My new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet, centers on the ways in which ordinary forgetting is an accomplice to the destruction and demolition of the living world. The scientific name for this is “shifting baseline syndrome.” Most people know of it via the fable of the frog in hot water—the critter that, apocryphally, will boil to death as it keeps accommodating to ever rising temperatures. As I write in the Introduction: “All of it—the extinctions, the clear cuts, the wounds of the minds, the looming chaos of an atmosphere unraveled—can be trace to the ways in which we trick ourselves into believing it’s not really that bad because today is only a tad worse than yesterday.”

There are already enough books focused on the world’s environmental woes, so in The Earth Said Remember Me I focus on solutions. The book is a resistance manual for environmental defense, presented in the form of meditations and explorations. I offer readers a simple, four-part antidote to environmental amnesia. Go Outside. Bear Witness. Make a Record. Pass It On.

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