a review of
Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings, by Joanna Macy, John Seed, et al, illustrations by Dailan Pugh, New Society Publishers, 122 pages, paper, $8.95
“The earth is perishing,” this book warns, and attempts to aid in answering the inevitable next utterance: how to respond? What it makes very clear from the start is that more political economy, more detailed scientific data, more facts, more theory are inadequate. This slim manual on what the authors call “despair work” argues that people will change not when they have received certain information but when they have confronted despair. They don’t change because society has institutionalized “taboos against the communication of expression of such anguish,” and thus its release and the healthy renewal of energies of resistance and change.
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