BOOKMONGER
LIVING IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
‘Believers’ is a
motivating book
L isa Wells, a poet and nonfi ction writer
from Portland who now lives in Seattle, has
been thinking about global warming and its
consequences for most of her life.
Even as a teen in the 1990s, Wells
believed that humans had created “an unsus-
tainable expansionist system that in 10,000
years had metastasized over the planet, eras-
ing and oppressing other forms of life in its
path.”
Foreseeing civilization’s imminent col-
lapse, she dropped out of school and
enrolled in a wilderness survival program to
acquire the skills to survive in a post-apoca-
lyptic world.
Since then, Wells has encountered others
who similarly interpreted the handwriting on
the wall, but whose solutions have been dif-
ferent. Her teen idealism has been tempered
into a more nuanced approach to the crisis.
Her new book, “Believers,” chronicles
the inventive ways people are forging paths
toward living in an increasingly uncertain
future.
It begins with Finisia Medrano, a formi-
dable zealot who spent decades roaming the
interior West, leading a tiny cadre of devo-
tees in her quest to replant the Great Basin
with its native fl owering tubers including
biscuitroot, bitterroot and camas.
Then there are the folks at the Taos Ini-
tiative for Life Together who are creating a
“parallel society existing within the domi-
nant consumer culture” in a rambling adobe
hacienda in downtown Taos.
And there is a U.S. Forest Service bota-
nist and a North Fork Mono tribal elder who
teamed up to transform federally-owned
properties in the Sierra Nevada from brush-
choked, garbage-strewn landscapes to biodi-
verse meadows.
Wells introduces us to rewilders, track-
ers, ex-cons, performance artists and water-
shed disciples, all of whom are grappling
with “making a life at the end of the world,”
as the book’s subtitle promises.
This week’s book
‘Believers’ by Lisa Wells
Farrar, Straus and Giroux — 350 pages — $28
This is not hyperbolic. As Wells writes,
“when it comes to the biospheric processes
that make life as we know it possible on
earth, the data is unemotional.”
On the other hand, she has come to
believe that the cumulative eff ect of urgent
headlines, frightening news stories and com-
municable dread has the counterintuitive
potential of numbing people to the new real-
ities of climate change.
So while we need to recognize that our
moment is unique in humankind — “a cru-
cible that will determine the habitability
of the planet for centuries to come” — we
don’t want people to be paralyzed from tak-
ing action.
Toward the end of the book, Wells points
out the encouraging successes of some
large-scale projects that have reversed
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desertifi cation in China, Ethiopia and Jor-
dan. Regreening those places has restored
the soil. B ecause living soils can store triple
the amount of carbon that aboveground veg-
etation does, this impacts climate change.
Wells fi nally counsels us not to wait
for world leaders to come up with grand-
scheme solutions to climate change, but to
activate our own agency right now by culti-
vating “a direct relationship with ‘ecological
function’” in our own backyards and in our
own community watersheds.
“Believers” is highly motivating.
The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd
McMichael, who writes this weekly column
focusing on the books, authors and publish-
ers of the Pacifi c Northwest. Contact her at
barbaralmcm@gmail.com.