The vision
“I envision a movement with a broad stance, a strong connection to ancestral wisdom, a strengthened sense of self that inspires all who see and touch and join it. We spend our time transforming ourselves and our relationships to the earth and each other. We lead the way with our bodies and behavior, rather than shaming someone about where they are. There is love in the middle.”
– Adrienne Maree Brown in Loving Corrections
The spotlight
“We need each other.”
Those words begin a new book by activist and scholar Adrienne Maree Brown (often styled adrienne maree bruin): Loving Corrections.
It is a scientific fact that people rely on each other; even the most introverted among us social connection requiredcollaboration and community to thrive. Yet we live through what even the surgeon general calls a “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” and our country seems to be more divided by the day – political, culturaleven through generation.
Loving Corrections is written as a practical guide to begin to mend some of those divisions, to inject empathy back into our interactions, and to offer an alternative to the damage of cancellation culture. “Even among those of us who long for justice and liberation, I noticed an emerging trend within our movements that looked and felt like policing each other, getting rid of each other, and destroying each other,” Brown writes in the introduction.
Brown (who uses both he and they pronouns) is a writer, activist and scholar, and a leading voice on the politics of activism and collective liberation, with a particular emphasis on climate and environmental justice. She has written and edited a number of books exploring themes of self-care, self-help and best practices in movements for change – including the 2017 book Emerging Strategywhich is considered by many to be a movement classic.
Loving Corrections is the latest in that series. The book draws on Brown’s extensive experience as a facilitator; in that role, they said, they learned how to hold a space in which people can slow down, if people can connect and really hear each other through sometimes difficult conversations. They thought that they might be able to do the same thing as a writer. (Brown also served as a judge for Grist’s Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest in 2021, and wrote for Grist nearly two decades ago about issues of exclusion in environmentalism—a space certainly guilty of the kind of policing Brown describes in the introduction to her book described ).
“I think of the work I do as growing a garden of healing ideas in public,” Brown told me. “I’m constantly trying to hone ideas that I think will be useful for the collective, for the species, how we relate to the earth, how we relate to each other – and loving corrections have emerged because I’ve kept getting questions from people which was like, ‘OK, but how do we actually do this? How do we hold each other as we relinquish these systems of oppression that we’ve been socialized into, that we’ve been trapped in?”
The book offers some specific advice, and even an example of Brown in conversation with her two sisters, showing how they instituted regular check-ins with each other as a way to ease familial friction.
But it is also about more than our relationships with fellow human beings. The earth can provide loving corrections, Brown writes, and also requires an attentive relationship. This can happen at the individual level, with the land and ecosystems around us — but for some of the systemic changes humanity needs to make to heal our broken systems of extraction, pollution and destruction, we first need to imagine better systems in their place, Brown said. It can also be a form of loving rebuke.
“We live in a world imagined by people who didn’t really care about keeping our connection to the Earth intact and who didn’t really care about us being in my relationship with each other,” she said. “It matters a lot that we articulate to each other what we dream, how the world could be – and that we don’t settle.”
Here is a short excerpt from Brown’s book, which explores ways to think about our relationship with the earth, how to listen and how to care for this blue dot we call home. (This essay originally appeared in “Murmurs,” a column Brown began for JA! Journal, which focuses on themes of accountability.)
– Claire Elise Thompson
Excerpt chapter: “Accountable to the Earth,” from the book Loving Corrections by Adrienne Maree Brown
I like to sit with mothers in moments of relaxation. I was recently on vacation with some of my goddess crew, one of whom is a new mom. Her baby was sleeping in the next room, and after some time and talking we heard the sound of his voice, carried in stereo through the door and the small monitor that let us see and hear him.
To be honest, every time he wasn’t with us, we were watching the little monitor, watching him sleep, dream, move around, self-soothe. My friend sat up, awake, and held a hand up to remind herself (and us) to give him a minute to see if he needed her or was just cycling to the surface of wakefulness before drifting off into the next dream. dive. He dove, and we went back to what we were doing. An hour later he called out again, louder, more demanding, fully awake. She moved quickly to hold him, knowing his needs with the incredible grace of a good parent.
Later I thought I heard him again, but he was awake, and it was an owl hooting deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the pitch of the hooting moving up, up, up the scale and into the moonlight. Another time it was a cat nearby, begging for attention. I was reading a book about a talking cat, and for a moment fiction and fantasy merged when I was sure I knew what the cat meant: Now, now, now! The baby, the owl, the cat – they all sounded the same to me, each crying out for attention, for care, in a language that translates across species.
This pattern of screaming prayer brings me back to a familiar question: How do we hear beyond the human cry for help?
The earth seems to be crying. I hear the simultaneous cry of one-third of Pakistan under water in massive floods; Jackson, Mississippi, without water to drink or flush the toilet for the foreseeable future; Puerto Rico’s power grid went out due to Hurricane Fiona. And that suffering barely scratches the surface. There are fires that never rest in ashes, there are waters that do not recede, waves where we need ice, islands whose highest point is now under water, heat waves sending elders to grocery store aisles while chefs cook steak on the hoods of cars. On the recent anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I noticed how normalized these disasters have become; how comfortable we become with mass displacement and death.
What would it look like to answer the demanding cries of the Earth, to be accountable for the needs of the planet? Since these questions are probably already familiar to the readers of this publication, perhaps we should ask something else: Can those of us who are willing to be accountable do enough to counteract the choices of those who are doomed? How?
For the past year I have been experimenting with a climate ban on unnecessary travel. I don’t fly for work or speeches. When I’m in transit, it’s only for love: go to family, blood or chosen; going home; go to health. If it’s within reach and my body is ready for it, I drive my electric vehicle to get there.
I was mostly able to keep this practice, and it felt like a choice that helped ease my impact on the Earth, while also easing the impact that travel and being away from the sanctuary of home has on my body. Every day I feel myself more like an earthling, and understand how good for my body is good for the Earth, and vice versa.
Another practice I’m interested in is folding the earth into every other thing I do, every decision I make. If I consider any concern for people, place, animal, culture, danger, I root myself back to the relationship with our Earth and the changes that are currently unfolding for her. What would the earth let me do, let us do?
These questions bring me to this short but powerful piece of wisdom from Margaret Killjoy: “You can’t write fiction on a dead planet.” I think the same goes for everything, far beyond fiction. If the planet effectively dies to us, if it becomes uninhabitable for humans, nothing else we do here matters. So many of us have cried it out for so long in so many ways – I know I’m adding my voice to an old cry, for attention. For care.
If every issue is seen through an Earth-related lens, what can we learn? We will not lay down our many priorities, but perhaps we will reschedule and redistribute our time to more accurately account for the care of our only home, which is currently crumbling and warping, infected, and burning and flooding in every room. Our house is crying too.
But imagine for a moment that everyone was engaged in this pattern of accountability to the planet, of anchoring our actions with consideration of their impact on the Earth. Imagine a common reality to collectively prioritize our most universal gift: life on earth. For example, imagine a movement-wide, Earth-forward ban on work travel, and a shared commitment to bring our global attention to the wisdom and need of the Earth beneath our feet and above our heads, flowing all around us.
Imagine what we could do together if our movements were focused on sustainability or, better yet, sustenance – that which sustains us, that which answers the cry for care. What if movement’s job was to hone the parental instinct of our species? I am not suggesting here that the Earth needs us to shape it in terms of a power dynamic, but rather that there is something communal and universal in the need and supply for care among the species that share this planet. There is a rhythm to care that flows in every direction. Rather than centering a human purpose of dominance and forcing the Earth to serve us, imagine if we were centered in a human purpose of care, between and beyond our species.
More exposure
A parting shot
Enjoy this picturesque photo of a sunset in the Blue Ridge Mountains – the place of refuge Brown describes in her essay, and coincidentally where I’m from! There is nothing more soothing to me than the sight of these old, tree-covered mountains, especially in the fall.
