660: Under the Sky We Make
In this episode, I finally got a nuanced look at climate change messaging…
Friends, friends, friends.
Welcome back to Teatime Reading where there are books in progress.
When I think about climate change, I always struggle to avoid rage at the corporations who are so uniquely responsible for our current position.
Why is it always that normal people are asked to clean up the messes of multinational conglomerates?
However, in today’s book, I finally got the appeal of having steps that we can take to mitigate climate change as individuals and citizens.
Under the Sky We Make was a complicated book for me. In many ways, author and professor Dr. Kimberly Nicholas had the unenviable task of straddling different parts of climate change. She had to explain how we got here, which involved naming names of corporations and bad actors. She also had to explain why it’s urgent to take individual and societal action even though it wasn’t normal people who covered climate data.
Finally, she had to give the reader hope as well.
Overall, I thought she did a good job with all of this while sharing what it was like to be a climate scientist these days. There were great insights into Dr. Nicholas’s life and the personal changes she embarked on to do her part.
The discussions about the stages of climate acceptance were also very enlightening, as she explained how people could go from ignorance to avoidance to doom to all the feels, and finally, in the end, to purpose.
Under the Sky We Make is clearly a primer for real human beings to do their small part. I was pleased to see the author give attention to the realities of corporate pollution, but it was evidently not the primary focus of this book.
The biggest surprise in this book was the lack of focus on recycling and plastic. That was because Dr. Nicholas focused on the proverbial ‘big guns’ of climate. Meat, Driving, and Flying.
The challenge, of course, is that if most people are anything like me, they like at least two out of the three offenders. Personally, I love the idea of solo road trips or long plane trips.
That brings me to the reality of our current situations. After reading Under the Sky We Make, I have to conclude that these individual solutions are important, but the amount of effort may still be better served to attempt to change governmental policies towards corporations.
Obviously, we should all try to cut our individual footprints on this planet, but I came away from this book still feeling as if this climate crisis in front of us has to still focus on systemic change rather than individual decisions.
We have to tackle both.
That’s all for today. Until next time, keep your bookmarks close.
Peace, Love, Pages.
Note: As Always, Affiliate Links are here for your convenience at no cost to you. All reading was at my own expense.