Elizabeth May and How to Save the World (…and Soon)
Earth Charter Council member Elizabeth May has an empowering new book out called How to Save the World in Your Spare Time. Not only does the book lead us forward on so many key issues, it also tells her personal story as she – like her mother also did – battles governments, companies, bureaucracy, and many other foes.
This volume underscores the meaningfulness of the Earth Charter principles for protecting ecological integrity and achieving sustainable development. It is both practical and uplifting—and it shows how much each of us can achieve.
Detailed topics include how to get your issue into the news, how to organize, how to lobby, how to mount a successful campaign, how to get an appointment with a cabinet minister, and how to appear on TV, among others. May says that too many people feel powerless. And as the reader progresses through this book, all such feelings disappear.
Back in the 1950s, May’s mother, Stephanie Middleton May, closed down eight major nuclear testing sites through the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy – showing in no uncertain terms how powerful one person can be. Elizabeth May followed in those footsteps, dedicating herself to a successful grassroots movement against aerial insecticide spraying of forests near her home on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in the mid-1970s. She went on to fight herbicide spraying, Agent Orange, uranium mining, and nuclear energy, sometimes at great personal risk.
May was the Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada from 1989 to 2006. She has been instrumental in the creation of several national parks, including South Moresby, and was involved in negotiating the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer. In 1998, the “Elizabeth May Chair in Women’s Health and Environment” was created in her honor at Dalhousie University. In May, 2001, she staged a 17-day hunger strike on Parliament Hill to force the government to promise to relocate at-risk families adjacent to the Sydney Tar Ponds.
May was elected the Green Party of Canada’s ninth leader at its national convention in August 2006 with a clear majority of the votes. She is the author of four other books, besides this one.
Guidance from May’s mother is irresistible, and these words are borrowed from May’s book as a way of directing you to it:
LESSONS LEARNED AT MY MOTHER’S KNEE
1. My grandmother always said, “Thought without constructive action
is demoralizing.”
2. You can accomplish anything you want if you don’t care who gets
the credit.
3. There is no one so famous or important that you cannot pick up
the phone and talk to them. Even famous people need baths.
4. Media coverage is fickle.
5. Sometimes governments lie.
6. No one is powerless without their own permission.
7. Be polite.
8. Thank people for helping.
9. Changing the world is only a matter of time (if you have enough
people on your side. Getting them on your side is what takes time!).
10. My mommy changed the world. So can I.