Title : Earth Calling:
A Climate Change Handbook for the 21st Century
Author : Ellen Gunter and Ted Carter
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Pages : 401
Price : $19.95
To little fanfare, in the waning days of Summer, another dispatch from the climate change front is released, with the publication of 'Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21st Century'. The book is a primer in both despair and hope.
Much of what the authors recount is not new, but the impact comes in gathering so much of what is now known in one volume. What is novel amidst the barrage of bad news is that Gunter and Carter ground their call to action in a spiritual framework that requires a shift in personal focus.
The authors employ the Hindu teachings on chakras, the subtle body energy fields that conduct the life force in humans. Classically, there are thought to be seven chakras, starting with the base chakra at the tip of the spine and moving upward to include the heart and the crown chakras.
The root cause of our growing environmental and climate change crisis, the authors assert, arises from the fact that we are no longer firmly rooted at our base to the earth. Therefore, our heart and crown energies likewise are no longer strongly rooted to the earth.
We have become estranged from and varyingly indifferent to that which has quintessentially sustained us from the beginning of time. What drives this rupture is “the unconsciousness of our intentions and willfulness of our ignorance.”
One of the most distressing sections deals with the growing water crisis, of rising oceans and diminishing potable water. Egypt’s Nile, the Indus in Pakistan and the Ganges in India regularly recede to almost disappearing. China’s 2,500-mile Yellow River commonly fails to reach the sea.
Contents of the book:
Chapter 1 examines the threats to the planet's health through the lens of the human energy system known as the chakras, describing how the broken first chakra relates to our disconnection from our biosphere.
Chapter 2 shows how our current environmental crises--global warming, climate change, dwindling water resources, natural disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes--represent severe manifestations of our disconnection from the earth.
Chapter 3 describes how the preponderance of oil in our culture--especially agribusiness--compounds this disconnection, from our dependence on other countries for our energy, to current issues of oil depletion, peak oil, and fracking, to the dumbing down of our agricultural polyculture.
Chapter 4 explains how the most basic building blocks of our nourishment--seeds--are being compromised with a loss of biodiversity and rise of GMOs, and how that adversely affects the farmers whose sacred connection to the land has in many cases been severed.
Chapter 5 describes the ways in which we as individuals can begin to wake up to climate activism as a spiritual practice. This chapter includes specific activities that you can use to implement change and heal your own connection to the earth.
Chapter 6 brings to life Goethe’s wisdom: “Knowing isn’t enough; neither is being willing. We must do,” by providing strategies and resources for exploring how each of us can find our own Earth Calling, then anchoring that calling with the only force that ignites change: Action.
Review Courtesy: http://www.pressherald.com
http://www.dailyom.com
No comments:
Post a Comment