“Nobody knows what will happen to the planet, but we do know what makes humans healthier, stronger, and more resilient. That is facing the truth, dealing with it emotionally, and transforming it. Regardless of the results of our work, when we are doing our best, we feel happier and less alone.” These are the words of Mary Pipher in her 2013 paperback, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture.

I find her words slightly startling and deeply empowering. Not many people (yet) come out and admit that we don’t know what will happen to the planet. And only a few people talk as if human happiness and our connections with each other are vital to our becoming able to heal the earth.

But as Pipher shows, the main reason we don’t know what will happen is that we can’t tell from here what the human members of our biosphere are going to do over the next ten years. She notes Paul Hawken’s estimate that “there are two million groups worldwide working for environmental change, social and economic justice, and indigenous peoples’ rights” and proposes that “many more people would work if they believed that changes were possible and that their efforts mattered.”

For me, this is at the heart of Pipher’s work in The Green Boat. She is inviting us to a much deeper and more resilient happiness than we have so far been able to learn: “As we join the millions of people who are working for a sustainable planet, we won’t be sacrificing, but rather building new lives based on our deep true selves.”