Read Active Hope How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy Joanna Macy Chris Johnstone 9781577319726 Books

Product details Paperback 288 pages Publisher New World Library; 58069th edition (March 13, 2012) Language English ISBN-10 1577319729

Active Hope How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy Joanna Macy Chris Johnstone 9781577319726 Books Reviews

• Ever since 1982, when I read Fate of the Earth by the fine writer, Jonathan Schell, who, I’m sorry to say, died this year, my awareness of mortality has been heightened – not my personal mortality but the possibility of the extinction of humanity itself. Schell was addressing the possibility of nuclear holocaust. Now we face more prominently our destruction of the planet’s systems that make human and most other life untenable. Macy and Johnstone talk of this as the Great Unraveling, the awareness of where Business As Usual is taking us. Their active hope is based in what they call the Great Turning. Here is the beginning of their poem about it.
  
  Active Hope is not wishful thinking.
  Active Hope is not waiting to be rescued
  by the Lone Ranger or by some savior.
  Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life
  on whose behalf we can act.
  
  Key is the acknowledgment that we don’t know how things will turn out. But we can make a choice about what we’d like to have happen and put ourselves fully behind that possibility. (Think Lord of the Rings.) They hold up three types of activism 1. holding actions (protecting what is left), 2. life-sustaining systems and practices (replacing the Business as Usual destruction), and 3. a shift in consciousness (that broadens our perspective to include connection to one another and the planet). This involves becoming clear what a good life is for you, what draws forth your deep aliveness. Then redefine success. Making a step in the direction you want to go is success. And make friends with uncertainty. We can never know the outcome. But one thing we are certain of. We will die. Let us die creating a possible wholesome future for all.
• How do we face the grim reality of the state of our world, with looming depletion of key resources, widespread ecological devastation, global climate change, and massive disparities in the distribution of wealth? How do we take on these problems without being overwhelmed by their sheer immensity? How do we marshal our energy, talents and skills for the betterment of our world knowing that we are not likely to succeed, and that it may, in fact, already be too late?
  
  These are the central questions that the book tries to answer.
  
  It is an unusual topic to grapple with. All the other books on the subject of environmental activism that I've read failed to mention it, instead devoting their time to facts and figures that left no doubt about the gravity of the situation, the ways of thinking that have brought us to the brink, and the changes that we'll have to make to dig ourselves out. This suggested an unspoken assumption that informing us about the crisis ought to be sufficient to prompt us to avert it.
  
  My experience has been quite different. Despite being exposed to the problem through various media, I took no interest in it until my late twenties. Once I did, I found it just as difficult to get the attention of others. Some didn't consider it relevant - they had more pressing personal issues to attend to and goals to pursue. To my surprise, there were others who also avoided the subject despite having a fairly good grasp of its magnitude and severity. They felt powerless to do anything about it, so they chose to make the most of the present circumstances and not dwell on tomorrow.
  
  When faced with the same dilemma, the authors of the book opted for a third course of action - to do what they can to bring about the Great Turning, no matter how seemingly insignificant their contribution may be. Depending on where one is in life, this can be a difficult decision to comprehend. While it looks self-evident to me now, I don't think I would have appreciated it when I was younger. It is for this reason that I'm exceedingly grateful to Joanna and Chris for tackling the subject. If the Great Turning is to happen, we will need many more people to take on the challenge of working towards it without expecting to see it realised in their lifetime.
  
  The authors don't spend much time dwelling on the particulars of the global crises that we face, supplying just enough information to set the book's main topic in context. Still, the information that is provided, and particularly the ways in which it is visualised, is among the most stirring that I've seen. I have found it very difficult to read about the dream of leaving a barren, hostile world to our children to inherit, and not be moved to preserve its current life-giving qualities.
  
  Perhaps the most importantly, the book does a great job of presenting alternatives to the dominant assumptions of the modern society. It illustrates how we commonly think of concepts like power and time, how these ingrained ideas have contributed to our predicament, and what alternative views can help us overcome it. Here, it is well complemented by John Broomfield's book Other Ways of Knowing Recharting Our Future with Ageless Wisdom, which contains a more comprehensive analysis of our unidirectional concept of time and its alternatives, as well as Jack Reed's book The Next Evolution A Blueprint for Transforming the Planet, which redefines wealth in terms of access to goods and services instead of exclusive consumption derived from their ownership. Noticing, let alone changing, the core assumptions that underpin one's worldview can be exceedingly difficult. This makes these insights all the more crucial.
  
  On a more personal note, the book is a rich treasure of thought-provoking questions and other material that can be invaluable in a workshop setting. This is hardly surprising, considering that it has originated from a series of workshops that were conducted by Joanna over many years. I have found it tremendously useful in my own course work, as well as for personal reflection.
• An alternative to apocalypticism and New Age positive thinking the "work that reconnects" developed by Joanna Macy and here repackaged as "active hope" is a crucial set of tools for developing the resilient communities we need to navigate the challenges of the twenty-first century. Traditional Western spiritual traditions still have valuable resources to be utilized, but have also become so enmeshed and tangled with "business as usual" that they are part of the problem as well as part of the solution. This set of practices is not a self-sufficient replacement for any of those ancestral resources and yet it gets to the core values in all of them by recognizing that the cycle of beginning in gratitude, honoring our pain, seeing with new eyes, and going forth in active hope creates an activist posture that is neither fatalistic nor naive. I hope and pray that this work (either through this book or through a local workshop) gains increasing familiarity and utilization. It is not just important. It is essential.