Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and the late Marthe Reed, is a work of collaborative eco-activism and a call to action for readers and writers.
Contributors (including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, Hoa Nguyen, Jennifer Scappettone, Cheryl Savageau, Rusty Morrison, Bhanu Kapil, Christopher Cokinos, etc.) call on humanity to end this era of environmental and spiritual destruction, beginning with this clear and provoking preface by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.
This glossary delivers terminological impression of shifts in language and in consciousness fostered to address the perilous state of today. Continually fed now since Euro-invasion, intentional attempts at extinction/slaughter of the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous peoples (estimates say that 75 to more than 100 million people rapidly perished at the hands of the Euro-invader and his diseases) undoubtedly spurred the initial methane surge of the Anthropocene. This is, immediate and dire, an enduring era of environmental injustice, survivance under unequal protection from colonial, imperial resourcing, with political sabotage by collective lessening of efforts to combat climate change. Now, in the Sixth Extinction epoch segment, we strive to locate lingual succinctness in attending to the multitudinous expression with participatory means to discern and disseminate information necessary to better the state of the world for all peoples and all lives dependent on our shared planet. Moreover, we strive to employ as vernacular this nomenclature and vocabulary in idiolect of intentional lexicon while gathering activist effort for gross intervention, reclamation, renewal, revivance, and restoration, by whatever means necessary to keep this world inhabitable and whole beyond what damage has already diminished its complete viability.
In imagining a book that would clarify the new ways that we respond to the call our earth, her oceans, and the surrounding atmosphere surely sing, Counter-Desecration brings sustenance and power with terms made in collective remedying. From dysoptics to echolocution, reciproesis to terrotic, the countenance of communication encounters the need of a global population on its mettle. Torpor (the rest state required of an activist) and vivitocracy (a social mind-set built on the idea that all life deserves equally to exist) bring a sense that our collective strength and support of the planet might still replenish and recover her ability to continue, and thus we along with her, or at least give a sense of the hope for future life here. This book allows us fortitude and wisdom to secure what means we might to continue to cherish and to equip us to protect our planet with concise and meritorious language and action: a generous undertaking for which I am exceptionally grateful and believe indispensable for writers, speakers, readers, and researchers working for vital cause and solution.
—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
