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On Fire for a Green New Deal ON FIRE The Burning Case for a Green New Deal
New in Paperback
by Naomi Klein
$22.00, paper. Penguin. 320 pages
On Fire is a critical book: it captures the burning urgency of this moment, the fiery energy of a rising movement demanding change now. For more than a decade, Naomi Klein has tracked the evolution of the environmental crisis and the staggeringly high stakes of what we choose to do next. From the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of our Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented “ecological conversion,” Klein delves into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now” to how white supremacy and fortressed borders are a form of climate barbarism. She paints a clear picture of interconnected social and ecological breakdowns, and explains that climate change is not only a profound political and economic challenge but a spiritual and imaginative one, too. Collected here for the first time, these prescient dispatches give us an invaluable window into the question—How THE GREEN NEW DEAL Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin
$24.50, paper. Picador. 290 pages
A new vision for the future is quickly gaining momentum. Facing a global emergency, a younger generation is spearheading a huge conversation around a Green New Deal and setting the agenda for bold political movement. Millennials, the largest voting bloc, are now leading on the issue of climate change. While the Green New Deal has become a lightning rod in the political sphere, there is a parallel movement emerging within business that will shake the very foundation of the global economy in coming years. Key sectors of the economy are fast-decoupling from fossil fuels in favor of ever cheaper solar and wind energies and the new business opportunities that accompany them. New studies are sounding the alarm that trillions of dollars in stranded fossil fuel assets could create a carbon bubble likely to burst by 2028, causing the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization. The marketplace is
the endurance of indigenous knowledge. The Reindeer Chronicles demonstrates how solutions to seemingly intractable problems can come from the unlikeliest of places, and how the restoration of local water, carbon, nutrient, and energy cycles can play a dramatic role in stabilizing the global climate. Ultimately, it reveals how much is in our hands if we can find a way to work together and follow natures lead. “If you want practical hope, this is it. If you want a place to dig in and make change, regeneration is the key. These are stories of people who work both intimately and at scale—and with love—to restore life to the land we all walk on, our beautiful home, the earth.” —Vicki Robin, coauthor of Your Money or Your Life “These are times that call for us to reimagine everything. That imaginative capacity depends on the stories, the possibilities, the experiences we have in our memory and our ability to reassemble them in new and unique ways. If you want to be part of that reimagining, you need the beautiful, patient, humbling stories in these pages. Their implications are staggering, and also suggest that sometimes we
on earth did we get here? In this era of rising seas and rising hate, Klein also makes the case for the Green New Deal: a practical framework that offers us a politically viable, just, sustainable path forward for tackling climate collapse and growing economic inequality at the same time. Above all, Klein underscores how we can still rise to the existential challenge of the crisis if we are willing to transform our systems that are producing it, making clear how the battle for a greener world is indistinguishable from the fight for our lives. “Once you have done your homework,” Greta Thunberg says, “you realize that we need new politics. We need a new economics, where everything is based on our rapidly declining and extremely limited carbon budget. But that is not enough. We need a whole new way of thinking… We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way.” “Naomi Klein is the intellectual godmother of the Green New Deal—which just happens to be the most important idea in the world right now.” —Bill McKibben, author of Falter speaking, and governments will need to adapt if they are to survive and prosper. In The Green New Deal, renowned economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin delivers the political narrative and economic plan for the Green New Deal that we need at this critical moment in history. The concurrence of a stranded fossil fuel assets bubble and a green political vision opens up the possibility of a massive shift to a post-carbon ecological era, in time to prevent a temperature rise that will tip us over the edge into runaway climate change. With twenty-five years of experience implementing Green New Deal-style transitions for both the European Union and the Peoples Republic of China, Rifkin offers his vision for how to transform the global economy and save life on Earth. “In The Green New Deal, Jeremy Rifkin presents a survival imperative for the millions without work and for a planet that needs healing. In this timely book, he defines the urgent steps that will need to be taken to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and reclaim public infrastructure.” - Dr. Vandana Shiva, feminist, ecologist, and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award
save the world by doing less rather than more. Do your imagination, your activism, your sense of what’s possible a favor, and swim in this book.”—Rob Hopkins, author of From What Is to What If
BRANCHES OF LIGHT
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Eco-Philosophy, Deep Ecology EROSION Essays of Undoing
by Terry Tempest Williams
$24.50, paper. Picador. 368 pages
Here be fierce, timely, and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist. Terry Tempest Williams is one of our most impassioned defenders of public lands. A naturalist, fervent activist, and stirring writer, she has spoken to us and for us in books like Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming. She looks at the current state of American politics: the dire social and environmental implications of recent choices to gut Bears Ears National Monument, sacred lands to Native People of the American Southwest, and undermine the Endangered Species Act. She testifies that climate change is not an abstraction, citing the drought outside her door and at times, within herself. Images of extraction and contamination haunt her: oil rigs lighting up the horizon; trucks hauling nuclear waste on dirt roads now crisscrossing the desert like an exposed nervous system. But beautiful moments of relief and refuge, solace and spirituality come in her conversations with Navajo elders, art, and, always, in the land itself. She asks, urgently: “Is Earth not enough? Can the desert be a prayer?”
Early in our evolution, we discovered as Homo Sapiens through need and necessity that our imaginations can summon power. Fire became a dream ignited that enabled us to feed ourselves and gather round to share stories. Stories are power. Power resides in community. When power is denied and oppresses others, we can resist, and when we resist together, something else can occur, something new emerges. This is the essence of erosion and evolution in human time. In geologic time, transformation can be slow and corrosive, or catastrophic and quick. It may be a cataclysmic moment or it may happen incrementally over time. Deep change requires both. And it is not without its ruptures. It can be associated with devastation or determination. It can also be beautiful. Weathering agents are among us. This is a time of exposure… “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people,” David Orr writes. “But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healer, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.” What are the qualities most needed in this epoch of the Anthropocene? One of the qualities we might seek to cultivate is our capacity to listen… Can you hear the trees speaking? Are we listening? This is the Liturgy of Home. There is only one moment in time When it is essential to awaken That moment is now. —Buddha This does not require belief, it requires engagement. How serious are we? —from Erosion by Terry Tempest Williams
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