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Books
Medicine Wheel for the Planet by Jennifer Grenz
Lucy Weir takes a wheel of healing for an intellectual spin.
Can we heal the planet, and ourselves, through the use of an ancient system developed among the tribal peoples of Canada? Many, including the author of Medicine Wheel for the Planet (2024), the agroecologist Dr Jennifer Grenz, might question why a person such as me – white, descended from colonial settlers in Australia – has either the audacity or sense of irony to engage critically with this book. But I am also a student of Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo, and of notions of enmeshment, agency, and compassion, and my work has focused on the ecological emergency, so I have more than just a passing interest in the subject matter.
Before I critically engage with Dr Grenz’s exploration of her personal odyssey through the falsehoods and abuses that were the legacy she received as an Indigenous woman, I want to set down my wholehearted recommendation of the book. This is something of a 180° turn for me, as I initially felt a lot of resistance to its challenging imagery. I also had some concerns about the effectiveness of her approach, in the face of the enormity of the political, social, climate, biodiversity , and even personal, fragmentation and collapse that now threaten us existentially.
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