Tikkun Recommends

What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action
Per Espen Stoknes
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015

The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy
Lester R. Brown
W.W. Norton & Company, 2015

Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth
David C. Korten
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015

Read these three books along with the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (www.tikkun.org/esra) and Global Marshall Plan (www.tikkun.org/gmp) proposed by the Network of Spiritual Progressives to learn why we need a fundamental transformation of our economic, political, and cultural systems to save life on earth from environmental catastrophe.

Per Espen Stoknes presents “a new psychology of climate action,” addressing everything from the psychological roots of resisting action to advice for coping with the depression that affects many of those who understand the depths of the disaster facing life on earth. At least one part of the solution is a switch from fossil fuels to an economy fueled by solar and wind energy. Lester R. Brown, one of the great pioneers in the science of climate change and its economic consequences, presents a hopeful picture: the energy transition is already beginning. And David C. Korten’s message has always been core to Tikkun: “A viable human future depends on navigating a deep cultural and institutional transformation grounded in a story of unrealized human possibility. . . . We humans are living beings birthed and nurtured by a living Earth in a living universe. To survive and thrive, we must learn to live as responsible contributing members of the whole of Earth’s community of life.” Korten’s powerful vision makes a fundamental change in our economy plausible. It works in tandem with Jerry Mander’s The Capitalism Papers, but uses psycho-spiritual language more likely to appeal to a broader public than is the narrow, economistic, rights-oriented discourse predominant in much of the liberal and progressive world.

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God
Kelly Brown Douglas
Orbis Books, 2015

Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics
Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski
Beacon Press, 2015

After the murder of nine African Americans by a white supremacist in a traditionally African American church, and after years of assaults on African Americans by police and white racists, it’s clear that a major reason the left’s environmental and social justice program has not reached all those it could benefit is America’s culture of “othering,” most obvious in the racist hatred of people of color, particularly African Americans. Kelly Brown Douglas forcefully contrasts the culture of “stand your ground” and its “grand narrative of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism” to the black faith tradition that “generates a discourse of resistance that allows black people to affirm their innate and created worth, even when everything around them suggests their utter worthlessness.” This tradition helps black people maintain their sense of divine dignity “in the face of a stand-your-ground culture that seeks to pervert their...