Of Glaciers and Grief

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/

Summer Reading Suggestion

Language ..."is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities."

Wade Davis

Anthropologist, Author, Explorer

Speak Out For Nature and Democracy in Canada

Recommended Winter Reading: Blessed Unrest

Five years on and this is still a most timely comment on how “people power” could really change the world—and save the planet.

Published in 2007, Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest may have been pushed to the back of your brain by the sheer number of books flooding the market every year since, but as Bill McKibben rightly identified, “Nothing you read for years to come will fill you with more hope and more determination."

Mid-decade, Hawken noted a groundswell of unrest and resistance rising from the bottom up ( think Occupy!) and pointed proudly to a new fierceness (his word!) in the world, not in the sense of ferocity but in the sense of determination — determination to stand up, speak out, and demand accountability, transparency, truth and justice from the power élite —   the corporations and the governments that collude with them.

So why are millions of people taking a stand for social justice and environmental justice around the world and across social media platforms? Because it’s hardwired into our genes: We fight because we love and we hope.

I’m a little late to the party too, in the sense that I did not get around to reading this book until only recently. So if you have not yet read Blessed Unrest, now’s a good time. It inspires courage and promotes hopefulness. We have a fighting chance, Hawken says, but only if we work together, for each other and for the well-being of our planet:

“The insanity of human destructiveness may be matched by an older grace and intelligence that is fastening us together  in ways we have never before seen or imagined.”

 “To come together we must know our place in a biological and cultural sense, and reclaim our role as as engaged agents of our continued existence.”

“We became human by working together and helping one another. According to immunologist Gerald Callahan, faith and love are literally buried in our gene and lympocytes, and what it takes to arrest our descent into chaos is one person after another remembering who and where they really are.”

Shift Your Perspective And Be The Change

In each crisis, we are told, there is opportunity, and humanity is going to be facing some major crises, no question. Already we are seeing the convergence of disturbing economic and environmental issues. Human population is growing as our resources are diminishing. World peace seems ever-elusive. Terrorism, food security, climate change, global corporatism, unprecedented levels of species extinction...

Yes, 2012 is poised to be a pivotal year, but not for those misguided misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar...however, we cannot discount the seriousness our situation.

Laszlo's book is an urgent appeal and a call to action. A declaration for planetary consciousness. We will need to be smarter, more creative, more responsible and more accountable in the years ahead. So let's start now. The sooner the better.

Laszlo outlines the three "unsustainabilities" - ecological, economic, social - and proceeds to discuss how we can take action to create conscious change, through various levels of activism  - civic, media, business and personal.

Definitely worth a read, and a timely read too.

May 2012 be a year of enlightenment and positive change.

Peace & Joy to all.

Shaking the Watchman's Rattle...

means sounding the alarm...

"A Rattler is any individual willing to sound the alarm. Whether the threat comes in the form of terrorism, obesity, deteriorating education, nuclear proliferation, overfishing the oceans or climate change, Rattlers bring people together to overcome adversity and to effect long-lasting change."

The Watchman's Rattle

Coming to a Democracy Near You

Another book recommendation from my shelf...

This is not just a lament for his own nation, America, this is a warning for all nations, all democracies that become "chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staples of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology."

Fair warning, Canada, we are not immune. The world is about to become one very large corporate state. Indeed, it already is...

More from Chris Hedges' brilliant, unflinching examination of a mass culture that has relinquished thoughtfulness and truth for illusion and entertainment:

The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace. They also serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and terrifying consequences.

As the pressure mounts, as this despair and impoverishment reach into larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state.

The more we sever ourselves from a literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence, the more we are destined to implode.

This book reveals just how deep the rot goes, and how, in a very real sense, we are currently living in a frightening global dystopia, the "brave new world" that early 20th century thinkers and writers presaged all those decades ago.

We, individual human beings as well as individual communities and nations, lose the power to control our destinies when we relinquish our birthright to think freely and to examine clearly, to analyze and to determine for ourselves what is right and wrong.

I am thinking now of Orwell, Huxley, and others. I was very young when I first began reading dystopian literature, but for the most part I've held onto a healthy trust in humanity and remained optimistic for our collective future, believing that those totalitarian scenarios could or would never come to pass, not after the lessons learned from the World Wars and the Holocaust.

How naive. Hedges' books articulate and document what has been systematically playing out over the course of the last few decades, revving into high gear in the 80s, when our leaders were pushing NAFTA and Free Trade - our power has been slyly wrested from us, and all the while we have allowed ourselves to be dazzled and entertained...