Unsolaced by Gretel Ehrlich
To read Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is by Gretel Ehrlich is to be reminded of all the ways we fail personally and globally. But it is not disheartening. In fact, it’s the opposite. It may be titled Unsolaced, but in Ehrlich’s stark and unveiled truth telling I found solace. In her stories about people living on the brink and moving ahead with their chins up anyway, in her stories of the people working to restore our planter for decades before climate change was a part of our vernacular, her stories of her own resilience in the face of unending loss—the heartbeat of this book is keep going, keep trying.
“Loneliness is a lie of the ego, though sometimes the absences mount up into an ache that can’t be ignored. Loneliness ended that night, whooshed away by the embrace of strangers. Unknowingly I had entered an obscure ranching community in which I could keep a writer’s distance but still be included. I could “cowboy” and write. Shell became my heart’s home.”
“Yesterday I was young. Today I’m trying to find a place to live where, as temperature increases, I will be able to find water, grow food, feed animals. I lay out a map of the world and see immediately that the choices are limited, yet I have a choice. Many don’t. Soon, perhaps, such a privilege won’t matter.
Our deep inflexibility seems a kind of foolishness, or worse, suicide, as we rock between acts of heroism and greed, self-discipline and self-indulgence, and at the drop of a hat we can easily persuade ourselves to go either way.
“I guess we’re a failed species,” an acquaintance said after exclaiming there was no such thing as climate change. We’re a failed species despite our unrivaled intelligence, we indulge in delusional behavior to protect ourselves from painful realities. We talk but don’t act. We ask to be spoon-fed, but only the things we want to eat, and make demands on the earth without ever inquiring what the needs of the earth might be.”
“Quiescence and fever. Starvation and extinction. Joy and blight. Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true.”