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ISBN: 9780865718999

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The Memory We Could Be

Overcoming Fear to Create Our Ecological Future

Heal the great separation between humans and nature, and help create a future worth remembering. The Memory We Could Be moves beyond the sterile, technical language around climate change and ecology to humanize the abstraction of global warming and bring different voices into the conversation. Drawing on sources from anthropology to hydrology, botany to economics, agronomy to astrobiology, medicine to oceanography, physics to history, the author weaves a lyrical and powerful story of our relationship with nature. The book has three parts: “Past” addresses memory. Our inability to comprehend our staggering present partly lies in our ignorance of our staggering past. We peer into the black box of history to understand how we got here. We go on a journey across the roots of our ecological crisis, from the Roman Empire to the forests of Burma, from Congolese rubber plantations, to Colombian oil fields. “Present” illustrates how climate change is shaping our world today, explores how it relates to poverties and inequalities, and equips readers with a set of intuitive instruments to understand climate impacts. “Future” looks at alternatives and strives to illustrate in human terms the world we could lose and the world we can win. It asks what we can do and develops a transformative vision of a more ecological and equitable economy. The Memory We Could Be is vital reading for all of humanity.

Contributors

Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik

Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik is a journalist and activist with writing in Pacific Standard, Open Democracy, and New Internationalist. He co-founded and is co-editor of www.worldat1C.org, a communications initiative designed to humanize the ecological crisis and clarify its causes.

Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

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Looking ahead, one thing is clear: the path we are on is coming to an end. Projections of the coming decades — whether they focus on food supplies, conflicts or weather patterns — … 2 $0.20

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The fight to tackle climate change is a fight to determine the fatality of the future. A fight over the vindication of life. It will require much of us: to unlearn our despair and learn our … 13 $1.30

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No matter where we may be, we are inseparable from nature. We live in nature, we live with nature, we rely on nature, and we are part of nature. Yet our language hides this. When we use words … 13 $1.30

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To understand how we find ourselves in such a situation of ecological precarity requires delving into the past. But our intents are fraught from the start. Any attempt to retell human history is … 8 $0.80

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Colonialism was, and remains, a wholesale destruction of memory. Lands, the sources of identity, stolen. Languages, ripped from mouths. The collective loss to humanity was incalculable, as … 36 $3.60

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Decades of carbon capitalism have woven fossil fuels into the fabric of our world. Cultures have been shaped by their influence. Cars have dominated our streets and cities as well as our minds, … 17 $1.70

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The story of climate change is one of the rise to dominance of a particular human relationship with nature, defined by callousness. Today we are blinded by that relationship, locked in its logic … 37 $3.70

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Humans have caused enough upheaval to heat the entire world — its seas and its skies — by over an entire degree Celsius. Just that one degree of temperature has been enough to trigger … 13 $1.30

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Beyond the rich debates surrounding complexity in climate science, when it comes to emissions, there are five major discussions: where, who, what, when and how? Where are emissions coming from? … 21 $2.10

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One of the major obstacles to ecological realism lies in the strength of orthodox visions of the economy, entirely segregated from issues of ecology. These framings offer us simplistic diagnoses … 13 $1.30

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Climate violence is always the result of a collision between acute weather conditions and acute social realities. Poverty, inequality, state neglect, improper planning and abandonment lay the … 21 $2.10

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Climate change represents the extinction of predictability, a demolition of certainties. By the end of the 21st century, the environmental conditions on up to a third of the Earth’s surface … 24 $2.40

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From a climatic perspective, our transformation requires two axes: a massive reduction of emissions and a massive reduction of injustice. We must diminish vulnerabilities, reduce the drivers of … 23 $2.30

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What follows is not an exact formula or a plotted route to climate safety. It is a brief map of 12 terrains of possibility, which may represent existing and potential pathways for a transition. 46 $4.60

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Many of us stumble at the very first question: what can I do? But our failure to find a straightforward answer lies partly in our misdirected question: there isn’t much that individuals … 13 $1.30

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We have become accustomed to too much: to a violently unequal world, to the systematic degradation of ecosystems and the constant theft of our future. Without the challenge of change, the … 8 $0.80