دانلود کتاب مثل یک جنگل فکر کنید

Dear Reader, The letters in this book (apart from this one) are not addressed to you. But I am sharing them in the hope that they speak to everyone who must live through and make sense of the extraordinary changes unfolding on our planet. I found myself writing to my eldest daughter, Daphne, before she was born in 2013. And then I carried on. It was not a conscious decision at first. The letters appeared in my notebook alongside summaries of scientific facts about how the climate was changing and, at the same time, frustration at the lack of awareness of what was happening and the lack of action. Before I could speak to Daphne, I knew she would be coming into the world at a moment of profound challenge. I knew that her world would be very different from mine. In some ways, this has always been the case between generations. But the scale of the change that is happening is immense, the break with our inherited environment, habitat, economy and culture is unprecedented. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I felt a desire to reach across the years, to prepare her for what seemed then, and is indeed turning out to be, a scary future, but also to capture something of the present that is disappearing. Humans are creatures of the Holocene and all the achievements of that era, but we have now left that stable climate of the last 10,000 years behind. Writing to my daughters (Cissy arrived in 2016) became a way to ease the frustration, the guilt, the loneliness of not yet being able to talk about these things fully with them. ‘We mustn’t scare the kids,’ everyone always says. By the time you read this my daughters may have read these letters, but they might not. I always imagined they would read them when they were old ‘enough’, perhaps eighteen or so, and they’ve still got a way to go at the time of writing. But when is old enough to learn about the world as it is now – not the world that was, the one that I grew up in? I don’t know what I originally intended to achieve for them necessarily. If I’m honest, I think the process of writing these letters was more for me. I have collected together the scraps from my notebooks, edited them and expanded on parts in order to share them now in the hope that in my parenting journey, in my worries and fears and misadventures, my daughters and others (you!) may find something of use in our experiences, our struggles and the mistakes I’ve made as we’ve tried to navigate this perplexing moment in human history. This strange moment, in the early twenty-first century, sometimes referred to as ‘the great acceleration’ or ‘the polycrisis’, has been defined by both a growing awareness of the trouble we are in and an apparent inability to do anything about it. Most of the world has grown accustomed to peace, to economic growth, to rising living standards and globalised communication while becoming increasingly habituated to the despoiling of ever larger areas of the natural world. Every day, it seems, brings more news about how our entire way of life is endangering all life. No one wants this to be the case. But, equally, no government or corporation seems at all inclined to really do anything about it. This leads to the uniqueness of our moment, an uncanny sense that we are on the deck of the Titanic looking at the iceberg while the elites are feasting below and the captain is asleep at the wheel. This has been the backdrop to my introduction to parenting. And it is, I think, the defining and fundamental contradiction of parenting in the modern world: how do we cope with the fact that we are raising kids within a system that is killing all of us? Modern capitalism has delivered remarkable progress in technology, medicine and so on but it has also gone hand in hand with the unrestrained destruction and pollution of our habitat and life-support systems. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the accompanying carbonic acid in the oceans are driving the mass extinction of much of life on earth, and, if the pollution doesn’t stop, us too. The problem is existential. Raising children requires a sense of the future. What are we raising them for? What will they need to know? And parenting forces us to ask ourselves: how do we want to live and who do we want to be? There is an epidemic of eco-anxiety among people of all generations. Children as young as four have shown they understand the concept of climate change and the destruction of nature and are worried about it. And yet, like sex or death, the climate and nature emergency can seem like a taboo subject. More than half of parents don’t talk to their children at all about the climate and nature emergency. Of course, talking about it can be daunting. There are no easy answers. What’s more, we probably would rather avoid facing the facts ourselves! This book is not just for parents. We all experience these feelings and we all have the opportunity to talk to future generations, but parents of curious children can only dodge their questions for so long. We know very well now from psychology that avoided emotions don’t go away but get submerged and express themselves in other ways. Research suggests that while adults are avoiding opening up conversations about climate change, children report being wary of raising the subject for fear of being dismissed or being seen to blame adults. The inter-generational nature of the crisis reinforces the barrier to talking about it. But, as a parent and as an educator, I can say with confidence: talking is what we need to do. Children are being blithely advised to ‘turn their anxiety into action’, while teenagers and grandparents alike are being imprisoned for peaceful protest. At best this trite phrase is uninformed, at worst it is misleading and dangerous. This, along with the commonplace advice that it is children’s duty to ‘fix the planet’, can leave children feeling that it is somehow their role to fight climate change because adults are not acting like adults and fixing it themselves. The only place to go from here is guilt. Meanwhile, most governments continue to promote and subsidise economies that are destroying nature, while peddling false hope and gaslighting us into believing that their meagre actions are meaningful. They are not. But there is another path. If there is a thread in the story of my conversations with my children over the last ten years then it is this: experiencing the present through younger eyes, I have also come to see the world differently. My daughters have taught me some foundational truths. The instinctive ethics of children are correct: many of our laws, behaviours and social norms are immoral and wrong. My children don’t tell me this in so many words. They have shown me by example: through their wonder, through their care and empathy for trees, pets, birds and other wild creatures; through their outrage and incredulity at the absurdity of things. On deforestation, plastic pollution, pesticides, sewage in rivers and seas and many other crimes against nature, they, rightly, just don’t get it: ‘Why is that allowed?’ they ask while I try, and usually fail, to justify the status quo. From very young, it became apparent that they saw themselves as one of many species living in our area. They viewed our garden, the street, the neighbours’ pets and the nearby forest as their community, a community within which they had rights and responsibilities. They instinctively understood the biology and the ethics of the ecosystem. An ecosystem like a forest is a community of species that are all in relationship to each other. The flower needs the pollinator, the tree needs the fungus, the fungus needs the soil, the mammals need the plants and the plant seeds need the mammals and the birds and so on, and they all need the sun, the wind and the rain for the whole to flourish. My daughters’ instinct was to try and find their place within this web of relationships. What was the right thing to do with a frog found on the road? Who lives where? Who needs what? These were the species and places they missed and felt a belonging to when we went away. Our neighbourhood was not just the geography of their imagination, it was also a map of ethics. It was an alternative way of looking at and relating to the world. A way of thinking less like a single person and more like one species among many, a practice of thinking like a forest. It is a way of looking and relating that we have lost. But one that offers us a way ahead for living differently when this current moment of contradiction and uncertainty passes and when we once again come to realise the reality of how much our survival depends on other species.