LISTEN TO THE EARTH

A call to be mindful of our planet’s capacity to absorb environmental damage.

Drawing on reports from the Global Footprint Network, Lemniscates bases her appeal on the notion of “Earth Overshoot Day,” “the date when human demand since the beginning of the year exceeds what the Earth can produce and absorb in an entire year”—July 28 in 2022, though how that date gets calculated goes unexplained. Urgently pointing out that “we are borrowing from our precious planet’s future,” she tallies a litany of changes in policy and behavior that, oracularly, “will move the date.” If all of her suggestions, from stopping the use of plastic bags to replacing fossil fuels in industrial processes with “green hydrogen,” are broad, even worldwide, in scope, they are still valid agenda items and could, with some creative thinking, be locally, even personally, scaled. But an even larger list of actions in the backmatter comes off more like pie in the sky as the rewards take an arbitrarily specific turn: “If all the world’s people would dress warmly for cold weather and coolly for hot weather, we could move the date 3 days.” The illustrations, rendered in watercolor, acrylic, and collage, open with smoke-shrouded industrial landscapes before moving to more uplifting scenes of racially diverse figures, mostly children, engaged in environmentally conscious activities. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Overwrought but with plenty of talking points for young eco-activists.