Two of the most important books of the season—Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything—confront the dizzying scale and complexity of the climate crisis.

But they arrive at a more hopeful conclusion: if we are capable of such devastation, then perhaps we are also capable of its opposite. The books come to this position in very different ways. Lerner is a poet who writes literary fiction set in the hermetic universe of contemporary New York; 10:04 is a slim, stylized novel that explores questions of reality and perception, with the eco-apocalypse looming in the background—how it feels to witness the dawn of the end of the world. Klein is a journalist and activist addressing a popular audience; This Changes Everything is a hefty tome of non-fiction, part reportage and part call to arms, positioning climate change as a menace so all-encompassing that addressing it will require the reorganization of our entire mode of life.

By Drew Nelles, The Walrus (March 2014)

The men are skating sitting down. They have strapped themselves into moulded plastic sleds fitted on the bottom with two steel blades, the kind used on ice skates, and they propel themselves using two hockey sticks. Each of these, at about seventy-five centimetres, is one-third the length of a typical stick and equipped with a standard curved blade on one end, for puck handling, and metal teeth on the other, for digging into the ice. Although the game has barely started, the rink already resembles the lunar surface, pockmarked with countless small craters. The men churn like locomotives, their arms the wheels and their sticks the pistons, their raw strength paired with the startling finesse required to stay perched on two narrow blades placed as little as three-eighths of an inch apart.

Some of the men have stumps rather than legs or feet, some have one leg, some have legs that are disproportional, and some have no outward sign of disability. Most sit with their legs or stumps straight, in line with the metal frames that stretch forward from their sleds, although one of the goalies—the Canadian, Benoit St-Amand—has his one full leg crossed in front of him. (The goalies carry just one stick, and their skate blades are set wide apart so they can stay upright.) The men play rough. Because they are at ice level, they check each other straight into the boards rather than into the more forgiving tempered glass above, and when this happens the sound of plastic, flesh, and bone against fibreglass is awful, something between a clatter and a dull crunch.

The sport is called sledge hockey. I am watching the 2013 World Sledge Hockey Challenge at the MasterCard Centre in Toronto, Ontario, last December. The Canadian national team is up against Russia in a round robin game to determine standings for the semifinals. The day before, Team Canada easily defeated South Korea, 5–2. This is the last international tournament before the 2014 Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia. While sledge hockey is probably the most popular sport at the Winter Paralympics, few people, I’ve discovered, have heard of it. Today the stands are more or less full, because masses of schoolchildren have been bused in. Most of them are enthusiastic, cheering loudly when Canada scores, although some are sullen and unresponsive in the manner of teenagers, leaving to buy french fries or watch the Maple Leafs practise in the next rink over. On two platforms, accessible by ramp, a dozen or so spectators in wheelchairs have gathered.

Sledge hockey, invented in Sweden in the ’60s, is played by people with lower-body disabilities such as leg amputation, paraplegia, or partial paralysis. The rules are almost identical to those of traditional hockey, which sledge players call “stand-up.” However, because the athletes can only use their arms for propulsion, puck handling, and shooting, the sport is in many ways more physically demanding. It is played full contact, although T-boning another player with one’s sledge is illegal. “A lot of guys use those metal picks on the end of the stick to stab guys,” says Greg Westlake, the twenty-seven-year-old Team Canada captain. “I’ve had stitches. I have scars all over my rib cage. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a more physical game, but it might be a dirtier one.” During a US-Canada showdown at the 2009 Hockey Canada Cup in Vancouver, a massive skirmish erupted after an American player checked the Canadian goalie with just 1.7 seconds left on the clock. The fight has drawn over 266,000 views on YouTube.

Here at the World Sledge Hockey Challenge, the level of play is swift, smooth, and brutal. The men move in pirouettes, twisting at the hips to carve from side to side and brawling in dog pile fights. (“These teams do not like each other,” I overhear a Hockey Canada official say.) They are adept at catching passes under their sleds, between the front-end skid and the rear blades, which seems like an impossible manoeuvre. The score inches upward: 1–0 Russia, then 1–1, then 2–1 Canada, 3–1, 3–2, 4–2, 5–2, until Canada emerges victorious at 5–3. With my face at the glass, I watch a defenceman, Adam Dixon, shake his head, wide eyed and stunned, after a particularly big hit. Mostly, though, I watch another player, number 26. He is not flashy—he earns no points in this game, and is overall a lower scorer than the other Canadian forwards—but he is still domineering, intimidating, and, at six feet and 184 pounds, one of the largest men on the ice, sitting tall and broad in his sled. His name is Dominic Larocque.

My friend @laurinliu was recently elected to the Parliament of Canada for the riding of Rivière-des-Milles-Îles, Quebec. Whenever she comes to Toronto we hang out, and the one time I've been in Ottawa since she was elected, we went for soup.

We're extremely lucky to have someone like Laurin representing us in Parliament. Laurin speaks for our generation, the Internet, the young generation.