A beautiful microcosm

Julia’s photos always strike a chord. The way she sees and learns from the physical spaces and ecosystems around her, the way she feels her complex climate emotions with transparency and grace – let it stir your own joy and gratitude and grief and heartache. – Rachel

Julia Curran is an urban/bio geographer, systems-thinker, graphic designer, revolution-fomenter, and world-lover who is all-in for climate.

Chaos theories

Recently, I’ve been pondering chaos and fractals a lot more than I have in years, reading about wind turbulence and ventilation and covid and thinking about rapid culture shift and systems organization in climate breakdown. I’m intrigued by natural patterns repeated across different scales, the way I can sink into novelty and familiarity by changing my physical perspective without ever shifting my location.

I’ve been thinking a lot, too, about my own scale, the patterns I’m trying to write, hoping others might write them alongside me, the ways we live in constant revolution.

Are you feeling this change, this urgency, like the trill of cicadas at night, like the roll of distant thunder across the hairs on your arms? Are you feeling the way this world is buzzing, thrilling, electric and on the cusp?

We are shaping our future day-by-uncertain-day, writing new paths, choosing in every conversation the world we’ll wake up to tomorrow, in November, ten years from now. We’re fractal agents of chaos, if you want, or individual microcosms of these repeating patterns. We’re the actors and the acted upon, the change-makers and the changed, the dripping water and the stone it forms.