The Memory We Could Be (eBook)

The first book by this highly regarded young activist and journalist seeks to humanise the abstraction of global warming and bring different voices into the conversation.

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<i>The Memory We Could Be</i> attempts to move beyond the sterile, technical
language that has pervaded discussions around climate change and ecology.
It seeks to counter the bureaucratic prose of our conversations, to humanise the
abstraction of global warming, and bring different voices into the conversation.
Drawing on a variety of sources – from anthropology to hydrology, botany to
economics, agronomy to astrobiology, medicine to oceanography, physics
to history – the author weaves a concise, lyrical and powerful story of our
relationship with nature.

The book is divided into three sections: Past, Present, and Future.

Past is about memory. Our inability to comprehend our staggering present partly
lies in our ignorance of our staggering past. We peer into the black box of our
human past to understand how we got here. We go on a journey across the
roots of our ecological crisis, from the Roman Empire to the forests of Burma, from
Congolese rubber plantations to Colombian oil fields.

Present illustrates how climate change is shaping our world today. Climate
change, so often associated with the future, is profoundly contemporary. By
exploring how climate change relates to poverties and inequalities, this section
hopes to equip the reader with a set of intuitive instruments to understand modern and future climate impacts.

Future is anchored around alternatives, and strives to illustrate in human terms the world we could lose and the world we can win. It also asks questions as to what we can do, and attempts to clarify a transformative vision of more ecological
and equitable economy.