and performers came together on the XR ‘Day of Love’.
And now this collection: it has not been easy to choose from such a rich variety of voices, and the collection could easily have been twice as long, but the following selection feels both challenging and vital.
We have gathered the letters into five headings: Love, Loss, Emergence, Hope, Action. The headings are not prescriptive, though they may serve as a prescription: if you feel despair, turn to Hope; if you feel loss, you may find comfort in voices who feel as you do; or you may need to read poems that immerse you in love for this home we all share.
We encourage you, too, to read the book from start to finish, but if you do so you will see that this is not a simple journey from Love to Action: love also contains fear and anger, hope contains despair. This is not comfortable reading. It is not comfortable to read the words of teenagers who fear they will have no future, of children begging for change. Of adults horrified by the world they are complicit in creating. Of mothers who despair for their children. Of those stricken by grief at the daily, catastrophic loss of the living world they hold so dear.
Some of the boldest voices speaking to us through this collection are those from the Global South, in countries where ecological and climate catastrophe are a lived reality. Daniela Torres Perez challenges us not to turn a blind eye to the suffering of her home country Peru: ‘a place where the people with the least money are the ones that suffer most’. While Renato Redentor Constantino, writing from the Philippines, invites us to imagine ‘an island travelling south, a landscape on the move where compassion is the currency and solidarity the only debt people owe one another’. As climate breakdown arrives on the doorstep of those living in the north, it is important to remember this wider reality, one in which people of colour and people living in poverty have long been disproportionately affected by ecological breakdown.
There are no easy answers contained within these pages, no clear paths out of the maze in which we find ourselves, but there is courage here and there is hope, hope that – in the words of Joanna Macy – is active, that calls us to action. There is love that echoes and speaks back to loss. Voices that dare to imagine a more beautiful, equitable, generous way of being with ourselves, each other and all those who share this living, interdependent, planet that we call home.
With love, and hope,
Anna Hope, Jo McInnes, Kay Michael, Grace Pengelly
August 2019
Dear Author of Genesis,
I know it’s pointless to begin like this, because you lived about three thousand years ago and are no longer around to answer my questions, but I think you would appreciate what I am trying to do in this letter, so I’ll carry on. You were a creative writer, an artist, and writers play around with words in ways that non-writers don’t always understand. It is the way you have been misunderstood that bothers me. In fact, not understanding you has brought the world you wrote about so lovingly to a moment of great danger, a danger I want to tell you about.
You started with these words: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ And that’s how your book got its name, Genesis, Beginning. Then you went on to craft a great poem describing how God made everything in six days and rested on the seventh. That’s where the trouble started. I wish you had added a little note inviting your readers to take you seriously but not literally. In fact, I wish you had written a prologue on the art of reading. I wish you had reminded us that you were an artist responding imaginatively to the wonder of the universe, not a reporter taking notes on something happening in real time. But that’s how some people started to read you. Not as a glorious fiction that prompted their wonder, but as an accurate news report of a tumultuous week about six thousand years ago. You won’t believe this, but there are people alive in my time who insist on reading you that way. We could dismiss them all as endearing eccentrics, if it weren’t for something else they get wrong, something they again take literally – and this time it’s had consequences, very serious consequences.
On the sixth or last ‘day’ of your narrative, God creates all the living creatures on earth, the grand climax being the emergence of humanity, God’s special favourite.
‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.’
Then come the fateful instructions to these human beings about how they are supposed to live:
‘And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’
I want to pause for a moment to reflect on what you thought you were doing when these words came to you. Great writers don’t tell us about something. Their writing becomes the thing itself. Is that what you were doing here? Were you writing with a premonitory sorrow over the meaning of these words? In a single sentence you captured humanity’s arrogance, its belief that it owned or had dominion over the earth, and could do anything it liked with it. And that’s what we have done. The planet is marked with the smudge and ugliness of our abuse of it. It is littered with the debris of our greed.
To be fair to us – or to some of us – we have begun to realise what we have done to the planet in our arrogance, and we are trying to make amends. We have started cleaning up the rivers we polluted. We are trying to purify the air over our cities we have saturated with toxic particles. We are even beginning to worry about the effect of losing the species we have rendered extinct. But now some of us are beginning to wonder if it might all be too little too late. A bit like deciding to spring-clean a house on the edge of a cliff that’s about to plunge into the sea because of coastal erosion. It’s the earth, our home, that’s now on the edge of that cliff. All because we didn’t know how to read what you had written. Because we read your words not as a warning, not as a fable that required interpretation, but as an instruction manual to be followed to the letter. Look where it’s got us.
It gets worse. There are literalists out there who believe this is what God actually wants. And because they don’t know how to read, they’ve come up with a god who hates the world so much he is coming soon to destroy it and everything in it. Except them, of course. They’ll be saved as the planet combusts. That’s why they welcome its extinction. ‘Use it before you lose it, the end is nigh,’ they yell, believing their divinely chartered spaceship is standing by to take them to safety. How could I sum up their attitude for you, dear author of Genesis? ‘Fuck the planet, we’re gonna be OK,’ is probably as close as I can get.
So I hope you understand now why I am writing to you. It’s not that I wish you’d been a bit more careful in how you wrote your parable. It’s just that I wish you’d made it clearer what you were doing when you started composing your great fiction. On the other hand, it’s hardly your fault there are so many humans who completely lack imagination. But why do so many of them claim to be religious? Don’t they understand that religion is the oldest art? And that its stories are to be read seriously, but never literally? Enough already.
The good news is that young people everywhere are rebelling against humanity’s God-given right to destroy the earth, their home. Their religion is love of the little blue planet that bore them and sustains them. And they are fighting hard to save it. You’d admire them. You’d want to write something to help them. Or maybe you would just point to something another writer from your own family of artists would say hundreds of years later. His
