To this question, environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore and Canadian artist Bob Haverluck bring twenty-two life-affirming essays and drawings. Their entwined art offers pluck, stubborn resolve, and even some laughter to those who have for years been working for environmental sanity, social justice, and ecological thriving.
What Moore and Haverluck offer is encouragement to join or keep on with Earth's work--not distractions, but deep and honest reasons to remember that the struggle matters. Rather than another to-do list or an empty promise of hope, Take Heart is a thank-you gift to the multitudes of Earth's defenders. Inside its pages, they will find reason to take heart.
Taking heart is not hope exactly, but maybe it's courage. Not solutions to the planetary crisis, but some modest advice for the inevitable crisis of the heart. A rueful grin, and gratitude to be part of this strange and necessary work for the endangered Earth.
Bob Haverluck is an artist and storyteller who works with community groups using the arts to help engage issues of conflict and violence against the Earth and her creatures. His drawings have appeared in Harpers, New Statesman, and other publications. A former adjunct professor at the University of Winnipeg and a current mentor with the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation in Montreal, Bob teaches with an eye to the role of comedy in social change. His most recent book is When God Was Flesh and Wild: Stories in Defence of the Earth.
"These brilliant essays and drawings will renew your strength to fight for Mother Earth. They will release your dammed-up tears. But mostly -- in their beauty and fierce wisdom -- they will bring you joy." --Donna Sinclair, author of Activist Alphabet