The Memory We Could Be: Overcoming Fear to Create Our Ecological Future - Softcover

Macmillen Voskoboynik, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865718997 ISBN 13: 9780865718999

Publisher: New Society Publishers, 2018

Synopsis

Heal the great separation between humans and nature, and help create a future worth remembering.

The Memory We Could Be moves beyond the sterile, technical language around climate change and ecology to humanize the abstraction of global warming and bring different voices into the conversation.

Drawing on sources from anthropology to hydrology, botany to economics, agronomy to astrobiology, medicine to oceanography, physics to history, the author weaves a lyrical and powerful story of our relationship with nature.

The book has three parts:

"Past" addresses memory. Our inability to comprehend our staggering present partly lies in our ignorance of our staggering past. We peer into the black box of history to understand how we got here. We go on a journey across the roots of our ecological crisis, from the Roman Empire to the forests of Burma, from Congolese rubber plantations, to Colombian oil fields.

"Present" illustrates how climate change is shaping our world today, explores how it relates to poverties and inequalities, and equips readers with a set of intuitive instruments to understand climate impacts.

"Future" looks at alternatives and strives to illustrate in human terms the world we could lose and the world we can win. It asks what we can do and develops a transformative vision of a more ecological and equitable economy.

The Memory We Could Be is vital reading for all of humanity.

About this title

Book Description

Heal the great separation between humans and nature, and help create a future worth remembering

From the Back Cover

Heal the great separation between humans and nature, and help create a future worth remembering

"Will we head down a path of continued environmental degradation rendering the planet unlivable for future generations, or will we act in time to avert catastrophic climate change and environmental ruin?"
― Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor, Penn State University and co-author, The Madhouse Effect

"Macmillen Voskoboynik is a hopeful realist―exactly the sort of storyteller and analyst we need at this fraught moment."
― Richard Heinberg, author, The End of Growth

UNSTOPPABLE climate change. Species extinction. The breakdown of ecosystems. Resource wars and mass displacements. Societal collapse. The common projections for our future feel too catastrophic to be plausible, too distant to be true, too complex to address.

But ecology is the study of the complex connections that sustain life. By taking an ecological view, The Memory We Could Be links history with biology, economics with physics, to join the dots between our overlapping crises. It shows how our multiple, seemingly intractable problems, be they ecosystem collapse, damaged health, racial oppression, or gender injustice, have common roots but also common solutions. Unpacking our past gives us the tools now, in the present, to build a more just future, where competition and control give way for cooperation and care.

Avoiding the sterile language that so often surrounds climate change, The Memory We Could Be seeks to inspire, illustrating in human terms the world we could lose and the world we can still win. This is vital reading for coming to grips with complexity and healing our separation from nature and each other.

"An exhilarating introduction to our ecological crisis, what caused it, and how we can imagine a better future." ― Jason Hickel, author, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

DANIEL MACMILLEN VOSKOBOYNIK is a journalist, educator, and activist with writing in Pacific Standard, Open Democracy, and New Internationalist.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0865718997
• ISBN 13: 9780865718999
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336