npm 3: way more than 52 girls

 

 

What’s the story here? It’s a story of names–this is not even close to all of them–most of which were new to me, when I started to read ALL WE CAN SAVE.  These have not been “the principal girls of the USA” for me; my culture (for all that I adore the B-52’s and their radical defiance of normative culture) has not sung their powers.  

The women in this book refer to each other, to the influences of these mothers, aunties and sisters on the daughters, cousins, nieces of the climate rescue movement.  As Adrienne Maree Brown says in her essay “What Is Emergent Strategy?” these women “interact and intersect and discover their purpose…and they serve it.”  They are lung cells, tongue cells, breathing and speaking a new narrative of collaboration and change. I may come away from my reading some days downcast, but never alone.

<poem>

🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎

My project for NPM 2022:

 

This month I'm "Mak[ing] human stories to move human beings.  Human stories are more powerful for inciting action than counting carbon or detailing melting glaciers." (Favianna Rodriguez, from her essay "Harnessing Cultural Power," in ALL WE CAN SAVE.)

My challenge to myself is to center our fabulous, ferocious human stories in the poems I write in response to ALL WE CAN SAVE--not my standard approach to writing, which usually centers...well, me.

 

So I'm working principally with narrative about others, bringing what I'm learning about how we can save our foolish human asses from ourselves by connecting to the people--including us--whose very existence is threatened, now and in the near future, by unchecked climate chaos, and who are doing the work to reverse it.

"It isn't a matter of moving climate change further up our priority list. The reason we care about [climate change] is because it affects everything that's already at the top of our priority list: our health, our families, our jobs and the economy, the well-being of our communities... To care about a changing climate we don't have to be a tree hugger or an environmentalist (though it certainly helps); as long as we are humans alive today, then who we already are, and what we already care about, gives us all the reasons we need."

Katharine Hayhoe, "How to Talk About Climate Change,"

ALL WE CAN SAVE: TRUTH, COURAGE, AND SOLUTIONS FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS