Book Review: Radical Joy for Hard Times

 

Image: The cover of the book is a photo of a forest taken from the perspective of looking straight upward. All of the trees tops point towards the center where the dawn sun is brightly shining through. In large white capital letters, the title of the book covers the page with each word on its own line. Under that in much smaller letters is "Finding meaning and making beauty in Earth's broken places." Below that is the author and foreword authors names in smaller letters

Radical Joy for Hard Times is a poetic and beautiful work that tackles many ugly things. This is a book about environmentalism and the planet and its starting point likely requires the reader to at least care a bit about the environment. Trebbe Johnson explores these topics using mainly story telling and philosophy, but you will also find poetry, studies, activities, and more. While this book could get a little too hippy-ish for my personal tastes at times, it undoubtedly made me consider a great many things about how I exist on and relate to this planet and its inhabitants. I imagine I will continue to do so as time passes.

Trebbe Johnson is a very wise woman with countless experiences to share from throughout her life. Johnson is from Pennsylvania, like me. As a result she intimately knows the horrors of fracking all over the state among other things. She tells quite a few stories about this in the book. There are so many other stories and experiences she shares including things like surviving natural disasters and the destruction of the environment and also rituals people have used to mourn or celebrate the plant and ways to find joy among it all. Do not read the title and assume this is all a happy go lucky read, though. I believe I got through at least half of it and asked myself, "where is the joy?" (Don't worry, she gets there.) This worked out fine for me. One reason is that I can't stand excessive optimism and positivity when discussing things like this as they are often manifestations of denial. The other reason is that one of Johnson's main themes in the book is accepting the entirety of our experiences and how everything is intertwined from the messy to the beautiful.

There is an entire section on emotions and grief regarding the loss and/or transformation of the "Broken Places" of the world. It calls attention to the detrimental nature of many cultures to demean grief about other animals and the planet. This is particularly true for men who in western colonialist and some other cultures are not permitted to show any emotion other than mild happiness or a spectrum of anger.  It was nice to see a section that tackled this directly, especially because the lack of allowance for grief and emotions is a huge cause of burn-out.

Johnson also explores the wide reaching psychological and sociological effects of ecological collapse. Destruction of environments and nonhuman animal habitats is something that is of mourned by both individuals and entire communities- sometimes worldwide such as in the case of oil spills that have attracted attention (unfortunately representing only a few of many that regularly occur.) The cultural expectations around grief translate to the clinical as well. Johnson describes more than one instance where a client was trying to grieve the horrors of environmental destruction and the therapist told them it was actually a manifestation of something else and that they would stop being upset once some other root issue was addressed. I can attest that I have had similar experiences. Even as a child while sobbing, mourning the death of my beloved dog, I was told I was likely actually upset about a human in my life. It was here that Johnson introduced me to the field of ecopsychology, which was very interesting and something I had not heard of previously.

In Johnson's analysis of what she calls "Scare/Scold/Rally" campaigns, she made me consider the ways I have approached environmentalism and animal liberation. She reminds us of examples of environmentalists like the founder of Earth First! calling humans a cancer and his and other racist environmentalists' borderline celebrating the deaths in Africa via AIDS and other disease. (Johnson doesn't call them racist, directly, but I am.) She includes studies that show that apocalypse type messaging can activate bigger denial responses in people via activating the just world fallacy. This is the belief that the world is inherently a just place where bad things only happen when they are deserved and good things happen to good people. It is, for instance, associated with the appropriated and colonized version of what people call "karma." This denial can be seen in how many grown adults have responded to the brave and brilliant teen, Greta Thunberg's passionate address to world leaders by ruthlessly attacking her. (For the record, I support Thunberg's style of address and her passion, I am just using the most recent example of widespread denial.) Johnson does not claim that the answer is to be without passion, anger, and seriousness around issues of climate change, but to be more thoughtful and considerate of the tactics we use to talk about it. She urges us to discover ways to tell the truth most effectively. 

She also discusses how some Hindus (and I note, many far left radicals) have a belief that we may be too late to stop ecological collapse with the ways we are headed and thus must invest more in community based structures and ideas of mutual aid. Johnson includes perspectives and experiences from various cultures and includes Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. I do think that at times, Johnson leans a little toward "noble savage" tropes in her discussions of indigenous people. There are some statements that seem to paint all native people as having the same rituals around nature, all being people who kill animals and believe an animal "gives" their life for humans. There are a lot of indigenous people who believe animals' lives are taken from them and choose not to consume animals as a result. There is a very wide range of indigenous experience regarding nature and animals. That said, I still appreciated her sharing and insights from the times she spent listening to various indigenous people about their rituals and cultures. I appreciate her discussing environmental racism (even if she didn't use those words) via calling attention to countless abuses of mostly poor Black people in polluted housing projects.

The only thing I disliked like about this book was the way Johnson talked about animals. It wasn't egregiously terrible. There is just a divide sometimes between environmentalists like me who see animal liberation as a central tenet of environmentalism and ones like Johnson who shy away from any strong statements about nonhuman animal exploitation, aside from ones most people have an easy time agreeing with, like saying endangered species poaching is wrong or discussing the beauty of wild, non-domesticated animals. She refers to animals as "it" regularly which always bothers me, especially in texts literally about environmental destruction. The borderline fetishistic admiration of how some indigenous people slaughter animals is another example. I am not saying indigenous people should stop preserving their cultures. They are the least responsible groups worldwide regarding animal exploitation and environmental destruction. I just often see white and other colonizing people using them as an excuse to shy away from calling out animal agribusiness as a whole. More and more each day, environmentalists are accepting that we must stop animal agriculture- including the 1-5% that are nonfactory farms (many of which have an even larger carbon footprint than factory farms) in order to slow climate collapse. I would have liked more direct addressing of domesticated animal exploitation and related environmental destruction.

Johnson finishes off the book by discussing environmentalism through a lens of existentialism in one of the final chapters. This was something I did not quite expect and really enjoyed reading. I don't claim to have a single philosophy I adhere to in life, but if I had to, existentialism would likely be it. She discusses the reality that, yes, focusing on individual consumption or intervention as some world saving venture can yield unrealistic assessments of what should be done. (I am vegan for instance, but don't believe my individual veganism is more powerful or that I need to be more accountable than large exploitative corporations like Tyson foods.) However, doing what is right in general as an individual has meaning and purpose in and of itself. Existentialism is often associated with atheism- since there is no afterlife, we must do what we can to create meaning in this life. But, even as an atheist, I think existentialism can also be applied by those who are afterlife-faith-based as well. Rather than believing that all rewards will come after death, we also can find rewards now even if the reward is in knowing that we did the best we could and remained true to our moral compass. 

Overall, this book was a compelling read that defies categorization. Johnson has a great many ways of wisely approaching these topics and it works out fantastically in this text. 

This was also posted to my goodreads.