Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future, by Mary Robinson, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future by Mary Robinson, available from Bloomsbury or Amazon here. She will also be speaking about the issues raised in this book in the West Cork literary festival July 12-19th.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2018

Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people – people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal.

Mary Robinson’s mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change.

Powerful and deeply humane, Climate Justice is a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative, and well-argued case for hope.

Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future, by Mary Robinson, reviewed

An apt book to be reviewing on #WorldEnvironmentDay. Mary Robinson in many ways has been a very positive figure on the Irish and global scene for over twenty years now. Both for her time as the 7th and first female President of Ireland and then subsequently for her work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights too. Then, after this, her awareness in environmental issues arose and she has been campaigning for climate change issues too.

The book is quite short, but does have interesting profiles of people in seemingly hopeless situations who went on to make a big difference in working to raise awareness about climate change issues. In some ways it might have been even more impactful if Robinson had used her time as Irish president to raise awareness on these issues, as the Irish Green Party had already secured seats in the Dail by then. However it is perhaps a case of better late than never, and if she can have as much impact in this area as she did in other areas of Irish life then hopefully it can help to make a difference.

President Mary Robinson welcomes lesbians and gay men to Aras in1992. Mary Holland wrote in Irish Times "Not for the first time, our President, effortlessly and generously subversive of entrenched prejudice, has given a signal that cannot be ignored" pic.twitter.com/C6dV037ZOx

— Kieran Rose (@kieranarose) June 3, 2019

When we were reading this book to review it in a local cafe, the young waitress came up to us and commented on the book, saying that it was great that she had written it and it was part of the inspiration behind the rise in awareness around the importance of these issues. We are definitely at the point where we need to act now before it is too late, and ideally if people who are already able to command a good audience are embracing the importance of these issues, then this can only help.

"Without #JusticeForAll, it will be impossible to achieve the #SDGs." –Mary Robinson.

Ahead of the #HLPF, The Elders are calling on world leaders to increase ambition on & funding for #AccessToJustice.

Find out more & share the thread ?: https://t.co/y9YQC7Q6BF #SDG16 pic.twitter.com/e3l22IfuvU

— The Elders (@TheElders) May 16, 2019

See more articles about Climate Change here.

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