Podcast Episode Details

e196 alice irene whittaker (part 2) - homing, a book review

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Season 5 Episode 196

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• I think a lot of people right now are feeling terror or feeling deep grief - worry about climate - and might mention it in a joking way over dinner, like ‘oh, well, we'll see if we're all around in 20 years’ and there's so much truth to that, to the pain people are feeling in the worry. And so in the end, I think and hope that it's helpful to share my personal emotional experience of this, even though it's very vulnerable to do so.

As promised during our first conversation on June 10th, 2024, in e187 alice irene whittaker - caring for the planet I love, I’ve now read Homing: A Quest to Care for Myself and the Earth book that came out on Tuesday, September 3, 2024. 

Here is my review of the book. Please keep in mind that this is my first try at being a literary critic. Luckily, it was easy, because I loved the book and highly recommend it to everyone. 

I loved the flow of the book, like gently canoeing down a river with occasional sudden rapids but with some portaging. And I notice that you often refer to rivers in the book. We’ll come back to that. 

At times the mix of practical and poetic did not work for me but then I’m not your average reader either, because my life story is actually much like yours, except that that I was a perfectionist and overachieving musician instead of a dancer - and I didn’t break my arm, not yet anyway. I think we were brought up equally enamoured with nature and worried sick about the implication of modernity and our complicity in it, though we would not have used that language back then…

So on the practical side I enjoyed learning more, for example, about eco-responsible local living : the buy nothing movement, the unbuilding movement, the permaculture movement and so on. I also loved hearing about that magical 37th degree isotherm and other stories of life on earth that warms the spirit. 

Here are some my highlights: 

• You talk about ‘Fashion as an ecosystem of justice, climate, soil, labour, gender, creativity, expression and culture, made up of people each with their own offerings and niche, intricate in its diversity and interconnections.’ in the context of sustainable fashion 
• You remind us that ‘it’s time for a whole-of-self-transformation, one that is messy and imperfect and wholehearted’, which does not sound perfectionist but rather grounded in reality
• I love your thinking around economic issues, for example, you wrote that ‘For the circular economy, or any alternative model to be meaningful, it has to recognize Indigenous worldviews and pay reparations to the people who have been exploited, traumatized, and marginalized in the centuries-long project of the linear, patriarchal, colonial and capitalist economy.’

And this last one, more on the poetic side, made me nostalgic for winter:

• Snow is water holding its breath, a calm pause after a deep inhale, waiting for that great exhale of spring when, instead of air, water rushes forth with relief.

Beautiful, engaging writing. 

And of course your Homing book made me think about my own domestic life and my own idea of home.

An excerpt from episode 185 of this podcast with indigenous artist Sandra Laronde came to mind: 

• I really believe that we carry the spirit of the land wherever we go. In the Western canon, they say that once you leave home, you can never return, but in the Indigenous canon, home never leaves you. 

I can see affinities between Sandra’s statement about home never leaves you and

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Published on 1 year, 4 months ago