A review by erintby
Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy by Joanna Macy, Chris Johnstone

4.0

This book is a very helpful, practical guide to maintaining healthy and functioning headspace in the midst of full awareness of the awful extent of the climate crisis. It includes meditations, self-reflection questions, and stories from the authors' lives. I was especially intrigued by the section on time. In the current era, we have become so focused on the minuscule increments of time that we seem to have lost the ability to look at timespan in the long term. When as a society we do try to take a "long term" approach, it usually includes a couple of decades at the most. We've neglected the perspective consistent with the Iroquois' Seventh Generation Principle (how will the actions we take today affect the world seven generations from now?). In contrast, oil companies willfully neglect needed repairs to prevent a catastrophe only a couple of years in the future just to prioritize quarterly profits today. While it was a small portion of the overall book, I found the authors' reflections of the implications of our abridged perspective on time and the necessity for an expansive perspective to be very compelling.