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AWP 2021!

3/1/2021

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The AWP Conference is going virtual this year, and the legion of folks who've been working on the digital platform have our deep appreciation. We've registered only for the Saturday Community Bookfair, March 6, and even for this minimal commitment the setup has been time-consuming. Nevertheless, we're happy to report that the arrangements below are more or less final, subject to digital glitches. We'll be sharing our virtual exhibit space with our friends at Hidden River Arts. Note that times are given for two time zones, Central and Eastern.

  • 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. Central/11:00 a.m. to noon Eastern:
    Meet & Greet with Nathaniel Popkin, author of TO REACH THE SPRING. As a special guest, Nathaniel has invited Andri Magnason, one of Iceland's best-loved authors. Andri is the author of ON TIME AND WATER, a book of "narrative nonfiction" about the climate crisis. It's become a bestseller in Iceland, and an English translation is forthcoming this month from Open Letter. This conversation should be fascinating.
  • 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. Central/1:00 to 2:00 p.m. Eastern: 
    Meet & Greet with Justine Dymond, whose book THE EMIGRANT AND OTHER STORIES has won the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts. The Eludia series publishes the first book-length fiction from women writers age 40 or above. The series has been extraordinary so far, and Justine's book, due out later this spring, is no exception. It focuses on "characters who experience life as foreigners, whether in their own countries or not." Very appropriate for this conference where we'll all feel like foreigners in Zoomland.
  • 2:30 to 5:00 p.m. Central/3:30 to 6:00 p.m. Eastern: Hours when we will be hanging out to talk with anyone who comes for a virtual visit. Please bring snacks.

These events are open only to people registered for the conference. However, in honor of AWP, we're offering three of our recent books at a 20% discount if you order direct from our distributor. Follow the links below and at checkout, in the line that says Enter Promo Code,  type AWP20.

Nathaniel Popkin, TO REACH THE SPRING
Nathaniel Popkin, EVERYTHING IS BORROWED
Mark Lyons, HOMING: A MEMOIR
These discounts will be available to anyone from 3/3 through 3/9. Enjoy!
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Pandemics and Climate Change

2/2/2021

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"Pandemics are coming with greater rapidity ... because the Earth is warming." It could hardly be stated more directly.

In his latest interview, on the Give & Take podcast with Scott Jones, Nathaniel Popkin directly connects the current pandemic with the subject of his new book, To Reach the Spring: From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of Eco-Crisis.

"Each of us is responsible [for the climate crisis]. But yet the responsibility is a collective one," he continues. So how do we THINK about the problem? To engage in this conversation, give the podcast a listen or check out the book itself.

#pandemic #COVID #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Global Warming
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Our First Audiobook!

1/15/2021

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Now available as an audiobook: TO REACH THE SPRING, Nathaniel Popkin's "clarifying, bracing, and ultimately transformative" book on the climate crisis. Narrated by the author himself, it's a great listen. Here are the links for Audible and Amazon:

Audible 
Amazon

The book is also available on iTunes. Search by author or title.

#climatechange #climatecrisis #climatejustice #globalwarming
#audiobooks
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Stand Up! for the Earth

1/12/2021

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"I know that I am complicit," says Nathaniel Popkin in the new episode of the podcast Stand Up! with Pete Dominick. "It's truly a weight on me."

He's talking, of course, of the responsibility all of us bear for the climate crisis, the subject of his book TO REACH THE SPRING. And he relates this long-term danger to our present experience with the pandemic.

Nathaniel's portion begins at 1:17:29. Some other snippets:
  • "The heating of the earth is going to create more pandemic diseases."
  • "You can see the ways in which the male ego gets in the way of making policy."
  • "I think it's possible for us to get it … that we're in this together."
  • "Ordering from Uber Eats a bag of fries - we're all complicit.… [Yet] most human beings are part of the capital system as victims."
  • "We have known, more than previous generations … in detail … that we are the killer here [of the Earth], also that we are the victim.… And yet we go on, sort of blindly."
  • "This is a book about thinking about how to think about this issue."

#climatecrisis #climatechange #globalwarming #COVID
@standupwithpetedominick
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"We are at stake to one another"

1/5/2021

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In a just-published Q&A with Jared Jackson of The PEN Ten (PEN America's interview series), Nathaniel Popkin reveals some of the thinking behind his book To Reach the Spring: From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of Eco-Crisis. Here's an excerpt:
[Q:] In the book, you highlight our complicity and potential for apathy, going on to write, “Not facing known and well-understood acts of destruction may be the moral failure of our time.” I turn one of your opening questions back to you. In face of the climate crisis, what is life worth?

[A:] Very clearly, we’ve allowed the market, the system of global capitalism, to establish the metrics for answering this question. But it doesn’t have to be that way, does it? And furthermore, what we take the question to mean—what is a human life worth?—can be challenged and changed. For all life and lives are connected. As biologists are increasingly coming to understand, beings spawn, grow, evolve, and adapt together in complicated webs of life and not—as we like to imagine—as discrete individuals. We are at stake to one another. Let us, then, reconfigure our approach to the question, “What is life worth?” For what do we mean by life?
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Year-End Roundup

12/22/2020

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For us, the main event of 2020 was the publication of Nathaniel Popkin's deeply thoughtful book-length essay on the climate crisis: TO REACH THE SPRING.

In the few weeks since the book launched, he's done a variety of interviews. If you like moving images, here are three video appearances available online:

Grid Magazine video interview

Walden Woods Project, Zoom discussion with Gail Straub:

The Jefferson Exchange radio show

Our favorite, though, remains the static, words-only interview on the blog of Deborah Kalb. It's really one of the best Q&As we've ever read.

#climatecrisis #climatechange #climateaction #globalwarming

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Interview with Deborah Kalb

12/1/2020

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"The Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo said recently, in discussing the spike in Covid cases in Europe: 'We [are] dangerous to each other. We have to have the courage to admit it.' What de Croo says about Covid applies to our paralysis in the face of eco-crisis. The paralysis comes in part from lack of courage. We can’t face the ways we are dangerous to each other. Because we can’t face them we aren’t able to act." [Emphasis added.]

This is Nathaniel Popkin discussing TO REACH THE SPRING with Deborah Kalb. Read the whole interview for more insights.

Today is the official launch day, and the book is available wherever serious literature is sold. (Probably not at your local supermarket. But once you load up on carbs, you can head over to an independent bookstore.)
​
#climatejustice #climatecrisis #climatechange #climateaction
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On the Launch Pad

11/25/2020

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[If you missed it live, the interview is now archived on YouTube.]

Leading up to next week's official release of To Reach the Spring, Grid Magazine has posted a video clip from an interview with author Nathaniel Popkin. Click on the image to see the clip. For the full interview, go to Grid's Facebook or Instagram feed on Friday, November 27, at noon.

Meanwhile, Green Energy Times has published a glowing review in its November issue (p. 27). Here's an excerpt:
Popkin cites capitalism as “invading every aspect of life on earth” where green shoots of concern and demand for action are smothered by an unending torrent of disinformation from powerful multinationals. These are led by the fossil fuel industry and supported by enabling politicians, that cast doubt on the very reality of the crisis facing our planet.

​Drawing on his years of experience as a climate activist and referencing past world crises from the bubonic plague of the dark ages to our Covid-19 pandemic, Popkin shows how challenging it is to achieve consensus on climate action and then shows us why we must.
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Native American Heritage and the Paiter Suruí

11/23/2020

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To mark Native American Heritage Day coming up on November 27, we want to highlight a portion of To Reach the Spring, Nathaniel Popkin’s new book on the environmental crisis. Unfortunately, this is not a feel-good story about friendly Pilgrims and Wampanoag but rather a tale of capitalism gone amuck in Brazil.
 
There are two sides of “modernity,” Popkin tells us. There’s modernity as destruction, evidenced by the way our great industrial advances have polluted the Earth, produced mass extinctions of animal species, and threatened our own existence. But as a counterpoint, we can also see modernity as hope: namely, the hope that technology will save our asses from this latest crisis, just as it has previously saved us from many types of disease, suffering, and ignorance. For Popkin, this distinction sets the stage for the story of the Paiter Suruí:
​In the Amazon rainforest of northwest Brazil, the Paiter Suruí indigenous people had lived without interaction with Europeans until 1969, adapting with the flora and fauna of their forest home for thousands of years. European contact inevitably brought disease, eviscerating the Paiter Suruí population, which dropped from 10,000 to 240. Lumber mills and ranchers moved in. Government policy encouraged economic growth (and return on investment) at all costs.
 
Facing possible extinction from modernity as destruction, Almir Suruí, the dynamic Paiter Suruí leader, appealed to modernity as hope to save his people’s forest home. In 2007 he convinced the engineers behind Google Earth to create a means for tracking and reporting forest loss. The audacity of the project gave the Paiter Suruí enough notoriety to take the upper hand in the fight, and the tool engaged young members of the tribe in the work of progress. The larger challenge was to permanently protect the rainforest while providing an economic alternative to logging or ranching (and for the young people a reason to stay in the village). Collaborating with various international organizations, Suruí enrolled the rainforest in the United Nations-sponsored REDD+ program, a marketplace for carbon credits. A corporation needing to offset its carbon dioxide emissions would pay the Paiter Suruí to maintain and enhance the rainforest as a carbon sink.
​Though Almir Suruí had his own doubts about the program, it looked promising at first. It might actually work! But then
the Paiter Suruí carbon offset credit project became the target of a powerful Catholic Church–backed indigenous group, CIMI, whose leaders attacked the project as commodification of nature. Though they had the same goal to save the rainforest as Almir Suruí, the CIMI activists saw the project squarely as an example of modernity as destruction, the wealthy earning on the backs of the poor.
 
The project now weakened by heightening protest, a rival leader, Henrique Suruí, accused Almir Suruí of corruption.… Then miners discovered gold and diamonds in the ground beneath the forest. The result was a free-for-all.
 
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí issued a panicked call for help. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national and international authorities and environmentalists. “We are undergoing a total invasion of deforesters and miners of diamonds and gold.” Each day 300 trucks entered and left the forest filled with lumber, the bounty of nearly 1,500 acres of tropical rainforest. The situation was dire: “Either one collaborates, or they put a gun to our heads!”…
 
In his cry of alarm, Almir Suruí was trying to seize the world’s attention, to make us act—immediately—while it was still possible to define the exact nature of the crime. The gun is at all our heads, he said. You living in comfort haven’t yet heeded the warning, so let me repeat it. He wrote, “The implications are terrible. In addition to environmental damage (and the challenge to our way of life), these invasions directly endanger our families and our children.”
 
Did anyone outside of the relatively small community of global environmental activists hear Almir Suruí’s declaration of sacrifice? Though his plea appeared on a few websites, the response was negligible. Indeed, when I search the Internet for any indication Suruí has been heeded, I come up with nothing. To my horror, the invasion goes on—today it continues at a much greater scale under the orders of right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a committed political enemy of indigenous people. There seems to be no one in Brazil’s demonstrably corrupt and incompetent government to stop it. The genocide against the forest was the kind of injustice and aggression that had spurred me to action so long ago, inspired by the simple idea that Suruí had so succinctly expressed: my future is the same as yours.
As Popkin makes abundantly clear throughout the book, a major adjunct of environmental destruction is the injustice done to those who live in the areas being degraded. Indigenous peoples whose lands have resources that others want to exploit. Low-income folks who can’t fight back against a polluting power plant or pipeline. People who can’t simply pack up and leave because there’s lead or PFAS in their drinking water.
 
Yet there’s really no us-versus-them here. The truism can’t be stated too often: We’re all in this together. President-elect Biden, it’s time to act on the eco-crisis. Long past time.

#NativeAmerican #IndigenousPeople #globalwarming #ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice
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Getting Real with the Climate Crisis

11/12/2020

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Here are the first two events for Nathaniel Popkin's new book, To Reach the Spring, an incisive, passionate, and philosophical examination of the climate crisis and what we can do about it:
  • 12/1/20, 7:00 p.m.: Zoom discussion with Gail Straub, sponsored by the Walden Woods Project. Register here.
  • 12/2/20, 6:30 p.m.: Virtual launch event via A Novel Idea on Passyunk. Register here.
​President-elect Biden, feel free to tune in. Nathaniel will have ideas for you.
​
Though we haven't yet reached the publication date, Amazon has apparently jumped the gun, making the book available now.
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