For readers of Ronald Wright, Rebecca Solnit, and Yuval Noah Harari, comes a compelling inquiry into our relationship with humanity's latest and greatest calamity
In The Environmentalist's Dilemma, award-winning journalist Arno Kopecky zeroes in on the core predicament of our times: the planet may be dying, but humanity's doing better than ever. To acknowledge both sides of this paradox is to enter a realm of difficult decisions: Should we take down the government, or try to change it from the inside? Is it okay to compare climate change to Hitler? Is hope naive or indispensable? How do you tackle collective delusion? Should we still have kids? And, can we take them to Disneyland?
Inquisitive and relatable, Kopecky strikes a rare note of optimistic realism as he guides us through the moral minefields of our polarized world. From start to finish, The Environmentalist's Dilemma returns to the central question: How should we engage with the story of our times? In The Environmentalist's Dilemma, award-winning journalist Arno Kopecky zeroes in on the core predicament of our times: the planet may be dying, but humanity's doing better than ever. Inquisitive and relatable, he guides us through the moral minefields of our polarized world.
In summer 2018, a killer whale, known as ,Tahlequah gave birth to a calf that died half an hour later; overcome by grief, Tahlequah refused to let her baby go and instead carried it with her, raising the body above the surface as though to help it breathe, over and over again, for 17 days.
Seventeen days. Nobody could have been astonished to learn that orcas are, struggling to survive in these industrialized waters, but the prolonged image of an animal so clearly deranged by grief did something that anyone who's ever tried to write a story or start a movement knows the value of: It turned knowledge into feeling.
Everyone knows that our oceans are in trouble. Everyone knows whose fault that is. Humans didn't kill Tahlequah's child directly, but we are very much the reason why her community is on the brink of extirpation, down to less than eighty individuals as of this writing. Hounded by whale-watchers and pollution, and crashing salmon populations, and a degree of acoustic, agony no human can fully comprehend, the Southern Residents' suffering is both a tragedy and a cautionary tale.
