ALL WE CAN SAVE
EDITED BY AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON
& KATHARINE K. WILKINSON
All We Can Save is a dynamic anthology of essays, poems, and stories from women addressing our climate crisis. The voices in it are so disparate and elegantly organized that it is able to offer some solace in what can feel like an overwhelmingly dire subject. It includes messages of progress, and profound happiness, along with the deep grief for what our changing world is losing. It’s also full of excellent resources for further investigation into the work of these women at the forefront of climate crisis work. It’s the type of book that will stick with you and bubble up frequently as you move through the world.
THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
BY DAVID GRAEBER & DAVID WENGROW
This is a real page-turner! David and David aim to bust myths repeated in other grand surveys of history, like the unfortunately popular Guns, Germs, and Steel, by highlighting newer anthropological research that had mostly gone unnoticed by non-specialists. By looking at ancient people as creative and complicated beings in their own right, the Davids reveal how varied human societies have always been.
With such a broad sweep there is occasionally some nuance lost, and for the amount of indigenous history they discuss, surprisingly little Indigenous scholarship is cited. Despite these issues this book is well worth the read. If past groups lived without the rigid simplistic hierarchies we usually ascribe to them, then maybe there’s hope for us too.
PHARMAKO-POEIA: PLANT POWERS, POISONS & HERB CRAFT
BY DALE PENDELL
This three volume set, Pharmako-poeia, Pharmako-dynamis, and Pharmako-gnosis, is a kaleidoscopic journey down the poison path of psychoactive plants and fungi. These allies, ranging from coffee to betel to morning glory, are our sometimes rowdy, sometimes stupefying, but always wise teachers. Each plant teacher is explored at length, and we are guided along by a host of voices and whispers. The plant teachers themselves are given voice. Ethnobotanical histories are delivered with humor and wit, and pharmacological findings relayed with scientific precision. The words of an ancient mystic are invoked, a trickster whispers into our ears, and an intoxicated poet mumbles a phrase. Readers be warned: extracurricular experimentation may be inspired.
The inexhaustible Pharmako Series works to obliterate human-centric notions of the world and then mulches and seeds the rubble. We are led out of ivory towers, social structures, and schools of thought and into the jungle where roots and green tendrils remind us of a deeper, more animistic relationship between ourselves and the living earth- a place where we don’t give voices to plants, they give voices to us.
