Four Seasons Books owner Kendra Adkins, right, helps Leah Rampy unbox copies of her new book, “Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos,” on Monday afternoon. Courtesy photo

SHEPHERDSTOWN — This past Tuesday, Shepherdstown town council member Leah Rampy’s first book, “Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos,” was published.

Rampy held an online celebration, in honor of the book’s publication, for friends and family who live abroad on Tuesday night. A book launch for “Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos” will be held in the Station at Shepherdstown on March 8 at 4 p.m., in conjunction with the American Conservation Film Festival.

“I titled the book, before I really decided what ‘soul’ meant. I was writing along, and then all of a sudden I realized, ‘I’m going to have to define this term, if I’m going to use it,'” Rampy said. “I’m defining it as, ‘essence of who we are at our truest self.’ For instance, you might have been incredibly curious as a young child, but somewhere along the line, someone tells you, ‘Don’t pick up that rock or that bug, they’re dirty!’ And so, who you are in the purest sense gets shaped and reshaped and covered over, by norms and expectations and culture.”

Rampy noted that, just as ‘soul’ is influenced by culture, so is the other term mentioned in the book’s title.

“We certainly have a cultural view of what Earth is,” Rampy said. “That’s not necessarily who we may feel Earth is at our deepest core, but Earth has been considered in our western culture — particularly in North America, particularly the United States — as a resource. It’s consumable. It’s something to make our lives better.”

This book is the answer to a problem she has became increasingly aware of, especially over her last decade presenting lectures and leading meditative retreats.

“I’ve paid a lot of attention to climate change, for several decades,” Rampy, who lives in Shepherd Village with her husband, David, said. “My daughter and I went off to Chicago in 2013, where we got trained by Al Gore to do the slideshow he did in the movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ which speaks about climate change and how carbon dioxide and temperatures align with each other and are going off the charts, at this time. We then, as part of that training, were expected to go around and do the presentations for others.

“It’s a powerful presentation — it shows how floods and droughts and wildfires and ways that insects are more prevalent because trees are more stressed and crops are changing and nutrition is changing, because of the soil,” Rampy said. “It kind of left people with the question, ‘So it’s so big, what can I do?’ or ‘How can I change this?'”

Those questions led her to her book’s hypothesis, that how humans live in the world is directly reflective of their “personal world.”

“My sense is, which is the nugget of the book, we have become so disconnected from this world around us, that we wouldn’t know how to support a more mutually beneficial world, because we have a point of view that we are separate and distinct from the living world — it’s ‘other’ than us and basically just for our use. Then, of course, we do that to people, too,” Rampy said. “Once we have this idea that we are separate and unique, our actions are human-centric.”

“I spent the introduction of the book giving a quick overview of climate chaos and biodiversity loss,” Rampy said. “And then I’m saying, ‘Okay. Now that’s just the backdrop to what we’re living in. That’s not what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about how do we live, in times where temperatures are rising and biodiversity is decreasing?'”

“Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos” is available for purchase at Four Seasons Books and on Amazon. Reserve a seat at the book launch, which will feature catering from MJ’s on German DeliCafe, by visiting https://www.fourseasonsbooks.com/rampy.html#/.