Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

(Paperback)

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When the latest environmental devastation--a clearcut forest, a mountaintop mining site--breaks your heart, this book provides ideas and inspiration to find joy, make art, and experience ritual, all told with a heartfelt journalistic style. Trebbe Johnson gives clear ideas and suggestions for accepting places that have been wounded by human interaction, from clearcutting and frakking to extreme weather and urban sprawl. Ever had that sick feeling when you see a clearcut forest or mountain top destroyed for mining Do you grieve for the woods or the fields you played in as a child Often, we respond simply by abandoning these places, as if they no longer count. Or else we work so feverishly to restore them to a state somewhere between what we remember and what we long for that we fail to pay attention to how they look--and how they affect us--right now. Trebbe Johnson, after years of leading workshops, retreats, and rites of passage programs internationally, such as a retreat in an old-growth clear-cut forest, a ceremony at Ground Zero after September 11, and a walk in weapons testing grounds at Eglin Air Force Base, suggests using art and ritual to make peace with the place as it is now. She founded an organization of the same name that has an annual Global Earth Exchange Day, where communities come together in a local place that has been wounded by toxicity, greed, or simply modern progress, to make art out of the trash and found objects there. The experience encourages acceptance for the place as it has become--"ugly" and yet beautiful in its own way. In a well-crafted narrative that includes interviews with cutting-edge thinkers and doers from around the world, she reminds us that spending time in these places, finding beauty there, discovering what they can tell us about ourselves, and making simple creative gifts for them, we can discover new sources of meaning, community, creativity, and even joy.

Reviews

"Radical Joy for Hard Timesis a journey through brokenness void of expectation. It is a demanding journey but one I recommend wholeheartedly."
Parabola

Radical Joy for Hard Timesis a must-read for those looking to take their role in repairing our world. At once, it is a manual for how we can move forward and a meditation on how best to respond. It shows us alleven in the face of substantial challengesthe true value of everyday actions.
Henry Timms, coauthor ofNew Powerand cofounder of #GivingTuesday

Its a great vision that Trebbe Johnson is sending out into the world, and it is very much her own. The great central truth of what she is doing is the very hard lesson for all of us in our lives, and yet it is our blessing.
W. S. Merwin, former poet laureate of the United States

Trebbe Johnsons idea is a revolutionary one and imperative in this possibly late phase of our relationship with the only planet we have: to look directly at loss. This manifesto is a songnot a dirge, but a symphony with all the complexity and emotion our home, the ever-creative Earth, calls forth.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author ofThe Place You Love Is Gone

"Engaging and intense, this book demonstrates vividly how contemplative approaches to life are profoundly political. Deeply embedded in how we respond to mass extinctionwhich is the least euphemistic way of putting what is now happening in the biosphereis a habitual conceptual severing of our necessarily symbiotic relationships with other lifeforms. This severing forms the very structure of how we have taught ourselves to enjoy 'landscape.' In showing us how to appreciate differently, Trebbe Johnson shows how to repair the severing, which traumatizes humans as much as it traumatizes nonhumans, step by contemplative step."
Timothy Morton, author ofDark EcologyandEcology Without Nature

In hard times there is a temptation to let the problems of the world orient the direction of our lives and the shape of our activism. Through her extensive artistic activist practice, Trebbe Johnson shows us a different path: a way to turn devastation into creation. Through simple acts of beauty, she provides a map that moves us from wallowing in dystopian despair to imagining utopian joy.
Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and cofounder of the Center for Artistic Activism

How are we to face the ecological desecration of so many beloved places Here at last is an ecopsychological guide bringing together many wise voices to show us a path beyond hopelessness into strength and renewal.
Craig Chalquist, editor of Rebearths: Conversations with a World Ensouled

There are some people on Earth who have a radical capacity for empathy. Trebbe Johnson is one of those people and she has applied her radical empathy to the appreciation of damaged places and the need for those places to receive the gift of healing beauty. Despite this Herculean task in a wounded world, she persists and refuses to ignore the desolation and look away. Radical Joy for Hard Times is Johnsons literary gift to the reader who wants to play a part in a global community of Earth healing. Accept it, its yours, given with love.
Glenn Albrecht, creator of the concept of solastalgia and author of Earth Emotions

Author Bio

TREBBE JOHNSON is an author and frequent speaker on the relationship between people and nature. Her previous books are The World Is a Waiting Lover and 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty, and she has won many awards, including the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Telly Award for a video made for the UN on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. She has led workshops, retreats, and rites of passage programs internationally since 1995, such as a retreat in an old-growth clear-cut forest, a ceremony at Ground Zero after September 11, and a walk in weapons testing grounds at Eglin Air Force Base. In 2009, Johnson founded the non-profit organization Radical Joy for Hard Times, dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. She regularly speaks at a variety of events, from the Stephens College Commencement to the Parliament of the World's Religions to the Sierra Club. Johnson is a contributing editor at Parabola Magazine and an active member of the Wilderness Guides Council, the Florence Shelly Stewardship Committee, and SCAN (Susquehanna Clean Air Network). She is married to Andrew Gardner, an artist, and lives in rural northeastern Pennsylvania.