by Margi Prideaux, Stormbird Press, October 2022. “WE ARE ALL DEPENDENT AND WHEN DISASTER HITS, WE ARE BROKEN.” Stephen Harrod Buhner
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors. – Adrienne Rich
I wish I’d had a copy of Margi Prideaux’s remarkable FIRE: A Message from the Edge of ClimateCatastrophe(Stormbird Press) 18 months ago.
I was then in the midst of writing Earth Grief: TheJourney Into and Through Ecological Loss and there was one thing I needed for that book that I could not find. I needed an extended account of the emotional and existential impacts a major climate change event makes on an individual and the community they live in. And that failure, if you think about it a minute, tells you a great deal about how dysfunctional the bureaucratic, researcher, and media responses are to the terrible circumstances we are facing. The voices of the actual human beings on the front lines, those who are dealing with the loss of everything that matters to them, are missing except in the most superficial sense. We might get a paragraph or two but there are no depth reports from the broken hearts of those who have looked into the face
2of these kinds of grief and loss. Until now.
