Sacred Headwaters: Holiday Book Recommendations
The newsletter is taking a quick break over the holidays but I thought I would share some of the more impactful books I've been reading lately.
I’m taking a short break for the holidays, but figured I’d share some of the books I’ve been reading lately as I know many folks have more time for reading this time of year than they typically do. Three out of five of the books I’m recommending are fiction; I think it has a powerful role to play in both understanding the dystopian reality of the near future and in imagining (and reifying) alternatives.
Feel free to comment with any recommendations of your own!
If you’re going to read one of these books, I’d strongly encourage you to borrow it from your local public library or buy it from an independent book store. I try not to buy things from that one particular company for any number of reasons, not least of which being their recent refusal to let workers leave a warehouse in the face of an approaching tornado that then killed (at least) six people.
If, for whatever reason, you are unable to get one of these books from a library and are unable to afford to buy a copy, please reach out, I may be able to help.
Unsettling Canada, Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson
If you live in what is known as Canada, this is an absolute must-read, but I think it’s worthwhile even if you don’t live in Canada or another settler colonial nation state. It is essentially Manuel’s memoir, but he played such an integral role in Indigenous resistance and anti-colonial activism in Canada that his memoir is as much a story of a social movement as it is of his own life. It includes really detailed histories of Indigenous organizing in Canada, political victories and losses, and more, and describes a variety of conflicts and developments that are not recounted in many other places. Manuel also paints a picture of continuity in the Canadian government that’s often obscured: Canada has been governed by a Trudeau (first Pierre, now Justin) or a close confidant of a Trudeau for a significant majority of the last 50 years, and throughout that time, at least according to Manuel, their policy towards Indigenous peoples has been one of extinguishment, first laid out in Pierre Trudeau’s 1969 White Paper.
This book offers a lot outside of Canada as well, both in its anti-colonial advocacy and in its nature as an on-the-ground outline of how social movements work. In How Change Happens, Duncan Green lays out, in a more theoretical frame, the various leverage points movements can press on to achieve change across all scales. Manuel’s book is the story of how a particular movement – that of Indigenous peoples in Canada – actualized that strategy through legal battles, insider political advocacy, and mass mobilization and protest. Obviously, their fight is far from over, and the struggle of Indigenous peoples is integrally tied to the fights against climate change and ecological devastation. This book is informative and inspiring and can serve as a guide for social movements of all kinds, as well as help those of us in the climate movement learn to understand how we can work with and support Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world against the colonial states that are facilitating climate catastrophe.
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Silent Spring (published in 1962) is widely credited with launching a social movement that led to a ban on DDT and substantive restrictions on other synthetic pesticides and herbicides. There are a few strands that make this book particularly powerful today: first, the universal spread of synthetic compounds, something Carson warned about, is virtually complete. While we may have limited the use of some toxic chemicals, there are human-produced chemicals everywhere; microplastics, PFAS, and other compounds are consistently found in the world’s most remote places – and of course, in human embryos. The impacts of the spread of anthropogenic compounds throughout Earth continue to be understudied and, despite Carson’s best efforts, largely hidden from the public eye.
Second, while Carson doesn’t delve into the political economy driving pesticide use explicitly, she does hint at it, as do many of the scholars she cites. There are a number of informative parallels with climate, both on the problem side (fossil fuel production and use) and on the solution side. She portrays the widespread adoption of synthetic chemical use, in many cases, as a complicated, expensive solution either to problems that didn’t exist or to problems that could be solved much more easily through working “with nature” rather than against it. The mechanisms by which chemical manufacturers convinced the public and the government to embark on these campaigns of mass death are nearly identical to those used by the fossil fuel industry to grow, and now to perpetuate, their business model. It speaks to something I wrote about in a recent issue: the most successful business model in capitalism has proven itself to be creating demand through manipulation and/or government procurement, not fulfilling some innate demand inherent to the broader public.
This book is a classic environmental read and remains highly relevant today even if many of the specific compounds Carson writes about are no longer in frequent use.
The Overstory, Richard Powers
This book is particularly timely in BC, where I live, as forestry protests and old growth logging have been one of the most prominent stories for nearly two years. But it’s much more than a novel about forestry protests: it communicates an ecological consciousness more effectively than any fiction I’ve read, and plausibly more than any other writing of any kind or art that I’ve encountered. Similarly to Braiding Sweetgrass, this book challenges the Eurocentric worldview that most of us have been born into and, through storytelling, helps us transcend the timescales we typically think in. At the same time as beautifully communicating the meaning inherent in the life of the more-than-human world, Powers explores human direct action as a vehicle for social and ecological change. To top it all off, it’s a really engaging read; one of my favourite books I’ve read in a long time. If you weren’t considering joining a forest blockade or engaging in some sort of civil disobedience before reading this book, you likely will be afterwards, and I can only hope that, as a popular book, it is contributing to a broader shift in the way we in the West associate ourselves with nature.
Powers just published a new book, Bewilderment, that uses the perspective of a young boy with autism to challenge us to feel more empathy with the more-than-human world. This book is much shorter and is well worth reading as well.
Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
Ministry for the Future is Robinson’s attempt to paint a plausible picture of the near future: ~2025-2080. I found the first half – the depiction of the onset of global climate chaos – really powerful. It’s well-informed from a scientific perspective and illustrates how parts of the world can experience unimaginable crisis while others (in this case, his characters in Switzerland) continue with what would seem to be relatively normal lives. An increasing number of people in climate circles, myself included, talk about “collapse” – the idea that our social systems are too brittle to last through what are now essentially baked in climatic changes – but to use that term realistically, one has to recognize that “collapse” will be experienced differently throughout the world and over potentially rather long timescales. Robinson does a great job depicting what “collapse” looks like as the world goes through climatic disasters of unprecedented scale. I won’t spoil the story, but I felt that it left the realm of plausibility towards the end of the book because of a sort of technocratic deus ex machina driven by the core institutions of liberal capitalism.
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
It might be a bit of a cliche to recommend this book (and its sequel, Parable of the Talents), but I think, especially for US readers, it’s a salient depiction of some of the same themes as Robinson’s book. Butler doesn’t focus much on the cause of “collapse,” but rather on the surreal reality of living in a half-collapsed United States as the government continues to putter along (led by a right-wing demagogue) while daily reality for Butler’s characters falls further and further apart. In that, it has similarities to Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, where the US federal government continues operating as though nothing is wrong while states go to war over water in the Colorado River basin. A few key themes (or warnings) stuck out for me and were particularly prescient given that Butler wrote this in the early 1990s. First, of course, is the scary reality of right-wing propaganda and violence – and how that can be amplified by the climate crisis. Second is the equally scary spectre of “company towns” and indentured servitude, also – in Butler’s vision – accelerated and facilitated by the increasing danger of a “collapsing” public sphere.
Comment below with what you’ve been reading!
Happy holidays, etc.
May 2022 be the loudest year yet for you and yours.