Customer Reviews

I love this book because it speaks to me of the very humanity of women and our potential capacity to create a different future. Review by Maddy Harland, editor Permaculture magazine

Review

Karen Eberhardt Shelton invites 83 women, young (from aged 12) and old, to share their visions of how to save the world. This is timely, because although many societies claim not to discriminate against women, we still do not fully share the halls of power and influence. Even in the environmental movement, I frequently find myself a lone female voice on a podium of men.

It is a book of professed loves; for music, animals, the Earth, radical kindness, justice, world peace... in fact just about everything that is beautiful, good and true. It is readable, engaging, articulate, intelligent and the sort of book you’d put in your loo to return to and enjoy over months. The editor, Karen, emphatically requested that the contributors ‘speak up’, and thus this book is also brave.

I love this book because it speaks to me of the very humanity of women and our potential capacity to create a different future. This is a world that aspires to co-operate, instead of competing by default, to resolve rather than to initiate conflict, to steward rather than to consume without conscience... I certainly don’t think women hold all of the solutions to the exclusion of men but I welcome the impulse to celebrate women’s perspectives. If we were able to do so more often in society, instead of relegating what are often perceived as ‘feminine’ qualities – the emotional, the passionate, the visionary – from our politics and economics and regarding them as rather embarrassing, we would begin the process of ‘saving’ our flawed human world and preserving the biodiversity on this planet. For the record, though, I certainly wouldn’t claim that women have the monopoly on these qualities. What is being asked for is balance between the pairs of opposites and genuine co-operation between the sexes. (Posted on 30/07/2010)