Alaska News Brief September 2025—The year ahead, the year behind
Sometimes it feels like we’re moving lickety-split toward a goal, keeping a steady pace on a clear path. Other times, it feels like we’re moving circuitously, tripping on the same tree roots as we evade obstacles. (And if you’re me, breaking a bone or getting an injury in the process.)
RSVP here for the official book launch of “Bloom Again” by Marybeth Holleman!
In some ways, this enigmatic feeling of getting somewhere while running on a hamster wheel feels soothing (well, not the running part). The ongoing motions and strategizing about what we’ve done, where we are, and what we can do next feels purposeful and focused. We’re not alone, either.
Law firms like Trustees notoriously carry lawsuits with big implications through many iterations of win, lose, and here we go again. That’s the work. Again, we’re not alone.
I guess what I’m getting at is that getting somewhere right now looks like not getting very far very fast, but action comes from inside us, through us, between us. It’s about not turning away from the challenges or each other. It’s about seeing and hearing each other to really dig in with a successful plan for doing the work.
That’s one reason I truly appreciate one of our longtime supporters Marybeth Holleman, whose first novel “Bloom Again” just came out. Throughout the book, she talks about people confronted with their comforts, discomforts, assumptions, inertia, lost dreams, and moments of decision—people who feel frustrated or helpless in the face of crisis but profoundly moved to action.
It’s a call for joy and connection, too. It’s the laying out of facts and revealing of possibility. It’s a book we can get behind.
That’s why we’re hosting a book launch for “Bloom Again” on Sept. 18 at Organic Oasis in Anchorage as our annual board member outreach event, with food and drinks provided. Please join us. There will be music by The Forest Never Sleeps starting at 5:30 pm (and again at 7:30 pm) and a reading and conversation at 6 pm with Marybeth and Kristin Link, the artist who designed the “Bloom Again” book cover.
Join us for the official book launch of Marybeth Holleman’s “Bloom Again”. September 18th from 5:30-8pm at Organic Oasis.
If you live in or have spent time in Alaska, you’ll feel at home in this novel. There are descriptions of places you’ll recognize, characters who remind you of people you know, and even a fictional version of Binky the polar bear who snagged someone’s shoe at the zoo in the mid-1990s.
The story will take you to North Carolina, too, where Marybeth grew up and went to college, and to places around the world where climate change has impacted communities in profound ways. It will show you other parts of the world, too, and reveal the connections between people, humans and other-than-human beings, heart and mind, art and science, story and wisdom.
The book gives us a perspective on climate where working in concert with each other offers a path forward, potentially even a breakthrough.
People are part of nature, not in power over it. One of the great challenges we face while so often wrenched away or tricked into turning away from Earth, the home upon which we make and owe our lives, and from more-than-human beings, to whom we belong as partners and companions, is remembering how those relationships empower us. We thrive only when we tend, care, respect, and listen to the knowledge inherent within those relationships.
This is the kind of conversation we look forward to having at the “Bloom Again” book launch event this week. If you’re not in Anchorage, don’t worry. We will have a virtual event on Oct. 2 with Marybeth and Kathleen Dean Moore, a distinguished philosophy professor emerita at Oregan State University, an advocate for climate justice, and the author or co-editor of a dozen books about our cultural and moral relation to the wild.
You can find copies of “Bloom Again” at the launch event and through your favorite bookstore.
We hope to see you soon!
PS. Thanks to supporters like you, we can continue fighting to protect Alaska’s land, water, air, wildlife and people.
Peggy geared up for a trip in Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Photo courtesy of Jules Tileston.
The big gamble
A bar-tailed godwit sits in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. Photo by Mark Lindberg.
On beings and biomes—the perpetual homecoming of migratory birds
President Harry S. Truman signs the Administrative Procedure Act into law. Photo courtesy of Harry Truman Presidential Library.