Every year on April 22, governments, institutions, businesses, and people across the globe collectively honor planet Earth and recognize the ever-pressing necessity of transitioning to a more equitable green economy. This year’s National Earth Day theme, Invest in Our Planet, emphasizes the vitality of seizing the moment to change the business and political climate. The three pillars, act boldly, innovate broadly, and implement equitably, creates a sense of solidarity and accountability between all Earth’s inhabitants.
“In 2022, we all must enter into one partnership for the planet,” said Kathleen Rogers, President of EARTHDAY.ORG, in the public announcement of this year’s theme.
To celebrate Earth Day, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen and of Agrarian Spirit by Norman Wirzba. These two books put human responsibility in discourse with the depletion of our planet’s ecological capital to address today’s most pressing environmental and social concerns.
In An Inconvenient Apocalypse, Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, two of today’s most prominent writers in the fields of sustainability studies, confront harsh ecological realities and the multiple cascading crises facing our world today. They argue that humanity’s future will be defined not by expansion but by contraction. “This is one of the most important books of our lifetime. An Inconvenient Apocalypse can help us face the difficult choices that confront us all and enable us to acknowledge the urgency of our current circumstance,” said Fred Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience.
Agrarian Spirit demonstrates how agrarianism is of vital and continuing significance for spiritual life today. Through compelling strokes, Norman Wirzba traces how agrarian practices are an essential corrective to the political and economic policies that are doing so much harm to our society and habitats. “Norman Wirzba has done it again: this is—literally and figuratively—the most grounded (and grounding) book I’ve read in a long age. It will lead you to contemplation, and then, if you’re lucky, to change,” said Bill McKibben, author of The Comforting Whirlwind.
Wes Jackson is co-founder and president emeritus of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. A 1992 MacArthur Fellow, he is the author and co-author of numerous books, including New Roots for Agriculture.
Robert Jensen is a professor emeritus in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of many books, including Plain Radical.
Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He is the author and editor of sixteen books, including This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World.
Agrarian Spirit (view book video here) will be available on August 1, 2022, and An Inconvenient Apocalypse (view book video here)will be available on September 1, 2022. We encourage you to preorder the books now on our website. For more information, to schedule an author interview, or for a review copy, contact Kathryn Pitts, pitts.5@nd.edu, 574.631.3267.
This piece first appeared at undpressnews.nd.edu.