The Definitive Country Almanac: The Living Worlds Movement - Part 1#

Reading note. The Movement is not a state, not a church and not a party. It is about two million people who have read the same numbers and drawn the same conclusion, organised into local Wild Watches, a yearly Convention, a scientific wing called the Fellows, and a party in the Crown called the Tideward League. Its argument is the spine's: no living human has seen a hot era, and one is 225 years away. Every Movement place named here is on the interactive Atlas, and the Register of the Living Worlds Movement lists them.

Section 1: National Overview & Identity#

Official Name & Etymology#

• Formal name: The Living Worlds Movement, as its Convention's charter of 2273 names it.
• Short name: the Movement. Its members are Worlders; a local group is a Wild Watch; its scientists are the Fellows; its party in the Crown is the Tideward League. Its voters are Tideward League voters: "the Tidewards" is always the district below the Stair. The Cantorate's allied wing has its own noun: a Steward (Chapter V).
• Where the name comes from. From a pamphlet, Two Living Worlds (2268), by Dilys Uche, a Hollin naturalist: "There are two living worlds on this planet, the one the Founders brought and the one they found, and the Seeding is the first eating the second." The Corran Convention that met on the pamphlet's strength took its title from it.
• Name check (naming principles). The name comes from the pamphlet. The flag's design (below) comes from the Hedge and the red night: different sources.

What others call it:

Greeting, between Worlders: "Which world?" Reply: "Both." The capital's everyday greeting is "Good step" (Chapter IV); a Worlder on the Tidewards answers it, "Lower every year."

National Symbols#

The State Profile#

Chronological Timeline#

Section 2: Geography & Environment#

Physical Geography#

The Movement's geography is the planet's: nineteen million square kilometres of gardenland and everything else.

The two worlds#

The protected Wilds. The Movement did not make these, and defends every one: the Corran Wild (181,000 km², Highcairn and Corrandale, the largest in the Crown, whose boundary the Bill would make permanent), the Lowfen Reedlands Reserve (22,000 km²), the Ashcombe Steppe Commons (96,000 km²), the Saltreach Flats (4,100 km², a tidehound breeding ground) and the Duskwood Park (38 km², fenced, in Aletheia itself) in the Crown (the Crown almanac); the Whitefell Wild (210,000 km²) in Ormsby and the Inner Meres (18,000 km²) in Sallow (the Lesser Crowns almanac); the Duskwood Keeping (410,000 km²) and the Irrin Slopes (38,000 km²) in Ilyr (the Ilyr almanac); the Northreach Reserve (about 400,000 km²) in the Imperium (the Vardane almanac). About 1.4 million km² in all: less than a tenth of the gardenland, and the Movement's whole map.

The Hedge and the Creep#

• The Hedge is "the boundary between gardenland and Wild" (the Introduction): a live front, and on the frontier a burnt and patrolled strip. Hedge work, "clearing, burning and re-seeding the boundary", is a trade (the Introduction). The Movement's Wild Watches do Hedge work too, on the other side of the argument: they clear nothing, and they count.
• The Creep is the capital farmers' word for the Wild growing back: "Native plants photosynthesise in Hyperion's deep red light", "the native Wild keeps growing through the night, while Earth fields merely rest", and "As Hyperion brightens, the Wild's advantage grows" (the Introduction). "The Living Worlds Movement calls it the planet reasserting itself."
• Earth grasses invade the margins of the Wild, and the Movement "treats this as a harm to the native Wild" (the Introduction). It is the one point on which the Movement and the Charter Party agree that something is spreading where it should not, and disagree about which.

"Climate"#

The Movement's weather is the spine's table.

• "About 20% brighter within one lifetime" (the spine). "Old people remember dimmer red nights. This is real, not nostalgia."
• The seas: "rising about 0.3 m per century now and accelerating" (the spine); about 0.35 m and 0.4 °C since AL 2200 (the Crown almanac). The Long Gate closes about 40 times a year (the Crown almanac). The Tidewards flood at every double spring (Chapter III).
• The Movement's reading of it: the retreat inland from the lowest steps, which the capital calls "prudence", is "the first evacuation" (Chapter I).
• What no one has: experience. "No human has ever lived through a hot era" (the spine). The last peak was about AL −665; the next is centred on AL 2539, 225 years away.

Life and Resources#

Section 3: History & Chronology#

Before the name (2204–2268)#

The Long Gate went across the Thess estuary in 2204 (the Crown almanac), and every year since it has closed more often. The people who noticed first lived below it, in the Tidewards, where the double springs came up the streets. The people who could say why lived at Hollin, where the sediment cores from Aumer (the Ilyr almanac) said what the Stair already showed: warm eras raise the seas, and one was coming. The Cantorate said the Father's Return would be "a time of plenty" (the Introduction). A wing of it began to say otherwise: the Stewardship school, for whom the Return is "a judgement, not a gift" (Chapter V).

Two Living Worlds (2268–2279)#

In 2268 Dilys Uche, a Hollin naturalist, published Two Living Worlds, and in Thaw of that year 340 people met in a hired grain hall above Corran Mouth: naturalists, Stewards, Tidewards ward councillors, a few Hedge-hands from the Corran, and the first Fellows. The Corran Convention founded the Movement and has met every Thaw since. Its first act was the Wild Watch at the Corran (2270), under Zofia Gunnarsson: a hut on the Hedge and a register of everything that crossed it, in either direction. Its second was the Charter of the Convention (2273), with the Three Asks: protect the Wild; limit the Seeding; prepare for the hot era. The Asks have not changed.

The war and the Lean Years (2279–2291)#

The Corridor War was fought over phosphate (the Introduction), which is the Seeding's debt, and the Convention declared for neither side; its Wild Watches served on the fire lines in the charter-country, where the war and the ember season met. Then came the Lean Years (2285–2290), the famine that "made the frontier briefly rich" (the Southern Holds almanac) and the capital hungry. Nobody votes for seeding limits in a famine, and the Movement learned it: its membership fell by half, and the Convention of 2288 sat with 90 delegates.

The Tideward League (2291–2306)#

The Armistice let the Movement do what the war had not: stand for election. The Tideward League was founded in 2291 by Amadou Marrable, a Tidewards ward councillor, as the Movement's party in the Crown, and named for the district where the floods are felt first. Four seats in 2296; eleven in 2301, the year the Assembly's Science Council sat the Brightening Commission (the Assembly almanac) with three of the Movement's Fellows on it; twenty-seven in 2306.

The same years gave the Movement the fire it would be blamed for. In 2299 a faction of the Wild Watches asked the Convention to pledge itself to "direct defence of the Wild", which meant sabotage, and lost, 310 votes to 95. The losers left, and in 2304 burned a Seedwright camp at Wendford the night before the Charter Court was to license its conversion. The Court, whose docket runs two years behind (the Crown almanac), granted a continuance, its word for an adjournment, and the burners took the word for a name: the Continuance Circle. In 2306 they burned the rebuilt works, and three people died: two works-hands, Leopold Greenhalgh and Joaquin Sørlie, and one of the Circle's own, Jorunn Salazar. The Crown outlawed the Circle. The Convention of 2306 disowned it, 870 votes to 61, in the words the register gives the Movement: "Coercion and attacks on civilians do not speak for this movement." The Circle's answer is the register's too: "Moderation protects the people causing destruction."

The Report and the Bill (2311–2314)#

The Brightening Report (2311) put "Hyperion's heat, in numbers the whole planet must now argue about" (the Assembly almanac), and the Crown argued: the Tideward League won 52 seats that year, "the fastest-growing party" (the Crown almanac). In 2313 its leader, Wystan Mwangi, moved the Seeding Limits Bill with a group of Charter Party dissidents from the Corran Reaches: the Corran Wild's boundary made permanent, and net new seeding in the Crown capped. It is "the Living Worlds Movement's central demand and the Charter Party's most divisive question" (the Crown almanac). Its second reading falls in Reaping 2314, and nobody knows the numbers (Part 2).

Historical Rulers & Leaders#

Convenors of the Living Worlds Convention (complete)#

13 Convenors since the Corran Convention of 2268. The Convention elects the Convenor for three years, once re-electable; the founder held the first two terms. ** The current Convenor is in bold.

Leaders of the Tideward League in the Hall of Voices (complete)#

3 leaders since the Tideward League's founding in 2291. **

Figures every Worlder knows#

Section 4: Demographics & Society#

Population Metrics#

The three wings#

Who the Worlders are#

Language#

• Hallspeech in the Hall; Landspeech at the Convention; Southspeech at the Wild Watches on the frontier.
• The Movement's words: Worlder; Wild Watch (a local group, and its hut); the Asks; Steward (Chapter V's noun, borrowed); the Creep (the farmers' word, used without shame); the first evacuation (Chapter I); "Which world?" "Both."; "Lower every year"; a continuance (the Circle, never named).

Religion & Belief Systems#

The Movement is secular in form and mostly Steward in fact. The Stewardship school teaches that the Return "is a judgement, not a gift" and is "Allied in practice with the Living Worlds Movement" (Chapter V); the Movement's Convention opens with a Steward's reading and a Plain Reckoner's figures, in that order, by a rule of 2273. The Literalist majority of the Cantorate holds that the Return is "a time of plenty" (the Introduction), and the Seeding a duty (the Lesser Crowns almanac). The Wolf Rite "does not believe in the Return" (Chapter V) and expects the world to burn "to its roots, as the emberscrub does, and grow again" (Chapter IV), which is the Movement's argument in another accent. The Ashward expect the end and dig for it (the Southern Holds almanac); the Movement wants nothing to do with them, and is accused of them anyway.

Public Health#

Education#