Believers

Making a Life at the End of the World

by Lisa Wells

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Pub Date Jul 20 2021 | Archive Date Jul 20 2021

Outdoors & Nature

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Description

"An essential document of our time." —Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering

In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change

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. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these 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 rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming—guns into ploughshares. 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. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.

"An essential document of our time." —Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering

In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing...

Advance Praise

“[Wells’s] 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.”

—Publishers Weekly

“We are living in an extreme moment, and one where it’s very hard to know what effective action looks like against crises of a scale we’ve not before encountered. These accounts of people trying to grapple with that reality are sometimes inspiring and often cautionary, and always a spur to thinking about how the rest of us might accomplish the most we can.”

—Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

“Believers is meticulously researched and reasoned and lays out a vast and sophisticated vision like no other writer since Charles Bowden. . . If some measure of a book’s importance is the noise it makes when it falls in the forest, this project reminds me of The Empathy Exams, by Leslie Jamison, for the conversations that will surely follow its release. An essential document of our time.”

—Charles D'Ambrosio, author of Loitering

“This adventurous and outlandish book asks us to imagine a relationship to the land that precedes human memory, an act that requires us to shed our idealism in favor of a more radical leap of faith. In that wild leap it arrives, miraculously, a few steps down the path to wisdom.”

—Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter

“Everyone who lives on this earth needs to read this book. Believers captures the stories of outliers working way out in the desert, deep in the city, and beyond, who are trying—and often succeeding—to live on this planet not only without harm but with great love. Lisa Wells is whip-smart and insightful, taking us along on her own quest to find another way to be. We grow with her, immersed in the poignant, hopeful, and heartbreaking stories of people she meets as she attempts to answer what has been her life’s refrain: How shall we live?”

—Tessa Fontaine, author of The Electric Woman

“Lisa Wells’s writing is brilliant; her conclusions are profound. If you can take only one book with you while wading through the wreckage of the Anthropocene, this is the one.”

—Kate Lebo, author of The Book of Difficult Fruit