The Mortal Reader: Books that confront our political climate and how we got here
Given the political climate these days, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about how we’ve come to where we are and how we’re going to be able to get out of it. These two books have helped me understand both of those questions in a much deeper way, and I hope they can do the same for you.
“Our History is the Future” by Nick Estes
As climate chaos becomes more and more a part of our daily lives, we will be forced to examine our own destructive culture and explore outside of it to find ways to resist the ecological degradation of our homes. The most obvious place to look is in the indigenous-led movements that have been doing everything they can to challenge the extractive processes and mentalities that have created the problems we currently face, and this book is a perfect place to start. I think a lot of people (myself included) watched the Dakota Access Pipeline protests from afar without really understanding what they meant and the history that led to them, which is really the history of our country and continent in a nutshell. Estes is very thorough and detailed in his explanation of how the U.S. and Canadian governments ignored treaties with sovereign nations, intentionally destroyed land that was vital to the culture and survival of those nations and used state-sanctioned violence to enforce their occupation of unceded Native lands. Until we reckon with our past and present as a settler-colonial nation that ignores every rule of war and diplomacy in our desperate rush to extract as much value from the Earth as we can, our future will continue to look like our ugly past. Books like this will change that trajectory if we give them the attention they deserve.
“The Solutions Are Already Here” by Peter Gelderloos
The world feels like it’s getting closer to collapse by the day, and Gelderloos doesn’t hide from that. In fact, the first half of this book spends a lot of time documenting exactly how bad things are, from the global ecological collapse that we’re witnessing in real time to the widespread social repression that is both a cause and an effect of that collapse. Fortunately, as the title says, solutions to these problems already exist, and they are being put into action by communities all over the world. The second half feels like a salve after the depressing picture painted by the first, and by the end I actually felt more hopeful than I have in a long time. Gelderloos does a fantastic job of presenting the myriad acts of resistance that slow the ecocide of the planet, and discussing the people who are leading the charge to defend our home is both inspiring and healing. This book is a great reminder that we don’t have to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel, we just need to plug into and learn from the networks of organizations and communities that are already doing the work. Whether you’re an experienced organizer or just looking for some hope in these dark times, Gelderloos has provided a very helpful resource.