Take Back the Magic by Perdita Finn

Author:Perdita Finn [Finn, Perdita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Clark and I were asked to write catalog copy for the world’s largest children’s book publisher and, unexpectedly, found ourselves with a front-row seat to the emerging zeitgeist. If the books we’d read as children were about magic and mystery, nature and history, the children’s literature of the new millennium focused increasingly on postapocalyptic disaster. “In a dystopic future, these kids must figure out how to survive…” was the ubiquitous tagline.

The grown-up media was little different. Zombies walked among us. Vampires were out for blood. Winter was coming. Get ready for the end of the world.

Most of the stories were some version, more or less, of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in which the environment was blasted into nothingness and the only thing left for people to eat was each other. Out-of-control consumerism had brought us, finally, to cannibalism. The preponderance of stories about vampires and zombies seemed to make the same point. Human beings had become insatiable demons, hungry ghosts with vast stomachs and tiny mouths who could think only of what they would devour next.

Clark’s love of haiku makes him a keen observer of nature. He knows the names of the trees, the habits of the insects, the calls of each bird… and, long before anyone else I knew was talking about global warming, he was reading scientific climate reports on websites that took hours to load on our dial-up internet connection. Alongside books about mystical practices, he added writings by ecologists and activists and visionaries about the state of the world to our shelves. For these prophets of science, the future was clear: The planet was in danger. All life on Earth was in danger.

“The end of the world is coming,” announces the street corner seer. But he cannot tell us which world is ending and how—and which will be reborn and when. January 1974; March 10, 1982; September 28, 1992; Y2K; 2012—doomsdayers of one kind or another were convinced that each of these dates signaled the apocalypse—until the sun rose the next day and the world bumbled on. But who is to say they were wholly wrong?

If we look beyond the narrow concerns of our own species, we see nothing but extinctions and annihilations. There was a month in which a Carolina parakeet sang her love songs at sunrise, and there was no mate left to answer her. One day in Mexico the last black cosmos bloomed and withered. All across the world plants and animals beyond number are disappearing forever. On the other side of the veil are ever more beings trying to get our attention before it is too late. The dead are clamoring for us to notice, looking to give us guidance.

What can we possibly do in the face of all of this? What actions are sufficient? Particularly since every solution we seem to devise only makes matters worse. Fires are spreading. The oceans are rising. Societies are collapsing. And humanity is in ever-increasing danger. What are we to do?

What if the dead themselves

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