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Earth Rights – Dr. Vandana Shiva

Indigenous Mind – Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees

CHAPTER SIX: Balanced Engagement

Wonder: A Practice for Everyday Life – Munju Ravindra

Embodying Change – Cheryl Pallant

The World Doesn’t Need to Be Saved – Byron Katie

What Keeps Me Alive: Making It Real – Chaia Heller

In the Climate Era the Personal Is Political – Tzeporah Berman

Coping with New Realities – Linda Buzzell

CHAPTER SEVEN: Meditations on Living in These Times

Eden Is a Conversation – Barry Lopez

Fostering Light in Dark Times – Vivienne Simon

From Mourning into Daybreak – Nina Simons

Waking Up from Despair – Opeyemi Parham

River Gods – Ken Lamberton

Questions for a Sacred Life – Bodhi Be

To Do the Will of God, Come What May – Alice Walker

CHAPTER EIGHT: Hope in Challenging Times

To Endure Climate Chaos, Live Dangerously and Cultivate Hope – Brian Tokar

Fighting Fatalism about War – John Horgan

Little by Little – Margaret Trost

The Grandmothers Speak – Ann Rosencranz and Jyoti

The Ultimate Miracle Worker – Jalaja Bonheim

The Challenge of Building Sustainably – Scott Rodwin

The Optimism of Uncertainty – Howard Zinn

AFTERWORD

Sabbaths: VI – Wendell Berry

Gratitude

About the Editor

Permissions and Copyrights

Introduction

MARTIN KEOGH

Sometimes bumping into a single piece of information can wake a person up to the plight of our world. This awareness came to me a few months after my son Dylan was born. In the warm comfort of our living room on a New England winter evening, I sat reading statistics on the decline of the world’s coral reefs. Glancing over at the face of my infant son as he slept in his mother’s arms, I imagined the world that he is to inherit. Those dying reefs suddenly did not feel far away—or so far in the future.

I was stunned to learn that, while estimates differ, in a few decades—or maybe even less time—the coral reefs could be virtually gone. Coral reefs are a life-support system not only for themselves and countless fish species, but also for the three hundred million people whose sustenance depends on the seafood harvested in these waters. We will not only have to cope with the loss of an entire habitat teeming with life—we will be staring right in the face of a global food-source collapse.

Events that many of us imagined would not threaten children until future generations are occurring even as we sit down to our dinner.

This recognition ushered in a series of sleepless nights. I lay awake as images crowded my mind: the seas filled with more specks of plastic than krill; axes and torches leaving stumps as they progressed through the Amazon rainforest, our “lungs of the earth”; and much closer to home, fewer and fewer songbirds on the branches of our own neighborhood trees. Grieving over all this loss, I wondered, If what is happening is so utterly different than anything we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, how do I live in the face of such loss?

My wakeful nights did not serve my family, or the world. My heart would pound so hard in my chest that my wife Liza would feel it through the mattress and then she too would lie awake.

In the midst of this despair, a friend emailed me “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water,

and I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting for their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I took the poem’s advice to heart. When I found myself awake, I would walk to the end of our street and continue into the woods. Sometimes the trail would be lit only by starlight. Feeling my body surrounded by so much life calmed my galloping heart.

One morning,