American Scientist

ALL WE CAN SAVE: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. Edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson. 418 pp. One World, 2020. $29.

All We Can Save is a collection of essays and poems that aims to serve as an antidote to climate despair while also fully conveying the gravity of the situation we confront. Its title is inspired by a line from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Natural Resources”: “My heart is moved by all I cannot save.” Editors Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson explain that they wanted a title for their collection that “felt adequately inclusive, expansive, grounded in what is, and forward looking.” They therefore flipped Rich’s line to suggest that we should also let our hearts be moved by what we can save.

A diverse group of climate experts and activists from a variety of disciplines supply the book with an impressive breadth of expertise. Contributors include prominent climate scientists Katharine Hayhoe and Kate Marvel; climate journalists Mary Annaïse Heglar, Amy Westervelt, and Emily Atkin; climate policy experts and longtime government servants Leah Cardamore Stokes, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Heather McTeer Toney, and Maggie Thomas; climate activists Xiye Bastida, Mary Anne Hitt, and Varshini Prakash; and nature writers Janisse Ray and Mary Oliver. Fortunately, Johnson and Wilkinson have also included voices we seldom hear from, because as Maggie Thomas writes in her essay, “The Politics of Policy,” “it may be the unheard voices—voices that have been suppressed for generations—who have insight into critical solutions.”

The editors open the book with the story of Eunice Newton Foote, who theorized about the greenhouse effect in 1856 but is rarely mentioned when the history of the idea is discussed. They go on to note that “women remain underrepresented in government, business, engineering, and finance; in executive leadership of environmental organizations, United Nations climate negotiations, and media coverage of the crisis; and in the legal systems that create and uphold change.” To help rectify this situation, they decided to focus the book on work being done by women. Therefore all 58 contributors are women, many of whom are Indigenous, Black, or Latina, or live in rural areas or the Global South.

The collection is divided into eight sections: “Root,” “Advocate,” “Reframe,” “Reshape,” “Persist,” “Feel,” “Nourish,” and “Rise.” These somewhat nebulous section titles are themes that represent the ideals of transformation that the book embraces. That thematic trajectory moves the reader from a sense of place and action to solutions, strategies, and facts—through the difficult feelings of ecoanxiety, solastalgia (existential distress caused by climate change), and grief to a view of a better future, a future that will be led by the next generation and buoyed by a sense of community and solidarity across generations and cultures. Each section opens with a simple four-panel drawing by Madeleine Jubilee Saito that suggests something about its theme.

Johnson and Wilkinson end by encouraging us to focus on what can be done now: “From a foundation of science and community,” they write, “we must imagine the future we want to live in, and the future we want to pass on, and every day do something to reel the dream closer to reality.” We already have solutions, they say; we just need “to get to it, removing barriers to solutions, accelerating their implementation, and expanding their reach, while actively stopping sources of this crisis.” Despite the many losses already incurred, they assert that “Every tenth of a degree of warming, every centimeter of sea level rise, every increasingly unnatural disaster, every species, every life—all of it matters.” We do what we can.