Believers

Making a Life at the End of the World

By: Lisa Wells

Narrated by: Lisa Wells

Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change.

We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?

Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead.

Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming - guns into ploughshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.

Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.

©2021 Lisa Wells (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

I believe

A beautiful book about the reality of our choices and renewal of our soil and seeds

Connective, Relevant

Loved every chapter! It felt like lifting a mirror to my own thoughts and finding solace in another persons life story and reflections on these times. I plan to listen to it again!

All things, truly considered.

Early into listening to this audiobook, a friend asked me if I was "enjoying" it. My response was that "enjoy" wasn't really a word that fit. Better descriptors might include important, provocative, affirming, relatable in vulnerability and complexity regarding the human experience.

Where do we fit, and how should we live? How should we shape our culture for the future? The Earth will balance itself one way or another, but will that balance sustain human life. By the end, my internal barometer is working through those questions, and I dare say, I have grown to "love" this book. I love this book in the way that love hurts and nourishes the soul, simultaneously. I believe it should be required reading for those who value critical thinking.

Terrestrial tale of transmutation

a love song to what was, what is and what can be. Believers is a wholistic honoring of an ever changing existence we have all shared. Powerful futurism from not a place of fantasy but aching realism. Consciously mortal, this book shares so many permissions to be alive and to live for a future that we cannot see but we can be a part of. So grateful to have listened to this book with Lisa Wells narration. i will be revisiting this book many more times.

I wish there was a star for impact. This book was an anxiety-producing, crippling slog. But also…

…chapters 7 & 8 made it entirely worth it! This book was marketed as hopeful and solution-based but, nearly all of the solutions are not tenable for the average person with an average psyche until later chapters. It was 90% crippling and I literally took anxiety meds at certain points. Why did I keep reading it? I have no f-ing clue to be honest?! **shrug** I put it down a lot. It took me nearly 8 mos to finish. I’m glad I did. I have some baby curiosities to feed, and as Liz Gilbert says in Big Magic (another uphill read for me), curiosity can lead to creativity.

I think it’s important for me to mention that I am not naive about the coming disasters that our current behavior holds for humans and other animals living on this planet. This book did not shock me in those ways… that is not what sent me spiraling, it was other aspects that I will not mention here. Pick up the book and have your own experience.

Will I recommend it? Absolutely, I will to certain people. What star rating would I give it for impact? 5!

(Also, it’s just a personal preference for me that authors do not read their own books, and use voice actors instead… this the average star rating for “Performance.”)