Tag Archive for: culture

The Patterning Instinct | Jeremy Lent

Jeremy Lent’s iconic work, described by George Monbiot as “the most profound, brilliant and potentially world-changing book I’ve read this century,” dissects the profound ways in which our cultures shape our understanding of the world. With rigour and lyricism, Lent explores the synthesis of cognitive, religious, philosophical, scientific and political systems that make up our civilizational structures, illuminating the intricate connections between language, myth, and belief systems.

 

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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Hope: Visions for a Better Future | Create the Future

 

Too often, we focus on the kind of future we fear. It’s time to start creating the one we long for.

Creating the future means finding the courage to re-imagine life on this beautiful planet, and having the determination to make it happen. It means seeking out hope in times of darkness, and seeing community in the midst of distrust. Most of all, it means flipping the script: it’s time to turn our anxieties about the climate crisis into action and justice. It’s time to be the change we want to see.

Hope: Visions Of A Better Future is a collection of stories, artwork and interviews from experts, thinkers, campaigners and writers, Hope is part-guide and part-inspiration that invites us to celebrate the solutions and actions that are already in progress, and feel the power which lies within all of us to be a force for good through our contributions to a better, more sustainable world.

This tremendous anthology from the inspirational Create the Future team includes six creative writing pieces, five ‘postcards from the future’ created by schoolchildren throughout the UK, and fifteen interviews with some fascinating experts on a wide range of climate topics. There is a lovely

Read Hope: Visions for the Future online and free thanks to Create the Future.

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Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World | Tyson Yunkaporta

This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrodinger’s cat. Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.

‘As consequences of civilisation squeeze modernity in a death grip, connecting with the ancestral world, breaking out of our box of time, is perhaps the most radical act any of us can do.

In his startling manual Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Tyson Yunkaporta describes five ways of seeing from an Aboriginal perspective – kinship mind, storytelling mind, dreaming mind, ancestor mind and pattern mind. All five help perceive the land and ourselves within it, kin with creatures, rivers, rocks and sky. This knowledge is embedded in ritual, storytelling and practice that hold communities and cultures together, so human beings can be ‘custodial’ for places and living beings. We have a thousand-year clean up ahead of us, Yunkaporta tells us, and generously hands us the imaginative tools to begin the work.’ – Charlotte Du Cann, guest contributor to May 2022’s Rebel Library Recommends

 

Purchase Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World from Hive online bookshop