Under the Sky We Make by Dr. Kim Nicholas
A surprisingly warm, very human take on our scorching ecological predicament
Dr. Nicholas knows the facts: she is a highly successful researcher and communicator on climate change, a topic most people kind of know in abstract but still in 2021 find hard to confront.
That means us in the wealthy, high-consuming North.
I know from experience that confronting what we call human-caused global heating and the destruction of the living world for profit isn’t very easy as a member of the perpetrator species. Hell, it’s straight-up hard as a human being. Almost impossible in a culture that worships overconsumption.
The reader learns that blaming the species is actually a neat way of avoidance. Once the illusions disappear, the author recognizes all sorts of maladaptation she is culturally subject to from high-consuming behaviors, scientific reticence, political denialism, family history, all the way to predatory journalism.
Dr. Nicholas proposes a mindset transformation from Exploitation (capitalized at purpose) to Regeneration. To achieve this, it is essential to understand our emotional predicament and face it through a series of feelings such as grief.
The book excels at making the almost unfathomable scale of the climate and ecological crises…
