We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?
Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. Seeking wisdom and practical answers, she embarks on a pilgrimage, interviewing outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts.
Believers traces the lives of people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead.
Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in re-wilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning tools of violence into tools of farming. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.
Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. She takes the devastating news facing us all, every day, and injects the possibility of real hope.
Believers demands transformation, and will change how you think about your own actions, how you can still make an impact, and how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.
“Wry, fierce and scathingly honest: for anyone who needs a shot of hope in these sideways times” —Scott Ludlam
“Brave, fascinating and honest” —Anna Krien
About the author
Lisa Wells is a poet and writer of nonfiction from Portland, Oregon. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have been widely published, including in The New York Times and Harper’s Magazine. She lives in Seattle and is an editor for The Volta and Letter Machine Editions.
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