Believers
Making a Life at the End of the World
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?
Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. Seeking wisdom and practical answers, she embarks on a pilgrimage, interviewing outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers traces the lives of people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead.
Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in re-wilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning tools of violence into tools of farming. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.
Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. She takes the devastating news facing us all, every day, and injects the possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation, and will change how you think about your own actions, how you can still make an impact, and how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.
“Wry, fierce and scathingly honest: for anyone who needs a shot of hope in these sideways times” —Scott Ludlam
“Brave, fascinating and honest” —Anna Krien
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Wells (The Fix) focuses this dense and eclectic survey on "relatively ordinary people" who, in the face of climate change, believe in creating a better future. Aiming to add hope to conversations often filled with doom, Wells takes readers on a tour of individuals focused on connecting with—and restoring—nature. In the Oregon woods, she meets "the Portuguese Sherlock Holmes," a man "rumored to be one of the best trackers alive" and whose abilities hinge on a deep knowledge of ecosystems. Matthew Trumm, meanwhile, had his life upended by 2018's Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., which Wells describes in shocking and vivid detail. Trumm, along with John D. Liu, a land restoration expert and documentarian, founded the Camp Fire Restoration Project in 2019. The people profiled come across as optimistic and resilient, and so too does the author. Her descriptions of climate change captures the harsh reality of devastation, and her musings often lean poetic ("I'm fond of the idea of being ‘of Rubble'.... I like how ‘rubble' echoes ‘rabble,' the disorderly mob of the ordinary"). Still, her curiosity keeps things moving: "What legacy will we choose to leave behind," she wonders. Climate-minded readers should take note of this roving account of perseverance.
