Book Review of Saving Us by Katharine Hayhoe
If you haven't already, you will want to read this book.
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I am still away on vacation and offline. I wrote this book review for my blog over a year ago. This book is a must-read. I am not sure I agree as much with the book as I did when I first wrote this, and I think that’s a good thing. In any case, this review will help you think about what we need to be doing, and what part you can take on today, for climate action.
Book Review of Saving Us by Katharine Hayhoe
I first learned of Katharine Hayhoe and her book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World[1] when she was interviewed by Nora McInerny on the podcast “Terrible, Thanks for Asking”. The host admitted that she had been getting a lot of requests for an episode about the ecological crisis, but that she had been avoiding it. Any time that she thought about the climate crisis, she admitted, she felt a deep sense of anxiety, and so she simply tried to avoid thinking about it.[2]
Yet, when she read this book, Saving Us, and then interviewed Dr. Hayhoe, she came away with a strong feeling of hope. It is the hope that is named in the subtitle of the book and is the kind of hope that I have already written about in this blog. Nora says, “Katharine’s energy, her passion, it is so contagious…and you will leave this episode not just feeling better about where we’re going, but aware of how to bring more people along. Even the uncle who thinks it’s all a hoax.”
When I heard this and then listened to Hayhoe, I knew I needed to read the book, which was released just this past October [2021]. Hayhoe, a climate scientist who has worked on many of the major international reports that have been released on global warming, has written a timely book during the height of climate change disasters and a pandemic that has had the whole world on edge. How could she possibly offer realistic, concrete hope in such a time as this?
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