The Green Boat
Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"Mary Pipher takes on our planet's greatest problems with the skills of a truly gifted therapist. She knows why we avoid and deny the truth and she knows how we can heal ourselves and our communities even as we try to heal the earth. This book is a deep and true gift."—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher offered a paradigm-shattering look at the lives of adolescent women. Now Pipher is back with another ground-breaking examination of everyday life, this time exploring how to conquer our fears about the major environmental issues that confound us and transform them into a positive force in our lives.
Pipher emphasizes the importance of taking small, positive steps to preserve what’s important, drawing from her own experiences as part of a group fighting energy company TransCanada’s installation of the Keystone XL oil pipeline across the Midwest, which will sit atop the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of 40% of the United States’ fresh water. The challenges she confronts reveal surprising answers to the critical questions we face: How do we mobilize ourselves and our communities to work together to solve global problems? How do we stay happy amid very difficult situations? And what is the true meaning of hope?
Both profound and practical, The Green Boat explains how we can attend to the world around us with calmness, balance, and great love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Psychologist Pipher (Reviving Ophelia) brings her wisdom about how individuals interact with culture to this compassionate, beautiful, and personal approach to acknowledging the global environmental crisis while maintaining mental balance and hope. As Pipher lucidly explains, the overwhelming amount of information about the desperate state of our planet leads to stress, avoiding discussion, willful ignorance, and outright denial, while the activist's call of "Wake up!" is an ineffective remedy. Instead, Piper distinguishes between "distractionable intelligence," which makes us feel helpless, and "actionable intelligence," which combines information with suggestions for addressing problems, thus creating hope, motivation, and change. She affirms that with guidance and support, we can reach states of acceptance, action, and, eventually, transcendent growth. Using her experience as an organizer against TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline across the Nebraska Sandhills as an example, Pipher shows the power that groups working together have to provide meaning, healing, and replenishing social support, while allowing individuals to feel like they have a role. Serious, yet accessible, realistic without being alarmist, this could be the most effectively inspirational book available about an individual's relationship to the global environmental crisis.
