If you have recently lost someone dear to you, read this book. If you are troubled by climate change and the glacial speed with which the human race is facing this calamity, read this book. If you love the planet and want to feel realistically inspired, rallied and ready to do your part to promote climate change action, read this book.
For all of the above, or if you simply want to read a well-written book by someone who knows the science and has an eloquently expressive command of English, read this book.
I came across it by accident (if there are such accidents) while searching for something else entirely. The title intrigued me. The Foreword by Bill McKibben and the opening chapter lured me in.
You see, I have recently lost my mother, and for over a year now I have been living in this rather odd bubble world of grief and longing, overcome with nostalgia to return to a time before she was diagnosed with cancer and before my life and my father's life were irrevocably changed. I have been changed by this loss and I am only now just grasping a sense of how much I have changed.
Reading M Jackson's account of how she experienced grief - twice, with the loss of both a mother and a father in a relatively short space of time - has made me realize that I am not alone in these feelings, that this is grief - a strange landscape that is hard to negotiate and a state of mind that is often irrational, where uncertainty, indecisiveness and self-doubt become your norm.
I am also grieving for the planet. I am not a geologist or a climate scientist, but I am an environmentalist and a wetland steward. I love nature and I deplore the way in which big business, governments at all levels and a great many of my fellow humans have sidelined earth health and humanity's well-being for their own greed and continuance.
I sit squarely in M. Jackson's camp, therefore. I feel the intense grief of personal loss at the moment as well as an intense grief for our larger losses on Planet Earth, from species extinctions to melting ice caps. I ache and mourn and despair in ways I never have before.
But this book has been good for me, despite being one of the more difficult reads in recent memory. It has helped me to identify grief for what it is and to be aware that we cannot allow grief to prevent us from picking up the pieces and moving forward.
This we must do if we are to have any hope of stopping a coming catastrophe of planetary proportions. It is necessary to grieve, but we cannot throw our hands up in despair and do nothing. M Jackson urges us on - even as we feel sorrow and fear - to act, to advocate, to find solutions. As she warns, we are well past the point of relying on energy-efficient light bulbs alone to solve this. We must free ourselves from grief's paralyzing grip and face the future head on.
Most days, lately, I feel that I am living in, as the writer describes, "a world no longer built on good will." Despite this, daily events in my life do remind me that there is hope, that as a species "even when we are most beleaguered, we are still capable of making this world a better place."
If any of these words resonate with you, either about grief or about climate change, find this book. Read it thoughtfully and slowly. Mark the passages that speak to you. Let her words lead you to a place where you can pause, take solace and wonder at the beauty of our living world. Maybe only when we feel intense love and fear its loss do we act. Hopefully, enough of us will feel encouraged to act rather than despair, because we need to act very, very soon.
To purchase or to learn more:
http://greenwriterspress.com/books/spring-2015-books/while-glaciers-slept-being-human-in-a-time-of-climate-change/
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