Advance Reading: Members of the group should read Chapters Six and Eight (“Fruits Not Roots” and “Dimming the Sun”) of This Changes Everything.
Discussion:
- Thinking back to this chapter, what stands out in your memory as something that was surprising, frustrating, or that you otherwise found provocative?
- How do you feel after reading Klein’s condemnation of so many major environmental groups in Chapter Six?
- What, if anything, did you learn from this chapter that you did not know before?
- Is there anything that you think ought to have been said on this subject that Klein leaves out? Any voices or perspectives you wish had been included?
- Do you plan to do anything differently as a result of reading this chapter? Will you associate differently with or think differently about any groups because of it?
***
Please have someone from the group read aloud the following quotation from the end of Chapter Eight:
[blockquote][G]eoengineering […] slots perfectly into our most hackneyed cultural narrative, the one in which so many of us have been indoctrinated by organized religion and the rest of us have absorbed from pretty much every Hollywood action movie ever made. It’s the one that tells us that, at the very last minute, some of us (the ones that matter) are going to be saved. […]We hear versions of this narrative every time a commercial comes on about how coal is on the verge of becoming ‘clean,’ about how the carbon produced by the tar sands will soon be sucked out of the air and buried deep underground, and now, about how the mighty sun will be turned down as if it were nothing more than a chandelier on a dimmer. […] We are, after all, the super-species, the chosen ones, the God Species. We will triumph in the end because triumphing is what we do.”[/blockquote]
- What connections, if any, do you see between this passage and Klein’s discussion of “sacrifice zones” above?
- Do our Universalist and/or Unitarian heritage and values include elements that cast us as “the chosen ones, the God species”? Do they include elements that contradict this view?
- What do UU ideas like “human agency” and “universal salvation” have to say about the narrative of human superiority criticized above?
[print_link] Please note that there are external links to videos, articles, and other resources that you will need internet access for.
