Hot Mess Book Review

Reflection and Embeddedness of Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red
Climate Emergency

Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergency (Wiebe, 2024) blends memoir-style vignettes with critical ecofeminist and environmental justice analysis to show how climate crisis is lived through bodies, care, and community. Grounded in Wiebe’s experience of motherhood during the 2021 British Columbia heat dome, the book uses hospital “codes” to connect embodied life, medical systems, climate disruption, and anti-colonial resistance. Across the book, Wiebe argues against individualized responsibility narratives and
for care and justice-centered responses to overlapping crises.

Rather than treating climate, healthcare, and social inequities as separate problems, Hot Mess emphasizes their entanglement within broader social, ecological, political, and institutional systems. The book’s “mess” is therefore analytic as well as descriptive, naming how harms compound and how vulnerability is unevenly distributed. In doing so, Wiebe (2024) frames climate emergency as a multifaceted crisis with interacting pathways of care, solidarity, and harm. The book’s interdisciplinary approach invites readers across multiple disciplines, such as environmental studies, feminist theory, health geography, and critical policy scholarship to
engage with the climate emergency not as an abstract event but as an embodied and relational reality. Through these lenses, forms of knowledge often dismissed as personal or marginal, including “mothered” perspectives, become crucial for understanding complexity and risk.

Written for general readers and relevant to scholars, Hot Mess invites environmental
and social scientists to reconsider what counts as climate expertise and whose knowledge
informs policy and preparedness. It offers a compelling account of how oppression can operate
as a feedback loop across ecological and social domains, and it calls for shifts away from
capitalist, colonial, and narrowly Western frameworks toward systems grounded in care,
accountability, and justice.

Reviewed by Daniel Layden