This Is The Best Book I’ve Ever Read On Climate Change & Hope
Leadership cultivating hope facing the climate crisis
“E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G—is connected. The soil needs rain, organic matter, air, worms and life in order to do what it needs to do to give and receive life. Each element is an essential component. “Organizing takes humility and selflessness and patience and rhythm while our ultimate goal of liberation will take many expert components. Some of us build and fight for land, healthy bodies, healthy relationships, clean air, water, homes, safety, dignity, and humanizing education. Others of us fight for food and political prisoners and abolition and environmental justice. Our work is intersectional and multifaceted. Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast. And more than anything, that we need each other—at our highest natural glory—in order to get free.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
This Is The Best Book I’ve Ever Read On Climate Change & Hope
There are a lot of books about facing the climate crisis.
And I've read too many of them.
But the best book on cultivating hope facing the climate crisis I've found is Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown.
For a few reasons:
Giving: Generous wisdom, frameworks, and principles for facilitating social change for social justice in our climate era.
Prose: Stunning. Lyrical. Pacing pulls you through. adrienne reading the audiobook is delightful.
Inspired: Visioning futures interconnected in resilient biomimicry. And building on the brilliance of Octavia E. Butler.
Change: Agency-empowering, shifting my perspective on shaping the future with active hope.
Love: "It is possible that this whole book is about love."
If you're at all interested in cultivating hope facing the climate crisis, I can't recommend this book enough.
(And if you've read it, do you agree? What other book would you recommend for beginners?)
“Do you already know that your existence--who and how you are--is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you? Not after or because you do some particular thing, but simply the miracle of your life. And that the people around you, and the place(s), have contributions as well? Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in?
Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
“Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow. P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations: that the broken heart can cover more territory. that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands. that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life. that grief is gratitude. that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community. that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction. that death might be the only freedom. that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time. that your body will feel only as much as it is able to. that the ones you grieve may be grieving you. that the sacred comes from the limitations. that you are excellent at loving.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
“Matter doesn't disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
“I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Originally Posted on Typshare: https://typeshare.co/adampowers/posts/this-is-the-best-book-ive-ever-read-on-climate-change--hope-cbrm
“We are in an imagination battle.
Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, radicalized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.
Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else's capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone' else's imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds