 Good evening and welcome to the 2022 Wilma Dijkman Stokely Memorial lecture. Tonight's lecture is presented by the Friends of the Knox County Public Library and the John C. Hodges Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries. My name is Paul James and I'm the Vice Chair of the John C. Hodges Society. The Hodges Society supports the UT Libraries through monetary gifts, engagement with library programs and by raising awareness of the value of the university libraries within the local community, across the state and also to researchers from around the world. Each year this memorial lecture is an opportunity for fellow book lovers and library supporters across our region to come together to celebrate the legacy of Wilma Dijkman Stokely. It's an honor to welcome you to this our second virtual installment of this annual event. We miss seeing you in person of course but we're thrilled that you're joining us tonight perhaps from the comfort of your own home. It is now my pleasure to welcome Jim Stokely. Jim is the son of James Stokely and Wilma Dijkman Stokely. Jim is like me a board member of the John C. Hodges Society but he also serves as president of the Wilma Dijkman legacy which is an organization that sponsors events and activities that sustain the values for which Wilma truly believed in. Environmental integrity, social justice and the power of the written and spoken word. We want to acknowledge all that Jim has done over the years to preserve his mother's legacy including donating his papers to the University of Tennessee Libraries where they're available to students, faculty and members of the community for study and research. Jim it's wonderful to see you again tonight. How are you doing? Good well thank you Paul. Well as always I'm here not to deliver any kind of speech but to tell jokes. I'm going to tell two jokes. These are the best I've heard from the previous year. Now folks it's been another bad year so don't blame me if this is the best we poor humans can do. So yesterday I asked my wife if I was the only one she'd ever been with. She said no all the others were 9s and 10s and you know CEOs and presidents and chancellors want all their employees to participate in their retirement plans and about 3 p.m. yesterday Chancellor Plowman stormed into Library Dean Steve Smith's office and said why haven't you signed up for our 401k? And Steve said I can't run that far. All right jokes are over. Quick update on the activities of the Wilma Diamond Legacy. Our second book entitled No Work in the Grave, Life in the Toe River Valley will be published in April. Ron Eller historian emeritus at the University of Kentucky calls it quotes an Appalachian memoir of the highest order. I know some of you here tonight are friends of Wilma Diamond. I'd like to invite all of you who care about rivers, social justice, the written word, and the spoken word to become friends of Wilma Diamond. Just visit www.WilmaDigmentLegacy.org. So my mother was passionate about safeguarding this natural environment of ours. Basically we're part of the natural environment. In 1955 she published her first book The French Broad which detailed water pollution and brought river contamination to the nation's attention. Ahead of her time she believed environmental protection is something for which we each bear responsibility. I am thrilled tonight to continue this important and timely conversation with our speakers. Catherine Dean Moore is a writer, moral philosopher, and environmental thought leader devoted to as she says quotes the defense of the lovely reeling world. This past year she published two books. One is A Devastating Endowment of Fracking. The other titled Earth's Wild Music Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World is a love song to a vanishing world of birdsong, wolf call, and whale bellow. In her forthcoming book titled Take Heart, Encouragement for Earth's Weary Lovers, a collection of short essays and drawings, Dr. Moore offers inspiration for Earth's protectors to continue the struggle. Chrissy Kapper is a news director at WOT which is Knoxville's National Public Radio member station. She's also the local host for all things considered. She hosts WOT's monthly public affairs series called Dialogue and she has been a book discussion leader for the Knox County Public Libraries all over the page series. In addition to that Ms. Kapper grew up in the Asheville, North Carolina area, the same area where Wilma Diamond grew up. So following a presentation from Kathleen Dean Moore, Chrissy Kapper will join her on screen to interview and moderate the live Q&A. Thank you so much. Those were good jokes and it's always good to start out with laughter. I have a really good joke but I won't tell it because my husband says don't tell that joke. Well thank you, thank you Ms. Moore and thank you so much for joining us virtually this evening from the from the far west. We are so happy to have you as our speaker and to hear about a topic that was dear to my mother. It is such an honor to be here and it is such an honor to give the Wilma Dykeman Stokely lecture. I would like to have been her friend. I think we could have been given what we both care so much about. I think we could have been really good friends. So as I've learned more and more about Ms. Stokely, what I really understand about her is that she so deeply loved this place and that's what I want to talk about today. What that love means and what it asks of us and I thought that I would do that in the 30 minutes that I have by telling stories about three rivers and a song. And so we gather here in Tennessee at a hinge point in planetary history. You could drive a nail through this decade, this one, and the fate of this beautiful earth would swing in the balance. And the question then is what kind of a story will these pivotal years be? So obviously it could be a horror story with zombie cockroaches. It could be scripture with all its terror and grace. The story of global warming I think is definitely a crime novel. Or it could be a choose your own adventure novel, exciting new ideas, great leaps of imagination, a new sense of empowerment, and the weepy joy of relief and redemption. I bet it's a thriller. Whether we can stop fossil fuels in time and draw down the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before a runaway planetary change is irreversible. But the story that I want to tell in the end is a love story to this glorious planet. So what I want to explore tonight is two questions really I'm only going to ask two questions. One is what does it mean to love the world? And my second question is what does that love ask of us in a time of the greatest peril and the greatest promise the world has ever seen? So I've been thinking about Tennessee. When people in Oregon think about Tennessee, we don't necessarily think of whiskey or the Smokies or the place where the tow truck was invented. You know what we think about? We think of Dolly Parton. We think of my Tennessee mountain home. I'm going to play it for you in the background if I can. Maybe I can't. But it's a lovely song and the song that Tennessee, my Tennessee mountain home is this moving nostalgic story about what Dolly Parton loves about this place. And if you know the words, you'll know that she makes reference to June bugs on a string, which is something new to me. She talks about fireflies when evening shadows fall. An eagle spreads its wings. A songbird on the fence post sings a melody. And here she is walking home from church on a Sunday with the one you love just talking, laughing, making future plans. Life as peaceful as a baby's sigh. So beautiful. So much to love. And what a beautiful love story that she has in this song. So even though I have never been to Tennessee, I get it. I mean, I'm a nature writer and that means that my work is loving the world. I guess you might say that I am a professional world lover. And I take my inspiration from the poet, Mary Oliver and her poem messenger. My work is loving the world. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young and still not half perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. You know, when I started out to do my nature writing, everything was so simple. I was in love with the world. And so were you. And so was Dolly Parton. And so was Mary Oliver. And nature writing was just a love song. And celebrating the world was easy. You just go someplace astonishing and open your heart and open your notebook. But then, but then loving the world got more complicated. And even as I was celebrating this glorious world, it was slipping away. Since Dolly Parton wrote that song in 1973, 1973, 40% of everything that has the breath of life, animals and plants has been erased from the face of the earth. Four out of every 10 beings. And Dolly, did you know that in the time since you wrote that song, fireflies are in decline all around the world? Can you imagine Dolly losing fireflies? Crickets and insects in general are down 33%. The eagles that you mentioned in the song, Dolly, they are getting lead poisoning from bullets and their numbers, which have just soared into beautiful numbers, are now falling again. 4% to 6% in the last 50 years. And songbirds. The populations of the birds that we love the best, the red-winged blackbirds and the robins, the thrushes, they have been cut by a third. We only hear two thirds of what we used to hear. Thomas Berry says, it's our generation that's witnessing the end of the era that we evolved in. My generation has done what no previous generations could do because they lack the technological power. And what no future generation will be able to do because the planet will never again be so beautiful or abundant. Unless we act against climate change, I will die in a world, you will die too in a world that is half as rich and life-drenched as the world we were born into. My grandchildren will be able to tear out half the pages in their field guides. They won't need them. And as for the line in Dolly's song, laugh in talking, making future plans, wow, wow, making future plans. I'm very aware of a statement made by 500 scientists led by a Stanford team. What they said was that unless immediate action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, unless immediate action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, by the time today's children are middle-aged, the life-supporting systems of the planet will be irretrievably damaged. By the time today's children are middle-aged, the life-supporting systems of the planet will be irretrievably damaged. Irretrievable from the French trouvée, never to be found again. And even so, the big oil executives to increase the already unimaginable profits are devising business plans that would knowingly take down the great systems that sustain human life and all the other lives on earth. The peril, the moral peril, the planetary peril, laugh in talking, making future plans. So tell me again, what does it mean to love the world? I'm going to answer that with a story. It's a story from Earth's Wild Music. It's a story about my grandson. 12 years ago, I took my newborn baby grandson to the pond where I often go for comfort. I held him in my arms and sang to him an old lullaby that made him soften like wax in a flame, molding his little body to my bones. He fell asleep in my arms, unafraid. I will tell you, I was so afraid. Poets warned us, writing of the heartbreaking beauty that will remain when there is no heart to break for it. But what if it's worse than that? What if it's the heartbroken children who remain in a world without beauty? How will the children find solace in a world without wild music? How will they thrive without green hills edged with oaks? How will they forgive us for letting frog songs slip away? When my grandson looks back at me, I will be on my knees begging him to say I did all I could and do all I could do. It isn't enough to love a child and wish him well. It isn't enough to open my heart to a bird-graced morning. Can I claim to love a morning if I don't protect what creates its beauty? Can I claim to love a child if I don't use all the power of my beating heart to preserve a world that nourishes children's joy? I will say this. Loving is not a kind of ladiga. Loving is a sacred trust. To love is to affirm the absolute worth of what you love and to pledge your life to its thriving, to protect it fiercely and faithfully for all time. So we who love the world had a better get down to work, which raises my second question. What is the work of loving the world? To answer this, I'm going to take you to three beautiful places, to three rivers, and we will together accept the stories they tell about what we who love the world are obliged to do. What is my work? What is the work of loving the world? So let's go to the first river. Let's go to the slew on the Mary's River. That's only just maybe a mile from my home. The message of that river I'll make clear right away is that loving the world calls us to praise and celebration. That's pretty good luck to live in a time of thrush song. To live in a time of 1200 species of road or dendrons, many of them in your own national park. To live in the time of laughing children and frogs that sing love songs. What do we make of that good fortune? Well, I'll answer that, but I'll take a stab at answering that. But that means that I have to tell a story about frogs, and it takes place in the slew on this Mary's River near my town. This story also is from Earth's Wild Music. So my husband is a scientist. He is a self-described hard scientist. You should see us try to paddle a canoe. The philosopher, me in the bow. The scientist, Frank in the stern. I'm rejoicing at the sounds of the night and Frank, Frank is explaining the biomechanics of frog song. Imagine blowing up a balloon, he says. Now imagine blowing up a balloon made of your neck skin, he says. Now imagine blowing it up twice your size. Now he says, hold there and tremble all night long. The energetics of this music are so tough, so much energy expended that it could kill a frog. Some tree frogs, he says, have only enough energy to sing for three nights. Three trembling nights. Imagine that. Imagine the silence of the frogs on day four, he says. So I do. What can I do? I sit quietly and listen to that silence. And then he says, now imagine swallowing a moth so big that you have to push it down your throat with your eyeballs. We look across the slew, the path of the moon glittering with the discarded wings of a trillion flying ants, and we look at the moon itself bulging out between black mountains. We note in passing that we ourselves are sailing at a zillion miles per hour through the darkness, spinning in a spiral galaxy, slung across space, slung out with all the singing frogs in the quiet ones, all of us up to our eyeballs in swamp. And if we even think about our own sparkling minds on that sparkling lake, if we even think about the molecular structure of awareness, the biochemistry of celebration, the universe singing its own praises in the language of philosophy and science, we have to hold on to keep from swamping the canoe, astonished and shaken. So here's what I want to say. It is this love for the world, our joy in it, its glory that is a foundation for our obligation to its continuing. The very same impulse that says this is wonderful is the impulse that says this must continue. If this is the way the world is, extraordinary, surprising, beautiful, astonishing, mysterious, contingent, beloved, then this is the way I ought to act in the world with gratitude and celebration, with caring and respect, and above all with a sense of responsibility to make sure it continues to be. So there we have it. From the Marys River, the first duty of a person who loves the world is to celebrate it. So let's go to the second river. This river is the Okavongo River in the northwest province of Botswana. The message that it sends us is that love for the world creates an obligation to warn of danger to it, to bear witness to the harms against it. The rivers in the Okanaga River system, Okavongo River system are seasonal rivers, and so they are subject to terrible flash floods. And whenever the upstream farmers in the communities there along the rivers in the streams notice their signs of flooding, they notify their downstream neighbors that the floods are coming, the floods are coming, and they do it by drumming and blowing horns and shouting and singing. To me, that's a morally beautiful thing, the dance of shared alarm, the dance of shared alarm. And so I would ask, can we do less? Living here on the river of time, we who have a clear vision upstream and downstream to the consequences of global warming and climate justice, can we do less than all can we do less than also sound the alarm? Here's what troubles me. Fully 65% of Americans feel a personal sense of responsibility to help reduce global warming, 65% of us. And yet an even higher percentage, 67% say they rarely or never even talk about the crisis. What gives America? I sort of get it. People don't want to hear grim and nothing angry or alarmist, they don't want to hear anything too dark. Give us reasons to hope, they tell me, always give us reasons to hope. But give me a break. We are well on our way to turning earth into Venus, a planet that it must be noticed doesn't support life. And we're not supposed to talk about it. Here's my point. We have to, as a matter of will, encourage, face the truth of our time and beat the drums with warnings. What are the truths we have to tell? Say it, that the world is crying out for help in all the languages of fire and storm. Say it, we know that an economy that prides itself on accumulating wealth instead of sharing it. A culture that gobbles up the fecundity of the planet instead of nurturing it. An economy of infinite extraction will kill off the sources of its sustenance. We know that if we don't put the brakes on climate change now, it probably can't be stopped. We know that fossil fuel companies to make astonishing unimaginable profits have shown themselves perfectly willing to take down the systems that sustain life as we know it on earth and cause suffering on a scale never before seen. We know. And that knowing has moral consequences. We have to talk about justice. There was a time when people understood global warming to be an environmental disaster, posing existential danger to polar bears, jungles, boreal forests. The climate change is now revealed as also a global crisis of social and racial injustice shimmering with human suffering and that suffering falls first and most severely on the poor, especially women and children, on people of color, and on indigenous people north and south. What strikes me as morally unspeakable is that the geographies of climate injustice and vulnerability now map closely on the historical patterns of colonialism and socioeconomic racial and socioeconomic racial and gender injustice. Pope Francis said climate disruption is one of the greatest moral disasters of human history because the people who will suffer the most have been the least responsible for its cause. We have to talk about justice. We have to talk about the violation of human rights. Climate change and the extractive industries that feed it are not just unjust. They are unjust in a particular way. They are directly violating rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document of moral consensus like the world has only seen once. I could talk about any human right you want and we would find it under assault by the fossil fuel industry and compliant governments. Anyone you want but I want to talk about the human right to clean water as it's affected by hydraulic fracturing just for a moment and I chose that because as I understand that that affects you here now. So hydraulic fracturing or fracking as you surely know sends a mixture of water and chemicals under high pressure into rocks underground and cracks them so that they release oil and natural gas. Then the oil companies separate out their product and they store the wastewater in pools or re-inject the contaminated water into wells underground. You know what else is underground is human water supply. Now the fracking industries don't have to tell us what they are putting in their fracking fluid. They don't have to tell us the names of those chemicals that they're releasing into the water table so I don't know what those chemicals are. They evidently don't want me to know but I do know that in the west where fracking is ubiquitous the chemicals that they're inserting into the ground include benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, arsenic, cadmium, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, and mercury. And I know that these are the chemicals that are customarily used to kill insects, clean toilet bowls, strip paint, polish brass, etch glass, preserve corpses, and commit murder. Warn people. Speak out. When these contaminate your water, your right to clean water has been violated. I would paraphrase the Boston College scholar Ibrahim X. Kendi. He says it's not possible to frack without spoiling the land. It's not possible to spoil the land without spoiling also the livelihoods in the homes of people. It's not possible to destroy people's livelihoods and homes without devaluing their way of life. It's not possible to devalue entire ways of life without devaluing also its people. And so racism and colonialism are built into the very structure of fracking as it devalues entire neighborhoods and devalues entire classes of people. There are so many truths to be told. Tell people that you can't have a thriving ecosystem unless people are treated justly and you can't have social justice unless the ecosystem is healthy enough to support all lives. Ecological thriving and social justice walk arm in arm singing behind the banner of climate justice. So that's what the Okavango River tells us, tells us that the earth's lover's second duty is the duty to warn. The duty to speak out. So let's go to the third river. This is the Willamette River. This is my home river. And this is telling us a story about earth's lover's duty to protect, defend, obstruct, resist the forces that would destroy what we love too much to lose. So let me tell you a story about a town very near my hometown. It's the town of Lancaster, Oregon. And it now consists of an outdoor restaurant that's called the junk yard because it has this junked car in the parking lot and pickup trucks pull in dragging clouds of country western music and dust and dogs snuff around this hurricane fence. This is what is now, this is what it is now, but 150 years ago Lancaster was its bustling steamboat landing on the, landing on the Willamette River. It had everything grain and planks to be loaded for Portland preachers and shysters walking down the docks. I can imagine rain shining on the backs of the Kalapuya captives who are carrying heavy loads up the boat ramps. I can imagine the algae smell of the river, the wood smoke, the spice of fresh cut lumber. All of that would be easy to imagine except for one thing. Today, Lancaster is nowhere near the river. From the junkyard parking lot, the land stretches east over grass fields and pasture land. There is no sign of a river. As it happened, just as Lancaster, the river town was getting going, the river picked up and left in the dark. When people went to bed, the Willamette was flowing along to pass town nice and steady, but heavy rains were falling on snow up in the mountains. And sure enough, the river flows quickly into the great flood of 1861. And that flood ripped at the river banks and tore out the great cotton woods. And sometime in the night, the river force jammed up against the mud and up against the cotton woods that had crawled into the river. And with nowhere to go, the river tore open another channel. And by morning, it was flowing along two and a half miles away, nice and steady, and it has been there ever since. My friend Gordon, who is a geomorphologist, said, that is an avulsion. An avulsion. That's the word for what happens when a river's own force creates so many blockages that it drops its load and goes a different way. I will tell you, I have never been so excited about a word in all my life. Avulsion. Yes, that's what we need. Let us create avulsions. I will tell you, I had been in despair. The planet is caught up in a river that's rushing towards hot, stormy, dangerous future. And the river is powered by huge amounts of money invested in terrible mistakes that are dug into the very structure of the land, this woven rate of fearful politicians and preoccupied consumers and cowardly universities and reckless corporations and bewildered parents, everybody in some odd way feeling helpless against the force of that business as usual river. I had agonized, how could Earth's defenders ever stop a river that flows with that kind of power? But I get it now. We don't have to stop the river with one big dam. We just have to jam it up all over the place and that's the fun part because once it's jammed up, the heedless force of the river will do most of the work and find itself a new direction. So our work and the work of every person who loves this world is to make a small deflection in complacency, to make a small obstruction to profits, to block business as usual, to find a better way to stop injustice, and then another, and then another, jamming up. And as it swirls around these subversions and these snags, the river, the current of business as usual will slow and it will lose power and it will create new systems and structures that change its course forever. And new ideas will grow there, creating thickets of living things and lifeways we haven't imagined. So choose your stone and drag it in people, chuck in a bunch of stones, or get together with your friends to roll in a boulder, push over a dead cottonwood, build something new. It doesn't matter what. Just get in the way of the destructive forces, just get in the way. And remember we're not trying to save our way of life. No, we're trying to save the world from this way of life's destructive power. So that's what the Willamette River has to teach us. On the Willamette River, an earth lover's third duty is to defend. The vehicle philosopher Joanna Macy says, you don't have to do everything. Do what calls your heart. Effective action comes from love. It is unstoppable. It is enough. I think that is right in every particular in every sentence. So let's look at them again. You don't have to do everything. The planet's problems are knotted together in causal tangles that might make us tear our hair. But this is a good thing. It means that an intervention at any single point will have an effect on the whole mess. So for example, more than three million people die each year from breathing polluted air. Go after that. And we will find that the cost of shutting down coal plants is more than made up by savings to the health care costs, two problems, three problems, four problems, all solved by the same action. You just have to do your part and the effects will radiate through the systems. Joanna Macy's second sentence, do what calls your heart. Your work, Frederick Birkner said, is at the intersection of your greatest joy and the earth's deepest need. So I asked my students, what do you love more than anything? What would you never give up? Hip hop says one. Then you are a force of justice. You are a voice of justice. You are a witness to wrongs. You are a beacon of a better way. I tell that student. Another student, of course, says beer. Then I say you are a protector of barley and hops from agricultural poisons. And so you are a protector of rivers and all their glistening lives. What else do you love? My girlfriend says another. Then you are a warrior for wisdom. You are a warrior for women standing against rape and murder and the invisible violence that women, especially indigenous women face every day. And then the student says, more than anything else, I love my little daughter. I move closer to that student and touch her shoulder trying not to cry. Then you, I say, are a climate activist. Joanna Macy, effective action comes from love. Hate and action, hate and anger are heavy burdens. You can carry them if you want, I tell my students. But hate will steal your strength and sour your satisfactions. Lay that burden down. Quoting John Lewis, lean toward the whispers of your own heart. And both you and your work will be transformed. So you will be joyous in your work of loving the world. Eager and fierce and courageous as love tends to make us. Love is unstoppable. And that is enough. So may you find the will and the courage to defend the world you love too much to lose. Thank you, everybody. Hello, Kathleen. Hi. We'll see how are you? I'm good. It's good to see you again. Thank you. Good to see you. Your presentation is very touching. I want to ask you about language and the word of words. You have mentioned how we use, we bear witness, we make observations and we must defend and impart warnings about what is happening around us. How I work in the media, as you know, and the words that we use create reality. When we're talking about language and philosophy, I think that I'm always reminded now, a former colleague of mine said when the pandemic was getting underway and there were mask mandates and restrictions that he'd never heard the word draconian used as commonly as it was being used all the time to describe many, many things. Those words that we use over and over become reality and change philosophy and influence how people think about the world. So when we say things like we're battling climate change or you know, just the types of words that we use, I wonder if there are certain words that you come up against when you are thinking about the world and nature and love and talking to your students about going on and making change that you don't think we should use and maybe give us some words that we should use instead. So many people want to tell me what your words not to use. So many people want to tell me not to use the angry words, not to use blaming words, not to use outraged words, but then how do you talk about what's happening? People tell me not to use words of fear and trepidation and sorrow and loss, but then how do we talk about what is happening? You have just seen me try to change the narrative from battle to love. You've just seen me try to turn from action that's based on fear for the future to action that's based on excitement about what we might create to protect what we love. But I think there's room for all of those kinds of narratives. In a different setting I would defend outrage. I would talk about outrage as a measure of our conviction of what's right. I would talk about grief as a measure of how much we value the world, but not tonight, not in this Stokely's lecture. This seemed to be a time when we would rally ourselves to defend what we care about. I love the word evolution. Isn't that a good one? Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard that word before. No, we've got to think about it more and more and use it all the time. I wonder, it made me wonder about balance because you talked about it in a way of we can throw things in the river and then the river will change course too. Part of the peril that we are in now is that we have lost balance. I wonder about our place in natural balance. Do you think it is possible for humans to find that balance again, even though there will always be humans who will profit off of the destruction of the climate and who will aim to destroy in order to profit? Is that possible? Yeah, I don't know, but you know the story I told about the Lambert River was a story about equilibrium. That river got out of equilibrium. It had all that power behind it that had nowhere to go, so that power was building up and then it solved that problem itself, flipping and it created its new equilibrium. Now it's in a new channel and it's flowing along, I would say, in some kind of balance. Do I think humans will find balance? A balance is generally between two things, right? So are we looking for a balance? Chrissy, are you looking for a balance between creation and destruction, between father time and mother earth? Are you looking for a balance between profit and praise? I don't know how to answer your question except to say that I think that it's unlikely that balance is where we will end up because balance seems to be a certain stasis, a certain a place where things have settled into some sort of state. And I think that that's not how it's going to be. It's going to be change, change, change, change, change. And so it'll be this balance is unbalanced, unbalanced, unbalanced and balanced. But when I think about the constancy of change and the necessity of changing ourselves, I think about Charles Darwin, and let me let me get there right. He said, the people who, let's see, the people who the species that survive are not the ones who are the strongest, and they're not the ones who are the smartest, the species that will survive are the ones who know how to change. And so I think, okay, we're not the strongest, we may not be the smartest smartest, but human beings are pretty good at change. And that's, I think, what we had better bank on, that we will find a way to change and change fast. Yes. Could you tell us a little bit about your book, Take Heart? Because if all of this, you know, discussion of, of the dangers that we are seeing and are in, I would like to know how you, how you can teach us to take heart. People are, the people who come and talk to me are tired. You know, climate activists are tired. They've been fighting this battle since the 70s. People are discouraged. They don't seem to be making any progress. And every time we think we've made progress, it turns out that that that isn't much progress. And so they're sad. And the question is, you know, how can we keep going? Because we have to. How can we keep going? And the important thing about that book is it is not offering hope. And we can talk about hope if we want to. It's not offering hope. It's offering courage. It's kind of offering, it's offering a strengthening of the heart to meet times of crisis. Um, we may, many, many books, and it's, it happens all the time in climate change books. And I'm sure you've seen it too in people you interview, that they'll tell a really long story about climate change. And then at the end, last chapter is always the chapter about hope. And right? Is that right? So it seems so fake to me. You know, if you're going to end up, it seems so fake to me. First, I'm going to dig a hole and put you in it. And then I will swing. Well, that's not fair. So people think that, shall we go into this? People think that they really have only two choices. And one is on the one hand is hope, and the other is despair. And that, that's, that's a terrible choice. Because if you have this kind of false hope, then you're going to say everything's going to be okay. So I don't have to do anything. And that's kind of a moral abdication. Or you can say, I'm in complete despair, no matter what I do, nothing good is going to go happen. And that also is a moral abdication. Because if that's the case, I don't have to do anything. So I can hope, or I can despair, either way, I am off the hook. But I would encourage people to think about that as a false dichotomy. Because between hope and despair, there's this moral ground that we call integrity. It's not taking action because we think we can win. It's not taking action because we think we're going to get some sort of result, some outcome from it. Because it's right. You know, you live simply, you don't, because you don't believe in taking more than your fair share. You treat the earth kindly because you love it. And so that's what I would encourage people to start thinking about is what is right, not necessarily what will get us what we, what we want. How do you use anger then? When you use your outrage and your anger, there is, you know, there's a certain level of acceptance that we all have to come to in order to move forward with anything. And certainly, when looking at the possible decimation of our own ecosystem and habitat, there is, I mean, there are things we have to be prepared to accept in order to make change, if possible. So where does the outrage come into it? And how do we use it for something creative? Yeah, I think that it's interesting to note that if this climate change ecosystem destruction were, as some people still probably believe, a natural process, we wouldn't feel anger about it. We would feel horrible, we feel horror, and we would feel grief, and we would feel desperation, but we wouldn't feel anger. The reason anger comes in is because the changes that are taking away what we love so much are intentional acts. They are knowing acts. The fossil fuel industry knows exactly what it's doing. It knew long before we knew. It's been a lot of time trying to trick us about that too. So when you have someone who's doing something harmful knowingly and intentionally, now we have something that the, the, the philosophical world for the word for that, I guess is evil. And we might as well, well say that a person might as well say that and people say that's, you shouldn't be judgmental. You shouldn't call people, you shouldn't call people to account for what they do. And I say, well, that's the case. Then are you not abdicating? Are you not abandoning what you believe is right if you can't call anybody to account? So I'm not meaning we needed to be vindictive. And I have to tell you, Chrissy, I take terrible heat for this by all my friends who are such forgiving people. But I think some things that are happening are unforgivable, unforgivable. So your question is a really, really good one about how we turn anger into something creative. I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to answer. Yeah, I think this is what we all must be thinking about though, to walk into the future now, because we are angry. Yeah, and it is really true that it is, that the anger we see in people is, and in ourselves, it is not a helpful, it's not helpful. So we have to find some way to transform it into something else. There's no question about that. Can we transform anger into grief? Maybe that's where we'll end up. Can we transform anger into action? That would be a wonderful way to end up. Hopefully we can transfer some of that anger into going outside and being astonished. Nice. Yes, and the cure for every negative emotion as far as I'm concerned is gratitude. So going outside and seeing what gifts you've been given, recognizing them as gifts and feeling gratitude, I don't think you can be angry with when you're feeling grateful. I don't think you can be sad when you're being grateful. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. When you have students and I work on a college campus, we are surrounded by young people who are learning. I don't think I realized until your talk that just in my lifetime, I was born in 1973. Oh my gosh. I didn't realize that so much life had been lost in my lifetime. So I feel overwhelmed by that often. I have a hard time understanding the perspective of a person who's much younger, having been alive when the climate peril conversation has gone on their whole life. How do you help younger students find a way to move forward and to find their place? Do you feel like they feel the despair that some of us older folks feel? Or do you feel like they are a little more resilient than many of us are? I had students, Chrissy, I left the university some years ago so that I could work full-time on climate change. I felt that I could work more quickly outside of the university. The young person that I speak most to is my grandson, who is 12. What he told me may be true of others, I'm not sure. I will get to your question, but first can I tell this story? He said, I am trying not to love the world too much. I mean, I am having a hard time with that, but I am really trying not to love it too much because I think that by the time I'm middle-aged, I won't have the world anymore and I'll probably be dead. I raged at him, I said, you will not be dead. Millions of other people, children of color, children in the southern hemisphere, other children will probably have been killed by climate change. You will not have. You have an obligation to stay alive. You have an obligation to learn everything you can so that you can prevent this harm from happening. You have to love the world and you have to marshal your strength. So let's go back to those students. They're well educated. They are interconnected like they have never been before. They are motivated like you cannot imagine. Well, we're seeing evidence of these, the power of these things in the Ukrainian Army. They are defending their homeland, these students are. And they are smart and they are brave. And I have, I don't think that it's fair for grown-ups, old people to dump this problem on them at all, but I am thrilled to see them stepping up in such brilliant ways, in such brilliant ways. You know, when Sandra Steingraber says, we have to all find our place in the save the world symphony. And I think that, and when I first heard that metaphor, I thought, that's a wonderful burn. I wish I had come up with that. And then as I was walking home from Ritaka, I thought, you know, it isn't a symphony. There is no score. There is no conductor. We are making this up as we go along. This isn't a symphony that we're going to find our place in. This is improvisational jazz. And it's perfectly suited to what young people are able to do. And you remember Miles Davis, the three rules of improvisational jazz. Let me see if I can get this straight. Learn to play your instrument. So that's the first advice to young people. Educate yourself. Get the skills you need. Insist that the university not waste your time. Insist that the university give you the skills you need. So first, learn your instrument. Second, listen really hard to the music around you, which I understand to mean make connections with other people become part of the, a part of the music. But then the third rule that Miles Davis said, forget all the rules and just blow. That's just great. And that that's right too. It's time for action and sometimes we'll make mistakes and sometimes we'll hit the jackpot and but we need to act. So when a student comes into my office and asks me, how can I how can I find my niche? How can I find my place in the climate struggle? I echo Robin Wall Kimmer, who says, if you want to know your work, ask what are your gifts? So the first question is, what do I know how to do? Or what do I want to learn how to do? What am I good at? What can I offer the struggle? Then what are your passions? What do you care about? And then you can put those together. So if I have a person who wants to be, for example, a nurse, these, it is training to be a nurse. Now is the time because everything has to change. Now is the time for that student to go to his or her computer and Google nurse plus climate action. And there'll be plethora of things that they can do. Organizations they can join, ways they can be a nurse in ways that that that help the earth and help the future and help the people and help justice. If you want, if a student who's I'm majoring in electrical engineering, Google, electrical engineering and climate action, you know, it's a silly thing to say, but it's really very empowering because the question people come to is always what can one person do? And the answer to that, I think should be stop being one person, you know, join up with other people and find your way. So I think that what they find when they do this Googling is that there are people already out there who are doing brilliant things. And they just need to start asking themselves questions to find their place. Am I happiest when I'm for something? Am I happiest when I'm against something? Do I like to work privately, making changes in my own life? Do I want to work with a group out in the public sector? When I'm fighting against something, do I want to fight against something dangerous and powerful? Or do I want to fight something my own size? So they really think hard about who they are and what they kind of do. And my colleague Sue Ellen Campbell and I are putting together that kind of a questionnaire for students so that they can go through and make a choice and find their way through this map, choosing their own adventure to the climate action that fits them to a T. And it's our way of addressing what so many people ask us. I really, really want to help, but I don't know what I want to do and I don't want to waste my time. Those are two good questions and they deserve good answers. And they can always be improvisational. Well, I have one more question for you and then I think we're going to move to the moderated question and answers from our audience. You told us before the audience showed up that you've never been to Tennessee. Isn't that terrible? Well, no. I mean, I've been to Oregon. Beautiful, beautiful. I'd love to go again. So my question for you is when are you coming? Absolutely. You know, I grew up in Ohio and I went to school and when it was time for me to go to graduate school, my husband said, let's go to a place that has beautiful rivers. So I applied to a school in Washington, Colorado and Oregon and was admitted and went to school then in Colorado. And then when he was getting a job, he says, let's find even better rivers. And so we came to Oregon. And so we kind of skimmed off the top of the continent and missed you guys. So, you know, I almost got there this week, you know, it was close because it hasn't been for COVID, I could have come. I would have loved that. I really, I don't know when I'm going to come. I feel housebound right now. But thank you. Thank you. You come visit me and then I'll come visit you, Chrissy. I will do that and you are welcome anytime. Thank you. I guess I didn't read my net to myself to unmute. I'd like to thank both Dr. Kathleen Dean Moore and Chrissy Kuiper for an inspiring and thought-provoking discussion. It has been wonderful to have you join us for the 2022 Wilma Deichmann Stokely Memorial Lecture. I'm Natalie Smith, president of Friends of the Knox County Public Library, an organization dedicated to fostering a love of libraries, books and reading in the Knox County area for community outreach, advocacy and support of the Knox County Public Library System and staff. In 2007, Friends established this lecture series to honor Wilma Deichmann Stokely's legacy by furthering the conversation on issues that were important to her. And when the University of Tennessee libraries acquired her papers in 2013, it was the perfect opportunity for our two organizations to join together in celebration of this remarkable voice of our region. We take great satisfaction in advancing her cherished causes, promoting writers with ties to the Appalachian South, furthering social justice and preserving our environmental integrity, especially when we're able to share in these inspiring evenings with fellow library and book lovers just like you. We are proud of our partnership with the John C. Hodges Society, which is now in its ninth year. If you value events like this, I encourage you to become a member of Friends of the Knox County Public Library or the John C. Hodges Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries or both. You can learn how by following the links on the screen. We'd love to have you join us. Thank you again to our presenters Kathleen Dean Moore and Chrissy Kuyper. And thank you for joining us. We wish you a lovely evening.