There is no doubt the American people made the difference in the House's narrow passage of the climate change/energy Waxman-Markey bill Friday. During the past year the amount of individual activism on climate change issues has risen dramatically - whether through political activities, personal lifestyle changes or writing.
DailyKos, other blogs and Twitter have provided a significant forum for writing and community interaction on this topic, but there is a noteworthy addition that I think the DailyKos community would be interested in. (I posted about this last week and a lot of people recommended I re-post with much more information. Your comments are appreciated.)
Last week a new interactive book anthology was published by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Penguin Classics. Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming is unlike any publishing project I have seen because it is literally a book built from submissions from Americans of all walks of life.
The book, available for free in a beautiful online format (this is well worth visiting and exploring) and very, very soon (just days away) in eBook format so you can take it with you. Amazingly that will also be free. (In case you're wondering a hardcover copy will be available for purchase.)
And in the first few days since going live thousands and thousands of people have visited Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming online and read the book.
The Thoreau's Legacy book reflects a new generation of writers and photographers who share their personal connection to global warming.
Last year UCS and Penguin Classics sought submissions from Americans across the nation. The writers, with inspiration from Henry David Thoreau and top environmental authors, were given the opportunity to be published in the special anthology. Sixty-seven essays and photographs were included in the book, chosen from about 1000 submissions.
Grist and Treehugger (a Discovery site) and The Oregonian had posts on the book recently.
In their book intro, Elda Rotor the editorial director at Penguin Classics and Kevin Knobloch UCS president write:
There may be no better current example of Thoreau's legacy than Barbara Kingsolver. Every sentence she writes crackles with energy, and her foreword to this collection is a powerful call to actively combat climate change. Indeed, the science shows that we need to act now if we are to have any hope of stopping the worst consequences of global warming. Our organizations are proud to bring you this exceptional group of thoughtful and inspiring personal stories about global warming. The authors follow in the long tradition of American environmental writers who have broadened our awareness and sharpened our perspective about the world we share. They are Thoreau's legacy.
In award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver's foreword (a lot of people are blogging about it specifically) to Thoreau's Legacy, which she titled "Day Seventy-nine", she writes:
We find ourselves in a chapter of history I would entitle "Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside." We're ravaged by disagreements, bizarrely globalized, with the extravagant excesses of one culture washing up as famine or flood on the shores of another. Even the architecture of our planet—climate, oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs—is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, We need to think about that. Ten years later, the world's nations wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The United States said, We still need to think about it. Now we watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient order. A few degrees look so small on the thermometer. We are so good at measuring things and declaring them under control. How could our weather turn murderous, pummel our coasts, push new diseases like dengue fever onto our doorstep? It's an emergency on a scale we've never known, and we've responded by following the rules we know: efficiency, isolation. We can't slow productivity and consumption—that's unthinkable. Can't we just go home and put a really big lock on the door? Read Barbara Kingsolver's entire foreward here: http://www.ucsusa.org/... (just click the orange box that says "Read Thoreau's Legacy").
What is it that is getting people excited about this interactive book? The fact that it's free is notable if not unprecedented, but not the essence of the response. Rather it may be the way 67 Americans from 32 states pour their personal stories - about places and scenes they have been to and see both near and far - and how the essays and pictures flow together in a way that tug at us and reawaken our own concerns about our environment and the planet.
Here are some excerpts:
Growing up in south Georgia, I never heard of tornadoes in spring. They came in summer and fall. Scientists say that warmer temperatures will favor the severe thunderstorms that give birth to tornadoes, and it's possible that the tornado season could shift to what used to be the colder months. This looks like the climate crisis to me.
- Janisse Ray, "Rural Southern Georgia" Chapter I
Anything and everything that threatens my autumn and winter glory and frolic would be bad, unnatural, and unwanted. I have read about global warming and its impending effects, and I confess that I don't care if the "demon" behind it is fossil fuel, some screwy temperature cycle, giggling aliens with giant mirrors in space, or even that slightly off guy down the street who gives me odd looks when I walk around the block with my old camera to take black-and-white pictures for my Photography 1 course. I just want whatever or whoever is causing global warming to shove off, and I'm willing to make some sacrifices to help that process. I love my New England seasons with all my heart, and the idea of one long summer or one long winter—whatever it is the scientists have lately been predicting—is enough to make me scream in anger and pain.
- Diego Paris, "God's Glorious Gifts" Chapter I
Each summer, in a ritual as sacred as fireworks on the Fourth of July, my dad, along with all the other dads in the neighborhood, would order a load of soil. A big truck would dump what to a kid in New Orleans seemed like a mountain of dirt—five feet high—onto the front lawn. Armed with a wheelbarrow and shovel, we would use that mountain to fill in the areas around the house that had sunk over the previous year. Southern Louisiana is the nation's canary in a coal mine. As Louisiana goes, so goes the country. Seventy-five percent of the nation's population lives in coastal zones. The question is, do we have enough shovels?
- Bronwyn Mitchell, "I Was Born on Shaky Ground" Chapter III
The rapidly warming climate is putting stress on our fish, animals, plants, and berries, and these resources are all diminishing. As we lose our healthy food supply, we have nowhere to go to sustain ourselves. But we now see in our young people a determination to honor our traditional cultural and spiritual ways of life and to stay connected to the land. As elders, we are trying to carry ourselves in such a manner that the young people of the next generation will live with respect for this place.
- Moses Squeochs, "View from the Yakama Nation" Chapter VI
The words and pictures are largely inspiring and thought-provoking. But what should we do with these thoughts? This book is telling us to take action - whether by joining a movement to build a new wave of environmental writing (or simply inspire us to read the great environmental classics), or by becoming active in community and government efforts to address global warming.
The timing is quite remarkable and perhaps the fact Thoreau's Legacy was published the same week the House passed important climate change legislation had the effect of actually helping this book reach more people and inspire greater action. Now the action in Congress moves to the Senate and hopeful the debate there will give this book an opportunity to get more people talking, writing and taking action for our future.