When the latest environmental devastation--a clearcut forest, a mountaintop mining site--breaks your heart, this book provides ideas and inspiration to find joy, make art, and experience ritual, all told with a heartfelt journalistic style.
TREBBE JOHNSON is an author and frequent speaker on the relationship between people and nature. Her previous books are The World Is a Waiting Lover and 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty, and she has won many awards, including the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Telly Award for a video made for the UN on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. She has led workshops, retreats, and rites of passage programs internationally since 1995, such as a retreat in an old-growth clear-cut forest, a ceremony at Ground Zero after September 11, and a walk in weapons testing grounds at Eglin Air Force Base. In 2009, Johnson founded the non-profit organization Radical Joy for Hard Times, dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. She regularly speaks at a variety of events, from the Stephens College Commencement to the Parliament of the World's Religions to the Sierra Club. Johnson is a contributing editor at Parabola Magazine and an active member of the Wilderness Guides Council, the Florence Shelly Stewardship Committee, and SCAN (Susquehanna Clean Air Network). She is married to Andrew Gardner, an artist, and lives in rural northeastern Pennsylvania.
"Radical Joy for Hard Times is a journey through brokenness
void of expectation. It is a demanding journey but one I recommend
wholeheartedly."
—Parabola
“Radical Joy for Hard Timesis a must-read for those looking to take
their role in repairing our world. At once, it is a manual for how
we can move forward and a meditation on how best to respond. It
shows us all—even in the face of substantial challenges—the true
value of everyday actions.”
—Henry Timms, coauthor of New Power and cofounder
of #GivingTuesday
“It’s a great vision that Trebbe Johnson is sending out into the
world, and it is very much her own. The great central truth of what
she is doing is the very hard lesson for all of us in our lives,
and yet it is our blessing.”
—W. S. Merwin, former poet laureate of the United States
“Trebbe Johnson’s idea is a revolutionary one and imperative in
this possibly late phase of our relationship with the only planet
we have: to look directly at loss. This manifesto is a song—not a
dirge, but a symphony with all the complexity and emotion our home,
the ever-creative Earth, calls forth.”
—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love
Is Gone
"Engaging and intense, this book demonstrates vividly how
contemplative approaches to life are profoundly political. Deeply
embedded in how we respond to mass extinction—which is the least
euphemistic way of putting what is now happening in the
biosphere—is a habitual conceptual severing of our necessarily
symbiotic relationships with other lifeforms. This severing forms
the very structure of how we have taught ourselves to enjoy
'landscape.' In showing us how to appreciate differently, Trebbe
Johnson shows how to repair the severing, which traumatizes humans
as much as it traumatizes nonhumans, step by contemplative
step."
—Timothy Morton, author of Dark Ecology and Ecology
Without Nature
“In hard times there is a temptation to let the problems of the
world orient the direction of our lives and the shape of our
activism. Through her extensive artistic activist practice, Trebbe
Johnson shows us a different path: a way to turn devastation into
creation. Through simple acts of beauty, she provides a map that
moves us from wallowing in dystopian despair to imagining utopian
joy.”
—Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Progressive Politics in an Age
of Fantasy and cofounder of the Center for Artistic Activism
“How are we to face the ecological desecration of so many beloved
places? Here at last is an ecopsychological guide bringing together
many wise voices to show us a path beyond hopelessness into
strength and renewal.”
—Craig Chalquist, editor of Rebearths: Conversations with a World
Ensouled
“There are some people on Earth who have a radical capacity for
empathy. Trebbe Johnson is one of those people and she has applied
her radical empathy to the appreciation of damaged places and the
need for those places to receive the gift of healing beauty.
Despite this Herculean task in a wounded world, she persists and
refuses to ignore the desolation and look away. Radical Joy for
Hard Times is Johnson’s literary gift to the reader who wants to
play a part in a global community of Earth healing. Accept it, it’s
yours, given with love.”
—Glenn Albrecht, creator of the concept of solastalgia and author
of Earth Emotions
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