The material was just as passionate for Ferguson who thought it was perfect for Burke. “One is about climate change, whatever the current word is, its really tricky. It’s amazing how little it's delved into in art, because it’s really the only issue really. Not that the others aren’t important; gender equality, racism, they’re all important but if we’re all going to die from climate change, it’s secondary. So it's remarkable to me how much we avoid it. We avoid it because it’s too depressing and we can’t look it in the eye. It was interesting to find ways of talking about it that we haven’t explored yet.”   

 

  Burke drew inspiration from Strand who unpacked the fairytale and origin of Sleeping Beauty, which also analyzed deep ancient mythology such as Persephone and Samarian legends. “It’s all about rebirth. Sleeping Beauty is about the world waking up again. I started looking at if humans disappeared from the world. The world doesn’t die, it keeps going and I wanted to know how long that would work? How long it would take? What would it look like? I started writing a play, that the environmental world calls a population correction and what happens after that.”

 

  Population correction is both a term and theory touted by Professor William. E Rees, a human ecologist and economic ecologist at the University of British Columbia (UBC)

 

  The following quote comes from Rees' published paper, The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable “Which brings us back to the population conundrum. In the simplest terms, overshoot results from too many people consuming and polluting too much. The immediate physical cause is excess economic throughput (i.e., resource consumption and waste production), but throughput is itself driven by both rising incomes and population growth. Most people tend to spend/consume to the limit imposed by their discretionary incomes (and, since the introduction of easy credit, often well beyond). High-income countries and populations are therefore responsible for three quarters of excess material consumption and pollution to date.”

           

  Angus asked if Burke could write a play in which the natural world wasn’t a setting but an actual character. Burke ran with that the idea and incorporated music into the production. “What if everything in the world sings? The grass sings, the trees sing, mushrooms sing and whales sing. If you want the natural world to be present, use music and possibly puppets.” Burke exclaimed.

 

  Burke completed a first draft last August and began work shopping it soon after. “It wasn’t good but it was a start and did the workshop and got it into a much better place.” Burke said.

 

  The original workshop helped construct the initial skeletal foundation which eventually blossomed into the current production. Angus asked Burke if we could have a character that’s not human, that’s a fundamental character and felt Burke would appreciate the challenge of a nearly impossible thing.

 

  Burke drew heavily on her passion of the environment and where society stands on issues like climate change. “Because of the pandemic, the environmental news is so dispiriting, if you allow yourself to doom scroll. If there’s something deeply personal for me in this play, it’s the notion of despair. I had to take it out for a walk, and see how I could respond to it that was genuine and not Pollyanna.” Burke said.