Hope Beneath Our Feet creates a space for change with stories, meditations, and essays that address one very important question:
“If our world is facing an imminent environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?”
Sometimes bumping into a single piece of information can wake a person up to the plight of our world. This awareness came to me a few months after my son Dylan was born. In the warm comfort of our living room on a New England winter evening, I sat reading statistics on the decline of the world’s coral reefs. Glancing over at the face of my infant son as he slept in his mother’s arms, I imagined the world that he is to inherit. Those dying reefs suddenly did not feel far away—or so far in the future.
I was stunned to learn that, while estimates differ, in a few decades—or maybe even fewer—the coral reefs could be virtually gone. Coral reefs are a life support system not only for themselves, but also for the three hundred million people whose sustenance depends on the seafood harvested in the waters they inhabit. We will not only have to cope with the loss of an entire habitat teeming with life—we will be staring right in the face of a global food-source collapse.
Events that many of us imagined would not threaten children until future generations are occurring even as we sit down to our dinner.
This recognition ushered in a series of sleepless nights. I lay awake as images crowded my mind: the seas filled with more specks of plastic than krill; axes and torches leaving stumps as they progressed through the Amazon rainforest, our “lungs of the earth”; and much closer to home, fewer and fewer songbirds on the branches of our own neighborhood trees. Grieving over all this loss, I wondered, If what is happening is so utterly different than anything we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, how do I live in the face of such loss?
My wakeful nights did not serve my family, or the world. My heart would pound so hard in my chest that my wife Liza would feel it through the mattress and then she too would lie awake.
In the midst of this despair, a friend emailed me “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I took the poem’s advice to heart. When I found myself awake, I would walk to the end of our street and continue into the woods. Sometimes the trail would be lit only by starlight. Feeling my body surrounded by so much life calmed my galloping heart.
One morning, as dawn arrived, I strolled into a nearby meadow. With each step rose a blur of hundreds of Ruby Meadowhawk dragonflies, which settled back down only to rise again as I took another step. As I watched the alarmed flapping of one of these graceful creatures escaping my shoe, I realized that I was not big enough to hold these questions alone, that I needed the help of others.
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Featuring prominent environmentalists, artists, CEOs, grassroots activists, religious figures, scientists, policy makers, and indigenous leaders, Hope Beneath Our Feet shows readers how to find constructive ways to channel their energies and fight despair with engagement and participation. Presenting diverse strategies for change as well as grounds for hope, the contributors to this anthology celebrate the ways in which we can all engage in beneficial action for ourselves, our communities, and the world.
Contributors include:
Diane Ackerman
Paul Hawken
Derrick Jensen
Barbara Kingsolver
Francis Moore Lappé
Barry Lopez
Bill McKibben
Michael Pollan
Alice Walker
Howard Zinn
For more on Martin Keogh and Hope Beneath Our Feet, please visit his website at MartinKeogh.com.
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