Bøger af Peter Friederici

The importance of telling new climate stories—stories that center the persistence of life itself, that embrace comedy and radical hope.“How dare you?” asked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations in 2019. How dare the world’s leaders fiddle around the edges when the world is on fire? Why is society unable to grasp the enormity of climate change? In Beyond Climate Breakdown, Peter Friederici writes that the answer must come in the form of a story, and that our miscomprehension of the climate crisis comes about because we have been telling the wrong stories. These stories are pervasive; they come from long narrative traditions, sanctioned by capitalism, Hollywood, and social media, and they revolve around a myth: that the nation exists primarily as a setting for a certain kind of economic activity.   Stories are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. The story that “the economy” takes priority over everything else may seem foreordained, but, Friederici explains, actually reflect choices made by specific people out of self-interest. So we need new stories—stories that center the persistence of life, rather than of capitalism, stories that embrace contradiction and complexity. We can create new stories based on comedy and radical hope. Comedy never says no; hope sprouts like a flower in cracked concrete. These attitudes require a new way of thinking—an adaptive attitude toward life that slips the narrow yoke of definition.

Set in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, amid traffic, pollution, and ever-increasing neighborhoods of houses and apartments, these meditative personal essays explore the importance of our connection with the natural world, history, and memory. The Suburban Wild follows the seasons from one spring to the next, celebrating the natural miracles we frequently miss and revealing a territory less tamed than we might imagine. These essays offer the sights and sounds found on the outskirts of cities, just perceptible amid the clutter and din of crowded streets and sidewalks. From the constant humming of cicadas on summer evenings and the seasonal migrations of ducks to the myriad hues in a green heron's feathers, Peter Friederici reveals a complex place in which wild geese and morning commuters share the same habitat.The essays honor our lost creatures and places, emphasizing the importance of history, memory, and consciousness. The author describes the varying shades and textures of a clay bluff near his childhood home, relating the gradual erosion and recession of this Ice Age-old landform. A description of spirogyra algae blooms on Lake Michigan merges with a discussion of the lake's once abundant native mussels and the imported zebra mussels that are threatening their existence. From recorded memories, Friederici re-creates the sight of the now extinct passenger pigeon. Though awareness of the destruction of the landscape and its creatures is never far from the wonders presented here, The Suburban Wild connects the tracks of wildlife and traces of our changing landscape with our own path through the world. The book explores how history--whether natural or cultural, collective or personal--shapes a landscape, and how human memory shapes that history. At heart, it seeks to forge a link between the world outside our windows and the one inside.