Ripple: An Intimate Exchange of Urgency and Hope Between An Ecologist Dad and His Daughter is a narrative of letters from an ecologist dad to his daughter upon her coming-of age. Drawing upon personal history, family anecdotes, and shared memories, Powers and his daughter together envision a path for humanity’s reintegration with nature, and a chance to rescue the life force that runs through all of us.
A story of separation has long gripped the human race: that people are separate—with more advanced habitats, technologies, and values—from our natural surroundings and fellow creatures. We have been told this story for generations. But as Powers watches his daughter approach adulthood, with all of society’s expectations, he knows that the story we pass down has to change. In Ripple, he tells a different tale, one of community and family, inner wisdom, and shared existence within a living planet.
In its intimate, collaborative format, Ripple combines the style of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me with the environmental focus of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and positions deep ecology as a backyard garden topic, fit for fathers and toddlers. It must be—saving the environment is a multi-generational endeavor. And the first step is arguably a small shift of perspective: realizing that we are nature.