The Planet You Inherit: Letters to my grandchildren when uncertainty's a sure thing By Larry L.Rasmussen. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022. 213 pages.
Year: 2023
Type: book-review
Abstract: With The Planet You Inherit (winner of the 2023 Nautilus Gold Prize for books on Ecology and Environment), Larry Rasmussen has written a book accessible to a wider public that sacrifices none of his characteristic rigor of thought.The book consists of letters written to his grandchildren (Eduardo and Martin) between 2018 and 2021.The reader is invited to eavesdrop on these letters as fellow time travelers from our Holocene past to our Anthropocene future, the geological epoch in which human activity is the dominant force shaping planetary systems.Rasmussen conveys his extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge in religious ethics across an encyclopedic array of topics.The focus is on the primary challenge facing our species-how to cross the perilous bridge from one geological epoch to another without going extinct.Rasmussen also ranges far beyond the eco-crisis here.He addresses numerous interlocking crises occurring during the writing of this book, including the fragility of American democracy, the COVID pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement.He engages these crises through broad dialogue with notable theologians, scientists, writers, historians, and religious leaders.While his previous book, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (Nautilus Grand Prize winner for 2014), is arguably Rasmussen's magnum opus, The Planet You Inherit provides the capstone to this eminent ethicist's contributions to religious ethics.The book begins by meditating on beginnings and threatened endings.Rasmussen moves seamlessly between stories of his humble beginnings in rural Minnesota and the origins of the cosmos, while mapping the emergence of Homo Sapiens and our threatened demise on the timeline of Earth's geologic history.Along the 360
Source: Dialog
DOI: 10.1111/dial.12828
Author: Janet L. Parker
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4388111201