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Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World Audiobook
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In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change.
We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?
Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead.
Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming―guns into ploughshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.
Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world?
Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.
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“[This] chronicle of environmental crises and the often radical actions some are taking to combat them is freshly informative and thought-provoking.”
— Booklist
Quotes
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“Gritty, vivid, and real.”
— Outside magazine -
“Believers is a young woman’s book of wandering at a time when our human footprint on earth matters more than ever.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“The question is not of what we face but how we can face it bravely and creatively.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“We need the kind of jolt that Believers gives us if we’re ever going to become, finally, active caretakers of our planet.”
— Washington Independent Review of Books -
“Climate-minded readers should take note of this roving account of perseverance.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“Wells melds memoir, history, psychology, and philosophy…An urgent message gently conveyed.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“If you can take only one book with you while wading through the wreckage of the Anthropocene, this is the one.”
— Kate Lebo, author of The Book of Difficult Fruit
Awards
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Shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
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A London Observer Pick of Best Books of the Month
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A New York Times Book Review pick of Best Books Now in Paperback
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About Lisa Wells
Lisa Wells is a nonfiction writer and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is an editor at The Volta and at Letter Machine Editions. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Believer, n+1, and other publications.