Welcome to my book club email… just kidding. But also, not. Let’s share our favorite books to read during this time of confinement. I keep thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, though a book about a global pandemic may hit too close to home during current conditions even if it does read like poetry.
Two other books I highly recommend:
- The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson (non-fiction, account of Winston Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister
- The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal (fiction, heartwarming story about a family of beer brewing women)
And two I plan to read in the next few weeks:
- Inconspicuous Consumption: the environmental impact you don’t know you have by Tatiana Schlossberg (title is self-explanatory… recommended by a few trusted souls)
- The Guest List by Lucy Foley (thriller, hopefully a “fun” read)
Share your must read with me and I will be sure to check it out.
And here I am in my not-medically compliant homemade face mask. No. I did not make it. I barely know how to sew on a button. But I do have a friend who designs costumes for The Shakespeare Theater. And after she and her colleagues made masks for healthcare workers, she took care of her friends.
(P.S. I know Alex Bozmoski is going to say something about the sunglasses. He detests sunglasses. But it was really bright out when I took this picture!)
And now on to the EcoRight news…
??Spotlight on CYC: A big shout out and all the applause to Florida’s Joey Jung, a high school senior whose inaugural op-ed, Wake Up, America! Learning from COVID-19 and facing the dangers of a warming world was published by the Invading Seas Project, an online collaboration of 26 Florida news outlets. “COVID-19, while an unprecedented threat to our health and our economy, is not an existential threat to our way of life (fingers crossed),” he writes. “But man-made climate is, and we will soon be facing the consequences if we don’t act now.”
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??EcoRight Speaks: The County Youth Chairs rule this week’s update, with Jake Leser the subject of our latest EcoRight Speaks, a series in which we profile one of our members. Jake is from Raleigh, North Carolina, and is a senior at Raleigh Charter High School. He will be attending UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2020. While in high school, he was captain of the mock trial team and frequent guest speaker at the Young Republicans Club. After attending Tar Heel Boys’ State in 2019, he became more active in environmental issues, becoming a County Youth Chair for us here at republicEn. Here’s a teaser of one of his Q&A.
When and why did you first start caring about climate change? I was a junior in high school and I was taking AP Environmental Science. I saw the destruction we were bringing upon ourselves, and it hit methis is an issue that we need to take seriously. I was afraid for the world I would see when I was old. I was afraid for the world that I would leave my children and grandchildren. I decided that I wanted to make the world better than it was left to me, not only for myself, but for future generations.
Be sure to read the entire interview.
??Write an Earth Day Haiku: In honor of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, republicEn is having a little EcoRight haiku contest. (Remember what a haiku is? Yep, it’s a poem with 17 syllables, in 3 lines of 5-7-5.)Submit your haiku here by Monday. On Earth Day, we will have the republicEn community vote for their favorites. The winning haiku will be performed aloud by our founder and former Congressman Bob Inglis in an upcoming video, as well as featured on republicEn’s social media channels and website. (I wish I could offer that Bob will leave your outgoing message on your voice mail… but I don’t have that kind of power!)
Hang in there, friends! More fun from us next week!