Dinosaur Dreaming. Gail Collins-Ranadive
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Praise for Dinosaur Dreaming
As a 21-year-old trying to build my own life and career, I am simultaneously overrun with anxiety and overwhelmed with grief and fear about what little promise there is for a future on Earth. It’s SO easy to let fear take over and think there’s nothing much I can do: if this was REALLY as big as they say it is, surely someone would do something. But that’s exactly the problem, the people we’re supposed to look to for direction in times of need are utterly blinded by greed and money. For so long we’ve all been following what the media and news fed us, while staying in the dark about the realities of climate change and global warming. Meanwhile, the ones who hold the highest office of the United States and who were sworn to make the best choices on our behalf have ultimately betrayed us. I found it so interesting that my grandmother wove her life story around the story of climate change. It was powerful having the anecdotes in which she was buying a car or doing some other, rather ordinary task, while unbeknownst to her the big oil industries were working to cover up any word of climate change. Now she shows me how vital it is that those of us who understand the magnitude of the crisis take action so that, hopefully, we will be able to outweigh the actions of those impeding our progress.”
–Channing Pooley, Author’s Granddaughter
“Dinosaur Dreaming is a beautiful book, an exceptionally important one, and it comes just in the nick of time. Collins-Ranadive weaves her own personal story into her narrative about ‘our climate moment.’ Here, in compelling story and vivid image, complicated realities at last make sense and invite smart conclusions. This book is a must read right now.”
–Barbara Child, author of Memories of a Vietnam Veteran
“Collins-Ranadive writes a memoir that sets an example of the moral accountability and right actions that climate change demands of people and societies of good will. Her concisely summarized research and clear language in explaining the science and politics of this complex issue are exemplary. Her call to readers is to stand strong, with open eyes, and dream and co-create a different future. Dinosaur Dreaming shows us how to confront the greatest challenge humanity has known with awareness, hope, guts and grace.”
–Elise Houghton, Environmental/Climate Education Advocate
“Collins-Ranadive skillfully weaves together science, story, and soulful imagination to provide a vivid snapshot of our present predicaments and powerful lifelines in addressing the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.”
–Aly Tharp, Program Director, Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth
“This book is a manifesto of action for all of us that care about the future of our planet. As a teacher, I am inspired and buoyed by the young people to address the realities of climate science. For them, we must all lead with our values aligned to ensure our Earth’s health for all who come after us. Gail is articulate in weaving her authentic personal journey with the urgency of ‘Telling the truth’ of our climate crisis.”
–Theo Small, Teacher and Union Leader
“What we once referred to as “climate change” has been so ignored that it has now become a “climate crisis.” Now ignorance is no longer bliss. Slowly we’ve realized that preserving the earth is to preserve our lives, while destroying earth is to destroy ourselves. Now the question is, is it too little and too late?”
–Donald Winslow, Journalist and Painter
“In this luminous book, Collins-Ranadive teaches us how to see the climate crisis through the eyes of a wise elder. Her life’s rich and inspiring stories, from motherhood to climate ministry, pull us into the discussion in a new way. She has a way of opening our hearts so we can begin to challenge ourselves to see the clear truth of the problem yet not be defeated. Her careful research educates us by taking us on a creative journey through a rainbow prism to understand what brought us to this place of planetary emergency. She and her partner Milt Hetrick have been brave stewards in their work and inspire us all to ‘transform our sense of hopelessness into activism on behalf of all that we cherish.’ ”
–Paddy McClelland, Co-founder, Wall of Women
Glacier calving this finite blue marble
Eye to eye
with St. Francis
bird the sun shares
heavy impact
of the waterfall
no longer falling
warming up to
the idea of climate change
by degree
–Jackie Maugh Robinson, Haiku Poet
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Front Cover Image © Map by AnSuArt
Interior and Cover Designed by Leslie M. Browning
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Dedication
For
MacKenzie,
Channing,
Alex,
Addison,
and Liam,
of course.
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Epigraph
“The elephant in the room is the room itself, the biosphere in which all life currently known to exist in the universe is enclosed, and on which it all depends, the biosphere now devastated by climate change, with far more change to come. The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war—and that was something that might happen, not something that is happening. Climate change is here, and it is changing everything. It is bigger than anything else, because it is everything, for the imaginable future.”
—Rebecca Solnit
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Foreword
In a recurring nightmare, I am standing in a linked-arm chain of climate-conscious citizens. We are lined up along the cliff-edge of extinction, facing off against the perpetrators of the greatest crime against humanity: the polluters and profiteers who have known for decades that their products would warm the planet, change the climate, and harm life on earth by overloading our atmosphere with CO2 emissions.
Now they’ve completely hijacked our government that’s supposed to be of, for, and by we the people and are poised to exploit every last ounce of fossilized sunlight for political power and private profit.
The only thing standing in their way is us…anyone and everyone who knows we are at a crossroads unlike any other in human history.
In my nightmare, I fear I’ll be a weak link in the line of resistance, a place where the climate deniers and liars break through, with those they have duped following as mindless as lemmings headed straight for the cliff. As the juggernaut of existential death presses towards us, I worry that my grief over what’s being lost will swallow me whole. I hang on to dear life despite throbbing arms.