Tacoma Chapter
Our solution to climate change? Democracy.
Literature
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by Barry Lopez, 1986. Acclaimed National Book Award winner, now considered a classic of nature writing. "Leads readers on a journey of the mind and heart into a place that grips the imagination and invigorates the soul." I recently heard a webinar panelist declare that this book changed his career path from corporate law to environmental policy!
Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams, 2019. A beloved writer and environmentalist, "her fierce, spirited and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert" as she sees democracy, support for public lands, and the environment eroding. See her poem below, which accompanies The Council of Pronghorns in the installation section.
Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh, 2021. Combining action-adventure, Bengali folklore, climate change, refugees, and endangered species, written with the author's usual "exuberant style and extraordinary linguistic facility. This important novel is an account of our current world, the one few writers have had the courage to face."(Annie Proulx)
The Drowned World by JG Ballard, 1962. Prescient science fiction set in the year 2145, in which global warming has melted the polar ice caps and abandoned cities are overrun with Triassic-era jungles. "Both a thrilling adventure and haunting examination of the effects of environmental collapse on the human mind."
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, 2021. A novel set between 15th c. Constantinople, Idaho in 2020, and space some time in the future. He says “The world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, pandemics, disinformation. I wanted this novel to reflect those anxieties but also offer meaningful hope.” Now that I've had the pleasure of reading it, I want to emphasize my recommendation---read this book! It's a wonderful story by an amazing storyteller.
The Carbon Diaries: 2015, and Carbon Diaries: 2017 by Saci Lloyd, 2009 and 2010. Young adult novels.
Laura, a student in London, keeps a diary as the UK imposes carbon rationing after weather-related disasters. She attempts to stay grounded as the stresses of rationing and extreme weather tear at the social fabric of her world.
The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood, (Oryx and Crake 2003, The Year of the Flood, 2009, MaddAddam, 2013). (Being adapted into a TV series by HULU). A "bio punk" post-apocalyptic world that "shows us how a new world can come from something which seemed always destined to break." The conclusion points towards the ultimate endurance of community and love.
Overstory by Richard Powers, 2018. Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about humans and trees and their deep connections. Magnificent writing and powerful eco-advocacy.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020. An amazing “what-if” mapping out a possible (mostly) positive scenario for the next 50 years. Chock full of great solution ideas, could it be a blueprint for real-life world leaders today?
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, 1993. Considered one of the first climate novels, a forerunner in treating climate change and social inequality.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2019. (non-fiction) Essays intricately interweaving botany, personal experience, and indigenous wisdom. A truly outstanding book.
Poetry:
The Council of Pronghorns by Terry Tempest Williams, 2011
We, the Council
of Pronghorn
have convened
as witnesses
to this moment
in time
when our eyes
wish to peer
into the hearts
of humans
and ask
what kind
of world
are you creating
when we can
no longer
run as Windhorses
but are relegated
to watching
behind fences
dreaming, dreaming
of Spirit
Migrations?
An Earth Song by Langston Hughes, 1925
It's an earth song,—
And I've been waiting long for an earth song.
It's a spring song,—
And I've been waiting long for a spring song.
Strong as the shoots of a new plant
Strong as the bursting of new buds
Strong as the coming of the first child from its mother's womb.
It's an earth song,
A body song,
A spring song,
I have been waiting long for this spring song
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (after Wallace Stevens) by Craig Santos Perez, 2016 (poets.org)
I
Among starving polar bears,
The only moving thing
Was the edge of a glacier.
II
We are of one ecology
Like a planet
In which there are 200,000 glaciers.
III
The glacier absorbed greenhouse
gases.
We are a large part of the biosphere.
IV
Humans and animals
Are kin.
Humans and animals and glaciers
Are kin.
V
We do not know which to fear
more,
The terror of change
Or the terror of uncertainty,
The glacier calving
Or just after.
VI
Icebergs fill the vast ocean
With titanic wrecks.
The mass of the glacier
Disappears, to and fro.
The threat
Hidden in the crevasse
An unavoidable cause.
VII
Oh vulnerable humans,
Why do you engineer sea walls?
Do you not see how the glacier
Already floods the streets
Of the cities around you?
VIII
I know king tides,
And lurid, inescapable storms:
But I know, too,
That the glacier is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the glacial terminus broke,
It marked the beginning
Of one of many waves.
X
At the rumble of a glacier
Losing its equilibrium,
Every tourist in the new Arctic
Chased ice quickly.
XI
They explored the poles
For offshore drilling.
Once, we blocked them,
In that we understood
The risk of an oil spill
For a glacier.
XII
The sea is rising.
The glacier must be retreating.
XIII
It was summer all winter
It was melting
And it was going to melt
The glacier fits
In our warm-hands.
James Franco, I Was Born in Into a World, 2016
I was born into a world
Before recycling was a thing,
Before oil wars,
When the biggest world
Threat was nuclear.
The only extinct thing
Was the Dodo,
We consumed and junked.
Then we were told about
Droughts, and disappearing
Rainforests.
About melting ice caps,
And we fought Iraq
For a second time,
Like father like son,
We needed our oil
Because we didn’t want
Those electric cars.
At one time there were
Huge monsters that
Walked where we walk,
Nature swallowed them easy.
Or maybe you believe
It all started with Adam and Eve,
But they too were kicked
From the garden
As are we,
With our poison beaches
Run down towns
And our atmosphere
That kills.
I write a poem
And preach to the converted.
We send out loud messages
To ourselves,
That our world is dying:
1984, Blade Runner,
Armageddon, The Road.
I’ve yet to read a book,
Or watch a film about a future
I’d like to live in.
Fortunately for me,
I’ll die before the earth,
But I’d like a place for my
Computer chip self
To click and beep
In bright, clean happiness.
Maura Dooley, Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide, 2016
Thrift grows tenacious at the tide’s reach.
What is that reach when the water
is rising, rising?
Our melting, shifting, liquid world won’t wait
for manifesto or mandate, each
warning a reckoning.
Ice in our gin or vodka chirrups and squeaks
dissolving in the hot, still air
of talking, talking.
Matthew Olzmann, Letter to Someone Living 50 Years from Now, 2017
It begins with,
"Most likely, you think we hated the elephant,
the golden toad, the thylacine and all variations
of whale harpooned or hacked into extinction..."
Lynna Odel, November, 2020
It begins with,
"If I can't save us
then let me feel you
happy and safe
under my chin..."
Camille T Dungy, A Massive Dying Off, 2011
It begins with,
“When the fish began their dying you didn’t worry
you bought new shoes...”
For entire poem
Molly Fisk, Particulate Matter,2018 (about the CA wildfires)
It begins with,
“If all you counted were tires on the cars left in driveways and stranded beside the roads…”