Every year I give my family books. The idea originally was to sustain the independent bookstore. But their reading interests vary wildly from women writers of the early and mid-twentieth century to Chicago Blues, to books about the climate crisis and books to help us forget the climate crisis. So I am ordering more and more on Amazon for used or hard to find books and feeling rather shameless about it. The salesperson at my Indie bookstore was positively relieved when I offered not to help them stay in business by insisting they find and order the above array in time for Christmas.
One of the books I’m giving is Paul Hawken’s Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Many, if not most of us, careen between denial on the one hand and despair on the other, the Scylla and Charybdis of the climate crisis. And yet, as the Buddha said, there is a middle way. The meditation version is our tendency to suppression of feelings on the one hand and to dramatic and reactive expression on the other. Denial and despair.
As Carl Safina writes in a section of Regeneration called “Wild Things,” “A United Nations panel last year released a report roughly summarizing…that a million species face extinction in this century. A million deaths, Stalin reputedly said, is just statistics. Even Mother Teresa said, ‘If I look at the mass I will never act.’ This emotional overwhelm, this paralyzing tsunami to the soul, has been termed, ‘Psychic numbing.” Mother Teresa had added, though, ‘If I look at the one, I will.’”
Paul Farmer of Partners in Health said the same thing, help the one in front of you, the one who touches you and arouses your compassion in this moment.
Safina continues later, “It would help all of us, and the cause of the world’s species, if we think more granularly; speak more specifically; focus on what can be meaningful, and stay observant of the many beauties remaining. Beauty is the single criterion that best captures all our deepest concerns and highest hopes. Beauty encompasses the continued existence of free-living things, adaptation, and human dignity. Really, beauty is simple litmus for the presence of things that matter. …As we make our habitual appeals to practicality, the argument we cannot afford to ignore, the one that must frequently be on our lips is this: We live in a sacred miracle. We should act accordingly.”