelt), The Nation, November 2021

“The reality is that climate activists spent decades politely asking for the world’s leaders to please act on this thing that is going to kill millions. They held respectful dialogue in respectable forums. They produced charts and came up with a plethora of acceptable solutions that, had they been enacted on a reasonable timescale, would not have posed a dramatic threat to the status quo. Over and over again, they met bad faith actors in good faith. And in response they were lied to, and saw little meaningful action. Is political corruption civil? Is it polite for a senator to risk dooming the planet before sailing off on the yacht he bought with the half a million dollars he earns every year from the fossil fuel industry?”

Climate Grief Hurts Because It’s Supposed To, The Nation, November 2021

“So when folks ask me how I avoid getting crushed by the immensity of the problem, I tell them that I don’t. I still fall under waves of existential dread—the ones where it feels like you’re on fire and drowning at the same time. My only trick is that I’ve come to expect it.”

Stop Trying to Find Magic Words to Convince Climate Opponents, The Nation, October 2021

“It’s not like opponents don’t know climate change is happening. The fossil fuel industry knew about it before I was born. The Republican Party knew, and even flirted with the idea of doing something about it. These people don’t need to be convinced; they need to be removed. So, inasmuch as we look for new words and slogans, it should be for the purpose of galvanizing those who want to be on the right side of history. To hell with those people who want to make sure history books are never written.”

To Build a Beautiful World, You First Have to Imagine It, The Nation, October 2021

“The real question isn’t about what the world is doing, it’s about what we’re doing. It’s not whether the world is ending or beginning. It’s whether we’re creating or destroying it. And the answer is, of course, both.”

This Five-Point Plan Will Fix Climate Coverage, (co-authored with Amy Westervelt), The Nation, October 2021

“We see this all around us, but it is rarely reflected in the news media. Climate change is seldom the first thing you see on an outlet’s website. Even if you search for it, climate coverage can be hard to find, often buried somewhere under ‘science and technology’ or in the even more obscure ‘energy and environment’ section. Of the major US newspapers, only one—the Los Angeles Times—has its climate reporting easily accessible at the top of its home page. And TV news is far worse, typically failing to connect even the most extreme weather events back to climate change.”

2020

The Whole World is on the Ballot, The New Republic, October 2020

“Americans suffer from a strange sort of exceptionalism. We think our democracy is invulnerable and that climate change is something that happens elsewhere. These are fatal fallacies. From our burning West Coast to our sinking Gulf Coast, climate change is not stopping at our borders, even if our government turns a blind eye to the refugees there. Furthermore, any climate action that even remotely resembles climate justice—which is built on equity, compassion, and respect for humanity—needs democracy, and becomes nearly impossible under authoritarianism. At the same time, a climate that’s hostile to humans begets a political climate that is hostile to democracy.”

2020: The Year of the Converging Crisis, Rolling Stone, October 2020

“We live today in the age of crisis conglomeration. It is no longer useful or honest or even smart to look at any of them through a single lens. Not even the ones that have become so endemic we don’t talk about them as crises, but as systems — like mass incarceration. Or the ones we’ve tucked neatly out of our line of sight, like immigration detention, which is a refugee crisis by another name. But dealing with one crisis at a time is over. Myopia is canceled. It is a luxury, and illusion, we can no longer afford. We are either looking at all of it, or we’re looking at none of it.” 

Seeing Hurricane Katrina in 2020 Vision, Earther, August 2020 

“I didn’t know the name of it when I saw it in 2005, but this is ecofascism, a far-right ideology that co-opts the climate crisis to justify racial violence and totalitarianism. It’s found not just in the U.S., but all over the world. Last year, it showed up in the form of lone wolves like the El Paso and Christchurch shooters. This year, it’s been uncovered that it has infiltrated the U.S. and even the German army, where active and former troops are prepping for a violent end days type of scenario that’s disturbingly attuned with the climate crisis.”

 

We Don’t Have to Halt Climate Action to Fight Racism, HuffPost, June 2020  

“Climate change takes any problem you already had, any threat you were already under, and multiplies it. When you take a population that has lived in chronic crisis, under constant threat, for generations — from police violence to housing discrimination to general disenfranchisement — and add yet another threat? That’s not just a recipe for catastrophe. With the climate crisis itself — the storms and the temperatures — it’s not so much that the game is rigged, it’s the playing field. Climate change is not the Great Equalizer. It is the Great Multiplier.”

We Can’t Take Climate Change Without You, WIRED Magazine, April 2020 

“Suddenly, Climate People are popular! Where we used to quietly lament our lack of dinner party invitations and hold our own parties in secret, we're now the belles of the ball. Before, people rolled their eyes, smacked their teeth, and backed away when I mentioned my work. Now they lean in close. They ask questions and actually listen to my full, uninterrupted answer—men included!

And no question is more fervent, more persistent, more desperate than the one that weighed us all down in December: ‘But what can I do?’”

In A Shrinking World, What Will We Pass on to Our Children? The Boston Globe, April 2020

“More often than I’d like to admit, I didn’t see my nephew because I could look into his beautiful brown eyes and see all the things he’ll never see. Like the millions of animals that burned alive in Australia just this year. Or I could see the world on the horizon when melted permafrost has unleashed a world in permanent pandemic. While his eyes sparkle with joy, mine well with tears and I have to look away.

It’s such a heavy, heavy thing to watch this world become so empty.”

What Climate Change Taught Me About Coronavirus, The New Republic, March 2020

“My climate grief and my grief about the coronavirus pandemic feel devastatingly similar. Both crises represent tectonic shifts in the way the world works. Both bring a sense of finality, that ‘nothing will ever be the same again.’ Both force me to accept the end of something big and precious and irreplaceable. And I don’t know what comes next.”  

Climate Denial By Any Other Name, Drilled News, February 2020

“I find it nearly impossible to look at the climate crisis without seeing the consequences of all the times white folks told people of color: ‘Wait, we’ll get back to it later.’ To be satisfied with ‘incremental change’ and not ‘push too far.’ To settle for band-aids atop gaping, festering wounds.

So forgive us if our ears have turned to tin. Forgive us if we refuse to help you put on your life vest first, when you’re the one farthest from the flood. We’ve drowned in patience long enough.”

2019

After the Storm, Guernica, October 2019 

“Because Katrina’s aftermath was so horrific, we forget how utterly strange she was as a storm. We forget that she made landfall in Florida before sweeping back out to sea to gather more strength for the Gulf Coast.

The other thing often forgotten, but which I can never forget, was that Katrina descended the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till. If you are Black, and especially if you grew up in the South, the name ‘Emmett Till’ brought immediate, arresting, gruesome images to mind. The name sank to the bottom of your stomach like a bag of rocks—or like the cotton gin fan that weighed down his barely pubescent body to make it surrender to the Tallahatchie River.”

Home Is Always Worth It, Medium, September 2019 

“I’ve never seen a perfect world. I never will. But, I know that a world warmed by 2 degrees Celsius is far preferable to one warmed by 3 degrees, or 6. And that I’m willing to fight for it, with everything I have, because it is everything I have. I don’t need a guarantee of success before I risk everything to save the things, the people, the places that I love. Before I try to save myself.”

The Fight for Climate Justice Requires a New Narrative, Inverse, August 2019

“As a lifelong lover of language, I will never believe that ‘words fail us.’ I believe we fail to find the words. And if we don’t have the words, let’s create them. As an avid daydreamer, I will never lose faith in the power of the human imagination. If we can drill deep into the rocks beneath us for coal and oil, there’s no reason we can’t reach even deeper into ourselves to pull out the language to name our crisis.”

But The Greatest of These is Love, Medium, July 2019 

“But, I don’t always feel angry, to tell the truth. In fact, sometimes I’m hopeful, sometimes I’m scared. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, and sometimes I’m downright stubborn. (My mama would tell you that’s pretty much all the time.)

That’s because none of those emotions really get to the heart of what I truly feel. None of them are big enough. If I’m honest with myself , what I truly feel is…love.”

I Work in the Environmental Movement, I Don’t Care If You Recycle, Vox, June 2019 

“When people come to me and confess their green sins, as if I were some sort of eco-nun, I want to tell them they are carrying the guilt of the oil and gas industry’s crimes. That the weight of our sickly planet is too much for any one person to shoulder. And that that blame paves the road to apathy, which can really seal our doom.”

This Land Is Not Your Land, Or Mine, DAME Magazine, April 2019

“This country was built on the backs of Black people. But the United States of America has never belonged to us. Our relationship to this soil began with kidnapping, bondage, and torture. For centuries. Follow that up with yet another century of codified terrorism, most of which was either officially legal on the books or illegal in name only. And here we are today, when the school-to-prison pipeline remains strong, the wage gap is growing wider, and simply saying that our lives matter is seen as an act of aggression. The right to vote—the very baseline for citizenship—wasn’t afforded to us until 1965. A cool 100 years after the “end” of slavery. And even today, that right teeters on and off of life support. Ask Stacey Abrams.”

Climate Change Isn’t the First Existential Threat, Medium, February 2019

“I want you to understand how overwhelming, how insurmountable it must have felt. I want you to understand that there was no end in sight. It felt futile for them, too. Then, as now, there were calls to slow down. To settle for incremental remedies for an untenable situation.

Black people of the not-too-distant past trembled for every baby born into that world. Sound familiar?”

2018

The Big Lie We’re Told About Climate Change is that It’s Our Own Fault, Vox, November 2018

“The dominant narrative around climate change tells us that it’s our fault. We left the lights on too long, didn’t close the refrigerator door, and didn’t recycle our paper. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. If the light switch was connected to clean energy, who the hell cares if you left it on? The problem is not so much the consumption — it’s the supply. And your scrap paper did not hasten the end of the world.

Don’t give in to that shame. It’s not yours. The oil and gas industry is gaslighting you.”

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