Rise Up and Roar
Aili Biriita, a young woman from a family of reindeer herders in the heart of the Arctic tundra in northern Norway, now a law student at the University of Oslo, speaks to an audience in the largest auditorium on campus about climate tipping points in the Arctic. She does not speak like an academic cadaver mumbling into his notes, but as a Sami with deep knowledge of the science, the law, and the wisdom of her Sami people reaching back a least five thousand years.
A one-hour video of Aili’s dramatic portrayal of our “final suicidal madness” goes out to young people around the world just before school begins in September.
Building on the momentum of her film, Aili invites two delegations to an entirely new kind of climate conference. Climate scientists from around the world meet with Indigenous peoples from around the world—without politicians, without “energy experts” from Texas—in Paris to share with each other their knowledge about our severely damaged planet. The delegates attend an organ concert (Saint Saëns) in Notre Dame Cathedral, where the mystery and the majesty and the power of the music encourages the delegates in their work. They meet for two weeks, secluded from inquiring media, then native peoples and scientists, now deeply woven colleagues, speak to the world in a global broadcast.
The conference concludes with the multi-national crew speaking by live link-up from the International Space Station orbiting planet Earth. We meet the members of the crew—both men and women—and watch the flickering flashes of thunderstorms from above the clouds, as we sail over the fragile atmosphere which keeps all Earthlings alive.
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Aili’s vibrant group of White Caps—immigrants, refugees, and native-born Norwegians who wear round white caps that replicate the Arctic ice cap—organize two unprecedented Global Referendums, which enable several billion people around the planet to participate in non-binding but morally powerful votes about the future of their world.
During the summer before the first referendum, young people in every country knock on doors and conduct classes at local schools for everyone in their communities on two subjects: the threat of global warming to us, and the promise of clean energy to us. In September, following three months in a global classroom, people fourteen years of age and older gather in the schools to vote—in 24 time zones around the planet—on three questions about their energy, their economy, their laws, and the future of their children.
Young people, working together, thus weave themselves into the First Global Generation in Human History. Students working together are now well on their way to becoming colleagues working together. They work for a clean future, a healthy future, a prosperous future, and a democratic future.
Though the results of the referendum are not legally binding, five billion purple thumbs, held up for all the world to see, give people a powerful sense of direction, and personal involvement.
The second referendum, held a year later, enables five billion people to vote on their demand for an end to all wars, and the building of a solid and permanent peace. Again they spend the summer in a global classroom, and again they vote in 24 time zones from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, and again they hold up their five billion purple thumbs.
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But is it enough? The plague of oil, and the plague of war, are deeply entrenched in our world today.
During a summer of record-breaking temperatures, the Siberian tundra across northern Russia warms to a tipping point: the thawing permafrost releases—as scientists had long predicted—growing amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, triggering a planetary crisis. Aili Biriita is with her family on the tundra in northern Norway when this potentially fatal release of greenhouse gasses threatens not only her Sami culture, but civilization, and life itself, on planet Earth.
We watch the events of this epic tale though the eyes of three generations of Norwegian women. Sofia, a Norwegian mother, is a doctor who works with premature infants in a hospital in Oslo. Anna, her daughter, is a bored teenager who finds her purpose when she carries an unconscious refugee child in her arms on a beach at night on a Greek island. Helena, Anna’s daughter, is a gifted musician and child of the early
Renaissance, who sings as the red-orange midnight sun slowly moves sideways over the tundra into a new day. And then Aili speaks to the world.
Rise Up and Roar is thus both a planetary story, and a deeply personal story.
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With a doctorate in literature from Stanford University in California (thesis on William Faulkner), John Slade has taught English in three colleges above the Arctic Circle—including the Sami College in the heart of the tundra—for ten years. He has skied with his Sami students beneath the rippling green and pink northern lights on skis waxed for forty degrees below zero.
John has also taught at universities in Saint Petersburg and Arkhangelsk, Russia, during the historic decade of the 1990s, when the Russian people were hoping to become good neighbors in a peaceful world.
John stood at night atop a cliff overlooking the rocky shore of the Greek island Lesvos, searching with binoculars for the tiny lights of small rubber boats carrying desperate refugees across the dark Aegean Sea from Turkey to the safety and freedom of Europe.
He has spent over 35 years researching both global warming and clean energy— including time at the Vestas Wind Systems company in Denmark, and at an Al Gore conference in Miami—gathering accurate information which he weaves into a story. He does not write sci fi-fantasy, nor apocalyptic gloom-and-doom, but offers factual information, and concrete steps toward building a better world.
He has walked through cemeteries where the victims of war are buried, in Normandy, France; in Arlington, Virginia; and in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He has stared at the horrors in Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Dachau.
The teacher became a writer, self-publishing paperbacks and then ebooks, while he searched for years through the websites of publishers and literary agents . . . who rarely mentioned the word “climate”.
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The teacher who taught bright, highly motivated students on the island of Saint Croix in the Caribbean, in the heart of the tundra and on the rugged coast of Norway, and in the historic cities of Saint Petersburg, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk, Russia, deeply believes in the young people of our world today. They are keenly aware of the enormous problems which they have inherited, and they have both the skills and the motivation to tackle those problems.
They are ready to break free from the shackles of the 20th Century—the poverty, the pollution, the plundering, the racism, and the wars—but they are held back by an archaic mentality based on greed and power.
John would like to put Rise Up and Roar into the hands which have waited too long for the moment when they can hold up their purple thumbs.
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Book categories: Climate Change and Clean Energy