Facing up to Climate Reality: honesty, disaster and hope is the sequel to an earlier 2014 collection of essays: The Post-Growth Project.
The book’s task as set out in a Foreword is to “confront the brutal reality of the long-term climate damage that [economic] growth has already made inevitable. Honesty about this situation is something which green politics (never mind conventional politics) has hitherto found desperately hard, but at the stage which we have now reached it is the necessary prequel to any effective climate action.” With this in mind you can see where the words honesty, disaster and hope in the title come from.
There are 9 separately authored chapters which explore this theme under three headings: politics, systems and framings. The politics section asks whether capitalism can survive the transition to a post-growth economy, what international relations might be in such a context, and whether there’s a need for local and localised responses if we are to make the best of the situation we find ourselves in. The systems section asks whether urbanisation is inevitable, how we are to deal with extreme weather, and whether geoengineering is a right response to the climate crisis. The final framings section looks back to what the crisis of the late Middle Ages in Europe might teach us about global climate change, asks what a psychosocial perspective can bring to the ecological crisis we face, and (finally) wonders where we can find that much needed commodity, hope.
The previous paragraph shows the commendable breadth of what is on offer here; whilst there might not be something for everyone (given the sadly limited market for non-escapist books of this kind), there is certainly something for anyone who’s already interested in what is clearly the core issue of our time.
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Sounds like a book for grown ups who want to really get into the issues around climate reality –
that includes teachers if their Easter holiday gets extended due to virus shut downs!