I had simply been too nice, for too long, as this is Minnesota.  So I read the Patrick Melrose Novels, by Edward St. Aubyn, practically weeping with relief.  Vicarious cruelty, sordid little lusts, an epic search to score heroin while carrying a parent's ashes, it has helped enormously. 

Patrick, on his parents vodka fueled marriage: "Perhaps, on the contrary, it was her money that had cheapened him.  He had stopped his medical practice soon after their marriage.  At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics.  In a sense they had succeeded."

The four novellas contain abuse, incest, indelicacies, vicious cuts at the person of Princess Margaret, hilarious descriptions of clothing, party swag, and the venal behavior of the British upper class.  There is also bewildered tenderness and a narrator who staggers toward something that resembles hope.  

Birchbark Books is going to Washington D.C. via train to take part in the Feb 17th 350.org action on curbing the fossil fuel industry.  We'll let you know how that goes, how the train goes, what we see and what we are reading.  

I might take the St. Aubyn and read it all again.  Or the new Karen Russell book, short stories including one about a Vampire in a Lemon Grove -- I just glimpsed an intriguing review -- 

Yours for books,

Louise

(View Louise's Facebook Page for more thoughts about the climate action in DC)

So that was a great night in New York City but home again is better, sweeter, and as everyone says "weirdly warm."  And oh, did we talk about Hurricane Sandy? Tomorrow is will be 50 degrees and this is December in Minnesota. When people speak of these warm days there is an uneasy smile, a half-laugh, "guess there's an upside to global warming", or an almost wistful, "we should get out and enjoy this before the cold hits." In the back of our minds, these thoughts: How long before it just doesn't get cold here anymore? How long before, as NASA climatologist James Hanson predicts, the southern half of the United States becomes uninhabitable? How long before the corn scorches in Iowa? How long before Lake Superior's waters warm? Before they recede ten, fifteen, twenty feet? How long before we lose nearly half the Arctic?

Oh, that was last summer when we lost the Arctic.

Back in the real we'd like to link everyone to 350.org. Bill McKibben brought 350.org's Do The Math tour to Minnesota a couple of nights ago. I was there. Ted Mann hall was packed and the event was long sold out. There were many people, but . . .   

When you were small and just falling asleep, did you ever have the sense that your boundaries blurred, that you were huge, vast, big as the earth? Bigger? A sudden sense of growing wildly beyond all possibility? I wish that was the way I felt the other night. Instead, I had the sense that this problem was that huge. I looked around at the people and we were so few, just a handful among the billions, and we were all perfectly ordinary. 

Not only that, but annoying too. Honestly? I hate the way I am sometimes, but some speakers (NOT McKibben) annoyed the hell out of me. They were right, but my heart sank. It was a little like being at a giant AA meeting where you know you're sick and doomed and, worst of all, you are in a place where you're going to hear a whole lot of platitudes. And then, horrifyingly, those platitudes will turn out to be true. And even worse -- in order to live with any decency at all, you're going to have to admit them into your own dark, anti-social, Minnesota-nice resistant, heart.  

It is true. All of us ordinary, annoying, scared, crazily hopeful people are called upon to fight, together, the greatest fight in human history. I know that sounds like a B movie trailer -- but like I said . . . true is true. The fight is simple: to keep a planet we can live on. The most important thing I took away was this: none of us really want to use fossil fuels. Given an alternative, hey, who wouldn't choose clean burning energy? But the fossil fuel industry -- giant and complex -- has blocked alternative energy. The fossil fuel industry, all of the oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, BP, Shell, etc., have decided that immediate profit is more important than a world.

We have to stop them.  

When Bill called upon us all to pressure our colleges and universities (not to mention any wealthy persons you know) to divest, to stop investing in fossil fuels, it was like a light went on. It worked for apartheid. Let's apply the pressure. If there isn't yet a group working to divest your college, form one, join one, write letters. Join 350.org. Find out how. Let's take EVERYBODY'S money out of fossil fuels.  

We were out of time twenty years ago -- but hey -- check out Germany.  Check out China. They are going green anyway and we are behind the curve, just where big oil wants us. 

This is supposed to be a book blog -- and so here is the book part:  I want there to be a world where we ourselves, our children, our grandchildren and on and on, can lie back on a cool summer night, the windows open, myriad sighing crickets and unknown little bugs singing, a lamp, okay a solar lamp, casting a pool of radiance -- in which we are reading together.

Yours truly, Book People,

 
Louise

Join the movement at 350.org.
Read Bill McKibben's key article on climate change: Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
Purchase Bill McKibben's book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

   

Addicts of all types who eventually enter recovery know the phrase "window of clarity". Through the haze of drugs or booze, people have a poignant stroke of thought. People realize their addiction is deadly; it is collapsing their personal world. So, too, a cheap energy addict (like me) knows these moments. Every so often, I look at some object in my hand and see the unrecoverable petroleum that actually produced it. I drive 1-94 to see my parents and remember only 130 years ago this journey was harrowing, it took a month by ox cart or more in some seasons. Before that, people walked and working dogs dragged along their portable houses. In that window of clarity my car, all of our cars, which we take for granted, are magic carpets.    

One such moment of clarity occurred this summer in Belcourt, North Dakota, on my home reservation where I went with my mother. I bought an apple in the grocery store. It was labeled Holland. The apple wasn't really from Holland, but it might as well have been. This apple appeared near the central Canadian Border in June -- it came from somewhere very, very far away. There are few places so remote that they do not get shipments of pesticide (petroleum) laced produce, fertilized (petroleum), harvested (petroleum) and shipped (petroleum) from a place equally mysterious and remote. The apple in my hand might as well have been tossed to the Turtle Mountains by a genie -- one created of a fabulously powerful substance accompanied by a deadly curse.

At our last bookstore meeting we talked as a group about what would make our work at Birchbark Books more meaningful. One of us said it would be great to enlarge our mission to include transitional thinking about how to strengthen local economies. The word "transitional" clicked with me. My windows of clarity, interspersed with bouts of magical thinking, included dread. Nobody likes to linger too long in a moment of clarity about climate change because it always ends in dread. Year by year I've tried to recycle, reduce, reuse. Still, the dread. And the word Collapse is enough to stop most thought. But the word Transition somehow pulled me out. Transition is not about dread, survivalist fear, a life of paranoia, hoarding guns and money and vacuum packed plastic barrels of grain. It is about producing our own energy and food, but in a joyous and meaningful way.

My mother's family gardened and canned and hunted all the food they ate only a generation ago, right there in the Turtle Mountains. My mother and father could still survive from their garden and orchard if they had too, even though they give most of what they grow away.

The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience by Rob Hopkins, is a great place to start reading. I recommend it as a positive beginning -- I have worked my way backward into Lester R. Brown's World On The Edge, and John Michael Greer's The Wealth of Nature, and Original Instructions, edited by Melissa K. Nelson, all excellent. As soon as I read The Transition Handbook, however, I realized that in Minneapolis we have the makings of a great transition city. Here are signs:

One year ago our bookstore faced a sheet of asphalt. Kenwood School was paved to the foundation. Last year that asphalt (petroleum) was torn out and replaced with a garden as miraculous as that apple in the Turtle Mountains. It was planted by (genies) the parents of schoolchildren, tended by the children (naturally produced) as well as more (eternal motion machines) parents, teachers, and now is being harvested. At the start of school barbeque, parents took home produce, marveling at the freshness, exchanging recipes. One boy looked at the top of a carrot showing in the dirt and asked, shyly, "can I pull it out?"  He did, and walked away brushing his face dreamily with the soft carrot leaves.  "I never knew they had tops" he murmured.

A moment of clarity for that boy, maybe, and for me a reason to enlarge our bookstore's offerings to include a section on Green Thinking, Urban Homesteading, Climate Change, The Commons, Indigenous Gardening -- all of the topics that I'd love to deny but can't.  If we look over the sides of our magic carpets, we'll realize we're floating on thin air.  If it's all the same, I'd rather coast down or "power down" than drop.  But that requires living in that clarity, more reading, and taking action. 

Thanks to all of our supporters who keep Birchbark Books going here on 21st Street. Watch for Diane Wilson reading from Beloved Child. She not only writes beautifully, but she is the director of Dream of Wild Health, an Indigenous gardening project and an original partner of Birchbark Books.

Louise