To Reach the Spring

From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of Eco-Crisis

By: Nathaniel Popkin

Narrated by: Nathaniel Popkin

Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

An urgent and deeply felt call to face our complicity in the Earth’s destruction. 

In the shadow of an escalating eco-crisis - a looming catastrophe that will dwarf the fallout from COVID-19 - how can we explain our society’s failure to act? What will we tell future generations? Are we paralyzed because the problem is so vast in scope, or are there deeper reasons for the widespread passivity? Nathaniel Popkin explores the moral, social, and psychological dimensions of the crisis, outlining a path to a future spring. 

Advance praise:

To Reach the Spring is a tour de force, both an incisive reckoning with the full magnitude of the climate emergency along with a visionary understanding of how and why we have come to this place. I read this book with an unruly range of emotions and states of mind including shame, unspeakable grief, existential dread, curiosity, insight, admiration for the author but finally, most of all, hope. By illuminating how our reverence for earth is intrinsically connected to our capacity to hope and to heal leading to an inexorable yearning to act, Nathaniel Popkin has offered us a way forward. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about our future." (Gail Straub, author of The Ashokan Way: Landscape's Path into Consciousness)

"Nathaniel Popkin is a swordsmith. He hones words that cut deep through the lies and self-deceptions that license cruelty, revealing the brittle bones of an unjust, death-dealing culture. Everyone should read this book. It is clarifying, bracing, and ultimately transformative; truth-telling is essential for change, and change is essential." (Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising)

"How can we go diligently about our business while the daily disasters of climate change are already visibly recasting natural processes, forcing migration and violence? 'We are the most slippery kind of criminal,' explains Nathaniel Popkin in his searching new book To Reach the Spring. And he's right, Americans (especially middle class and wealthy white Americans) have built up a resistance to the consciousness of their own complicity in the climate crisis. Exerting privilege without feeling privileged, we go about our quotidian consumption, and destruction, consumed by worry but never taking real action. Simultaneously told as a letter to a future descendant, a history of disaster, a personal confession, and a lie-stabbing op-ed, Popkin has crafted a read so melancholy and spiritual you won't lay it aside until you're done." (Scott Gabriel Knowles, author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America)

©2020 Nathaniel Popkin (P)2020 Nathaniel Popkin

Tour de force!

Nathaniel Popkin is not only an author and writer - he is a philosopher, scholar, and poet! This book blew me away with the rich, mosaic of ideas, clearly explained and presented, and REALLY made me think. If you want a fresh way to find out more and think about our eco-crisis - how and why the world is dying TODAY - you won't want to miss this find.

The Book to Read Now

This book captures this moment. Read by the author, it ties together the coronavirus crisis with current and past politics and policy that worship the dollar at the expense of the earth. It's touching, eye opening and - if you're concerned about the climate crisis - puts our collective American-car-culture lifetime into perspective just as a new president comes with the promise of a plan to heal the planet.