BELIEVERS

Seeking new ways to live on Earth.

Reflecting on the fragile state of the environment, poet and essayist Wells melds memoir, history, psychology, and philosophy as she recounts her ongoing struggle to define her role as “an average, well-meaning person who daily participates—however grudgingly—in a system that is bringing the planet she loves to the brink of destruction.” With a growing desire to learn about ways “in which human beings not only thrive but also repair damage and even increase the biodiversity and beauty of the planet,” the author traveled around the country to find people—including eccentric activists, urban gadflies, botanists, and Native Americans—who have devoted themselves to honoring the Earth. In Oregon, she met the irascible Finisia Medrano and her queer band of Prairie Faeries, who range around fields and woods, living on and replenishing wild plants. In New Mexico, Wells lived among the “earth-honoring” Taos Initiative for Life Together, who work to transition from the fossil fuel economy by growing their own food, sourcing their own water, and bartering services within the community in order to generate no waste and repair the local ecosystem. During her visit to the Simple Way intentional community outside of Philadelphia, the author discovered “a multiracial group of radical disciples who’d fixed up several blocks of foreclosed and condemned houses” and set up a farm in an effort to heal a broken urban neighborhood. At the Tactical Tracking Intensive school, Wells learned that tracking humans and animals creates an intimate knowledge of the environment. “If you were estranged from your own ecosystem,” she writes, “tracking was a refreshingly straightforward practice for overcoming that estrangement.” Wells offers no pat prescriptions for nurturing “lived relationships with water and plants and soil”—only an ardent hope that humans will persist in “fighting and reconciling and reaching across the divide of mutual misapprehension” to save their world.

An urgent message gently conveyed.