Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [4]
Walking into the kitchen, I would find them with their friends, assembled around the refrigerator, munching on an after-school snack and peering at the sheet we’d put up to show how actions such as installing energy-efficient appliances, taking shorter showers, and buying a hybrid car had considerably reduced our resource consumption. Water and heating oil: down by 35 percent. Gasoline: cut by 80 percent. My airplane business travel: down 50 percent. What surprised our boys was how little noticeable sacrifice had to be made to produce these savings (though they did miss our old minivan).
However, when we suggested that they join a sustainability group at school, Wyatt dismissed the idea: “Nope, only the hippies do that.” But when our family bought a share in a local CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) farm and began to receive a box each week that spilled over with organic produce, the boys held their noses and tried some vegetables they had never set eyes on before. Some lived up to their expectations and others they found surprisingly tasty, especially when cooked in the solar oven.
No one really knows whether this one teenager’s comment after watching An Inconvenient Truth is accurate. The truth is, we might have arrived at the tipping point. What the contributors in this book reveal, however, is that if enough of us lean together in the right direction, our trajectory can change; we do have the ability to alter the course of events. We have to make this effort—because the alternative is unthinkable.
The only way we are going to make it is if everyone contributes to the many remedies needed. And the good news is that the world has never given us such a vital opportunity both to find our contribution and to offer it.
Restoring Our Place in the Natural World
We need only turn on the evening news to hear the litany of what is wrong around us. In these essays and meditations, you will not find a catalog of despair. This book is an invitation to move beyond merely coping into actively engaging.
When I sent out the initial requests for writings, I did not know what form the book would take. I didn’t know that it would become an invitation, a challenge, a spur, for each reader—for you—to find his or her own particular ways to contribute. The authors describe myriad approaches to finding the drive and passion and will to stand up for our world. Through their eyes, we discover that our solutions are as multi-faceted as our problems, making room for each of us to weigh in with our own style. Your approach may be through science, advocating for legislation, chaining yourself to a tree, or simply starting conversations. You might have a skill that can support the good work of others. Most likely, your part will include simply lowering your own consumption of our earth’s resources.
Ideally you will hear more than a few voices within these pages that speak directly to you. I invite you to seek them out.
Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen show simple ways to make a difference, literally in your own backyard. Ann Rosencranz and Jyoti connect us to an indigenous wisdom with our feet in the natural world. Several authors, including Diane Ackerman and Alice Walker, demonstrate that gratitude can lead to forms of activism. Frances Moore Lappé, John Horgan, and Margaret Trost reveal how your actions indeed send out ripples that have influence. And Derrick Jensen lets us know, in no uncertain terms, why there is no time to wait.
Not everybody here agrees with each other, nor should they. But their generosity is born of a passion to see all of us meet the challenge—together. Some have been laboring for decades, trying to wake people up to the reality of what we are doing to our