Tomorrow Is Too late

Grace Maddrell

The Indigo Press

“WE YOUNG people are powerful. We deserve to be heard and listened to,” writes 15-year-old Grace Maddrell in their first book, about the activism and work of youth climate strikers across the globe.

Based in Somerset, UK, Grace went to their first climate strike in February 2019. It sparked their passion for the environment and they have since become an activist, fighting for both environmental justice and LGBTQ+ rights, working for Fridays for Future, the youth-led movement that started with Greta Thunberg’s protests in 2018.

After they took part in the global climate justice strike in September 2019, Grace was inspired to collect the voices of other youths fighting climate change. They sent out a tweet, calling for young climate activists across the globe to tell their stories. Within hours, Grace was flooded with responses. is a collection of essays from some of those who responded.

With contributors aged between 8 and 25 years, from places including Brazil, Uganda, Australia and Palestine, this book provides a powerful snapshot of how climate change is affecting the world today. It also shows how the younger generation is fighting back, whether by giving speeches at United Nations summits about the effects of climate change or striking to raise awareness.

Each essay is given a short introduction by Grace, providing background on the person telling their story. Some of the writers are already seeing the effects of the climate crisis at first-hand. Michael Bäcklaund, a 17-year-old from Israel, says he has seen friends die because of more frequent floods. He also says the climate crisis is often ignored to focus on political conflicts: he was told by Israel’s minister of energy that it was for the younger generation to fix the climate problem.

Coming from an Indigenous background, 20-year-old Lucila Auzza from Argentina feared that she wouldn’t survive to adulthood because of a lack of drinkable water as a child. She says the media there aren’t showing what the government is really doing to the rainforests and how many lives have been put at risk as a result. “Throughout 2017, 42 per cent of deforestation in the country took place where regulations did not allow it,” she says. Auzza says that rich countries care more about their economies than the environment.

Many of the essays call for the leaders of the world to act now, rather than leaving it up to the next generation. “Enough of climate talks, what we need now is climate action,” says 24-year-old Patricia Kombo from Kenya who started an initiative to get environmental education taught in schools.

“We should not have to take the hand of the adults and drag them towards the solution that will save our planet,” says 19-year-old Fionnuala Braun from Canada. She says that, in her lifetime, she has experienced more frequent extreme weather conditions, and that every year more Canadians are losing their homes to forest fires.

Tomorrow Is Too Late is a remarkable book that shows how educated and passionate young people can be about saving the planet. It also makes it clear that climate change is very much a global issue. Hearing the voices of children experiencing the impacts is heartbreaking, yet empowering.

The strength and determination of such people show how previous generations have failed to care for the environment. But this book is inspirational, and will ignite the inner environmentalist of those who read it. It encourages and educates people of all ages to fight for the future of our planet because tomorrow is too late. “Even a small action that you take is better than no action,” says Grace.

A vast site in north-west Saudi Arabia is home to 1000 structures that date back more than 7000 years, making them older than the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge in the UK.

Named after the Arabic word for rectangle, mustatil structures were first discovered in the 1970s, but received little attention from researchers at the time. Hugh Thomas at the University of Western Australia in Perth and his team wanted to learn more about them, and embarked on the largest investigation of the structures to date.

Using helicopters to fly over north-west Saudi Arabia and then following up with ground explorations, the researchers found more than 1000 mustatils across 200,000 square kilometres – twice as many as were previously thought to exist in this area. “You don’t get a full understanding of the scale of the structures until you’re there,” says Thomas.

Made from piled-up blocks of sandstone, some of which weighed more than 500 kilograms, mustatils ranged from 20 metres to more than 600 metres in length, but their walls stood only 1.2 metres high. “It’s not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,” says Thomas.

In a typical mustatil, long walls surround a central courtyard, with a distinctive rubble platform, or “head”, at one end and entryways at the opposite end. Some entrances were blocked by stones, suggesting they could have been decommissioned after use.

Excavations at one mustatil showed that the centre of the head contained a chamber within which there were fragments of cattle horns and skulls. The cattle fragments may have been presented as offerings, suggesting mustatils may have been used for rituals.

Radiocarbon dating of the skulls shows that they date to between 5300 and 5000 BC, indicating that this was when this particular mustatil was built – and maybe the others too. If so, the monuments would together form the earliest large-scale, ritual landscape anywhere in the world, predating Stonehenge by more than 2500 years.

“This could completely rewrite our understanding of cults in this area at this time,” says team member Melissa Kennedy, also at the University of Western Australia. She says that further south, religious groups became focused in homes, with families displaying small shrines, but the opposite was happening in ancient Saudi Arabia with the mustatils.

There may also have been a relation between the construction of mustatils and the environment. They were built during the Holocene Humid Phase – a period between 8000 and 4000 BC during which Arabia and parts of Africa were wetter, and what are now deserts were grasslands. But droughts were still common, and Kennedy says it is possible that cattle were herded and used as offerings to the gods to protect the land from the changing climate.

Mustatils were typically clustered in groups of two to 19, suggesting that gatherings may have been broken up into smaller social groups.

“The mustatils themselves are probably associated with an annual or generational coming-together of people who would normally be out with their herds and cattle,” says Gary Rollefson at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, suggesting that these rituals were important for bringing communities together. “But there’s no indication that these guys spent a lot of time around the mustatil.”

“These structures are enigmatic,” says Huw Groucutt at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. He says they show that remarkable human cultural developments took place in the Arabian peninsula.

But despite all the new findings, there is still much to learn. “People are going to understand these structures even more in the future,” says Thomas. “It’s nice to be at the forefront, but we’re also excited to see what other people find.”

Males of a species of parasitic wasp can identify potential mates from chemicals they give off, even before the females have emerged from within their host fly.

Jewel wasps (Nasonia vitripennis) are found across North America. Females deposit eggs inside the cocoon-like casings of developing flies, using their ovipositors to inject each fly with a venom that paralyses it. The developing wasps remain in the host as they mature from egg to adult, only eating their way out to mate. Males emerge first, hanging around on the hosts to wait for females to appear.

“Males want to increase their mating success, so would benefit from finding hosts with females,” says Garima Prazapati at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali.

It is possible for these wasps to up their chances. Males develop from unfertilised eggs and females from fertilised eggs, so some hosts hold all-male broods, while others house a mixture of males and females.

Prazapati and her team collected jewel wasps from the wild and bred them. They isolated some females, keeping them from mating so their eggs would go on to create all-male broods. Next, they individually presented 26 male wasps with two Petri dishes: one holding a host containing male and female adult wasps, and one with a host containing only adult males.

The researchers found that the males spent around four times longer on the host with the females inside.

Analysing the chemical compositions of both hosts, the team found that the one containing female wasps had a higher abundance of nine cuticular hydrocarbons – compounds that cover the wasp exoskeleton – than the host with males inside.

They then dipped adult wasps in a chemical solution that extracts these hydrocarbons and found that adult females also had a higher concentration of them than males.

Prazapati says this suggests that the males must be able to detect the abundance of female-specific chemical cues emanating from within the fly casings. “This is the ultimate mate‑finding strategy,” she says.

They are certainly good at finding the female wasps, says team member Rhitoban Raychoudhury, also at IISER Mohali. “But males being attracted to females isn’t news.”

Given the lifestyle of parasitic wasps, this strategy of searching for mates while they are still within the host is important for males to secure reproduction and may also be seen in other species, he says.

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