I was born and raised in Russia — the country whose borders contain the biggest plot of land within them. Growing up, this knowledge was a given and a point of pride.
Russia is now at the center of geopolitical discussions, more than it has been for quite some time. The country placed itself in mouths and headlines worldwide by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — making many of us young Russians look back at our history more critically than we ever had before. We are looking back with fear for the history of which we are a part, but we know that we need to keep looking.
How did Russia grow so big, stretching across eleven time zones for 9000 kilometers? On such a heterogeneous plot of land, what unites us? Does anything? Tragically, it took full-blown violence to set off these strings of thoughts. I am lucky never to have had my belonging or right to home questioned by the tyrannical ruling power in Russia.
So when this issue’s theme — Land — was proposed last semester, I latched on to it immediately. Knowing that every space is contested and that every struggle is a version of another one, and, thus, that our theme could serve as strong connective tissue across geographies and experiences, I had big hopes for this production cycle. One of them was to find those ties among the pieces in the issue that clarify my judgment of Russia’s tremendous terrains. Another - to learn about concealed land-caused pains. Another - to find, despite the parallels between all struggles over land, what makes each of them matchless.
In our solicitation message for this issue, we wrote that “The Harvard Advocate is thinking about land” this semester. But of course, it is us, students of the Advocate, who keep returning to this concept — some of us weekly in board meetings, some daily, some never stop thinking of it. What a blessing we have, to turn our focus toward and away from land — land as an intellectual curiosity, as a deeply exciting topic, as a novel perspective on the world. But then there is a need for some of us to wake up and go to sleep, concerned and aware; for others, livelihoods are engulfed in contestations over land; others don’t enjoy the privileges of citizenship on “neutral soil” and are irreversibly hurt by the status quo.
The Advocate is in a unique position: sustained by our own efforts, but also by Harvard College, we benefit from the stability that few publications enjoy. And so we carry the weight of Harvard’s institutional legacy, of crimes against land and the people who inhabit it. As we considered all things land this semester, we found that this issue must not only house our perspectives and uplift artistic expression on campus but also be offered humbly and compassionately to those for whom land is a matter of survival.
I have long discarded my national pride and started doubting if I have ever been proud. These days, I am embarrassed to simplify growth and resulting hugeness to the point of unquestionable achievement. In the Land Issue, I find similar doubts. Why is a giant country, connected so faintly, by stamps and trains, yet hopelessly unwavering? How do we define the relationship between living things: humans and land, both of whom are strong characters and diligent laborers? Am I uniquely intimate with the landscape? And thus, am I always or never alone? This issue has brought me great joy, as all these questions — that we learn are unanswerable and, thus, meaningless — were not only asked but also debated with passion.
The final product is not without its shortcomings. We took upon this project knowing that it is ambitious, inexhaustible, and disputable. But this semester, I am very proud of the Advocate. I am proud of my friends and colleagues behind this name, for their curiosity and drive, for approaching with urgency and empathy, and for devoting a lot of time to our Land Issue. This issue is, I hope, one of many steps towards an Advocate that serves the pursuit of justice through our fundamental means: visual and literary arts.
— Varya Lyapneva, Publisher
We bought a new outfit for my appearance in the climate change documentary. It wasn’t a decision so much as a necessity: I had arrived fully clad in black; my head seemed to float above my body, which had disappeared into the green screen I was being shot against; this called for a new outfit color. My mother ran to the nearby children’s shop while Amy, the show’s producer, had me remove my shoes and untie my hair to hang down my back. I was barefoot and ethereal looking by the time my mother returned with a skirt and shift in virginal blue.
A year later, when the documentary aired, we had already discarded both skirt and shift: trash that nevertheless survives eternally in a video of me singing Tom Chapin’s This Pretty Planet — followed by a montage of turtles choking on garbage in a sea once ethereal blue.
Saving My Tomorrow was a documentary about kids, for kids: a Gen-Z paean against climate change, mildly star studded (Liam Neeson, Tina Fey, and Laura Dern all made appearances), with the tenor of an enthusiastic acceptance speech (Us! Yes, us! We’re going to save the world! Thank you and please donate!) from a diverse cast of real-life children, whom Newsweek dubbed “pint-sized activists.” Our anthem, the documentary’s theme song, was the They Might Be Giants tune “Then The Kids Took Over”:
The earth is our one home
The earth is so fragile it seems
It's warmer and warmer
And things have gone from strange to extreme
And then the kids took over
That's when the future began
That future was now, and that future was orchestrated by preteens. Critically, no documentary participant had outgrown middle school. Everyone had an adorable lisp, cringey braces, or a face studded with acne. My right foot tapped nervously as I sang, lips shaped in a taut O unless the lyrics called for the clearly enunciated T I had learned in voice lessons. My older brother, Ben, sat upright at the piano, leaning soulfully into the keyboard whenever the harmony resolved.
Amy, a parent at our elementary school, had plucked Ben and I from the school talent show — he, fourteen, an amateur climate enthusiast; I, eight, unsure if I liked to be outdoors — and plopped us back into the school auditorium that was now transformed into an HBO set. Ben played as I sang:
This pretty planet
Spinning through space
My garden, my harbor, my holy place
Golden sun going down
Gentle blue giant
Spin us around
All through the night
Safe till the morning light
My rendition of This Pretty Planet did not, in fact, follow Chapin’s original lyrics. Unintentionally I had changed them: from “You’re a garden / you’re a harbor / you’re a holy place” to “My garden / my harbor / my holy place.” Through this pronoun switch-up I had inadvertently transformed the song from a grateful ballad to a statement of ownership.
My lyrical mishap was only fitting. By Google Search, Saving My Tomorrow is billed: “From the children who will inherit the planet, comes a collection of songs, activism, and heartfelt tips for protecting the earth.” Not yet fifteen, we received our inheritance: this pretty planet. Unified by our youth, we could never squander such wealth.
For ours was a very particular fantasy: that before we were old enough to vote, to breathe smoke from illicit cigarettes, to brush up against grief in joy’s clear waters, to tumble into love on a warm December night and out in a freezing July, Generation Z would rescue a planet about which we knew little — save that it was “ours,” and that we had very limited time.
~
When I think of New York City I think of the things that fall on it. Hosewater trickling through the caulk between sidewalks on fresh April mornings. Snow plows scraping white from the streets like crust from a thermos’ rubber rim. Gingko nuts that stink more than bird shit. Home in New York is a tightly-zipped pocket of sky or an unyielding plot of concrete. Land in New York is not soil but the thick layer of fallen residue that rises to meet the sky from which it fell.
I grew up in that city, and so compiling this issue has been a lesson for me in other ways of knowing land. Andrew Q. Kang ‘27 leads us through an unnamed city in his short story “Quiltro,” shadowing a dog’s kaleidoscopic view. Mohsid Hamid describes Lahore’s changing climate in an interview with Imaan Mirza ‘25. In an interview with Varya Lyapneva ‘26, Jumana Manna speaks of urbanization eroding earth’s soils as surely as colonial power corrodes the minds of the powerful, as mold eats through bread crusts in Manna’s Old Bread International.
In other stories, land is synonymous with house. The narrator in Rosalind Margulies’s “the maneater” promises to shoot the beast stalking Shady Acres retirement community, in exchange for allowance to continue living in his late grandfather’s house. Taylor Dorrell photographs an old man standing by his clapboard house in shirtless contrapposto. A dog with a gun bullies his owner into housebound seclusion in Christopher Wilson’s “The Bad Dog.”
Sometimes, plan replaces land, as in “The Machine That Makes the Machine”: Annika Inampudi ‘25 writes of her grandparent’s home in the meticulously plotted town surrounding a heavy electricals factory in Nehru’s India. In a chapter from Ishmael Reed’s upcoming novel “The Terrible Fives,” a necrophiliac named Termite Control plans to reshape America’s mortuary landscape when he becomes President of the United States. Sama Alshaibi describes making art with teenage girls at the Dheisheh refugee camp in Palestine, nurturing creativity in the face of planned destruction.
Frank Y.C. Liu ‘26 takes a transcontinental train ride. The earth is stitched with steel; humans flee, and land grows back around the stitches, inflamed with new life. In an interview with Liu, Homi K. Bhabha questions the geographic reach of postmodernity. “Rain Comes After She Dies,” Denise Low tells us. In her poem “Waldens,” McGowin Grinstead ‘26 swims in debt through a lake at the margins of her life.
Our garden, our harbor, our holy place — we think of land as something we own, something to be possessed; ownership licenses our irresponsibility. The stories enclosed engage that irresponsibility. They also engaged me to reflect on my own.
More than ten years ago now, I appeared in a documentary against global warming, costumed in the future’s trash: an outfit I would discard less than a year after purchasing it. Later I littered the Internet with candy-colored infographics. I spread awareness. The personal is political, and poetry is not a luxury but a means of action: weaned on the doctrines of second-wave feminism, I politicized my writing. Concurrently I aestheticized my politics. My friends and I thrifted new outfits to wear to climate rallies: red tube tops (a powerful color, a call to action!), casual light wash jeans, haloes of stick-on gems around our eyes. I remember little from those rallies other than the photos we shot for Instagram, the proselytizing captions that guilted others in order to deflect our own shame.
In Saving My Tomorrow, youth was a promise. To many adults, “the youth” are an undifferentiated and self-perpetuating mass onto which one can perpetually foist responsibility to compensate for one’s own lack thereof. It’s natural to blame the parents. But it was I who spent my childhood performing climate justice, even as I contributed to its increasing improbability. Youth became my excuse — one that becomes increasingly harder to brandish.
Sweeping statements like “the kids will save the world” manufacture a superficial coherence premised on shared youth. This fantasy of unity elides real differences in lived experience, of climate change and many other things. But I believed in this fantasy. I lived it, until I was no longer a child, and it was abundantly clear that Gen-Z had failed to save the world before the age of twenty-one. Self deception nibbles at the soul as mold consumes bread — until stale ideology dries the mouth, encrusts the tongue, halts speech.
Coming out of this fantasy I was lucky to find the Advocate — colleagues and friends who invite all to share in their curiosity.
Here is our offer: a thick packet of stories, broad in its scope and by no means exhaustive, that speaks not to unity but to the universality of difference. The pocket of sky in which I conducted my childhood years is not the same pocket in or under which you conducted yours. We will read the same stories differently. As we read, we will reflect on our own separate lives, and responsibility will fall with varied weight on varied individuals.
Here is my hope: that we are able to accept the responsibility that falls on each of us, and rise through our own self-deceptions, firmly planted on the land beneath our feet.
— Maren Wong, President
2025