Writings on climate change will give you some hope
“AllWe Can Save” is basically a community bound between two covers, and a gift to anywho wishes to join in.
Before 2020 collapses under its ownweight, it’s worth noting some of the positive things that came out of the year. Abook thatwas published this fall, “AllWe Can Save,” is something that will help us navigate a nerve-wracking future.
Against a backdrop of the trickling, everyday dross of internet life— not to mention destabilizing pandemic and populism around us— this book is what the late short-story authorRaymond Carver might have called “a small good thing.”
“AllWe Can Save” is a collection of essays, memories, poems and even advicememoswritten by 60women, most enmeshed professionally oneway or another with climate change— scientists, researchers, activists, journalists, former government officials, writers and more.
Afine expression of the project comes in one of many interstitial quotations dropped in-between the short essays. It’s a statement fromHeather McGhee, a political commentator, author and board chair of the group Color of Change: “Inequality and climate change are the twin challenges of our time, and more democracy is the answer to both.”
Many readers are used to climate change as a business, investment, policy, technology or science story. “AllWe Can Save” complements that approachwith something sorely missing: shared interior monologues about the empathy that binds people to each other and to history.
The contributions are each about what it feels like to be a descendant, child, mother, friend,
colleague, leader or ancestor at the onset of the what should probably be called obvious climate change. The book’s title comes froma line by the late poet Adrienne Rich: “My heart ismoved by all I cannot save.”
It’s refreshing to hear the expertise of, to cite one example, Indigenous people applied directly to modern questions of governing, business, agriculture and more. The world’s largest companies have been tripping over each other for 15 years to claim the mantle of “sustainability,” when the oldest human communities have quietly been experts on it for millennia.
“The great contribution that Indigenous peoples may be able tomake at this time is to continue providing theworld with living models of sustainability that are rooted in ancient wisdom,” writes Sherri MitchellWeh’naHa’mu Kwasset. Half a book later, Régine Clément, the head of Creo Syndicate, an investing group for rich families, bridges the old andnewby asking,“How canwe use the mechanics of capitalism as it currently exists to transform it?”
There are hat-tips to national politicians, any of which shrinks in substance to, say, formerU.S. regional Environmental ProtectionAgency administrator HeatherMcTeerToney’s account of howwhen doors close and meetings start, “therewas no room for petty division.”
There are a couple of repetitions of names and ideas, which can be interpreted charitably as happy shoutouts to shared parts of a community. One contributor, formerU.S. EPAadministrator Gina McCarthy, was recently named to become President-elect Joe Biden’s national climate adviser.
Books are finite, and even awork of 60 contributors running more than 400 pages leaves out voices. EditorsAyana Elizabeth Johnson and KatharineWilkinson, who respectively hold doctorates in marine biology, and geography and environment, have turned their book into an AllWe Can Save Project, with anew newsletter, to extend their ideas andwork on behalf ofwomenclimate leaders.
“AllWe Can Save” is basically a community bound between two covers, and a gift to any whowishes to join in. Johnson andWilkinson have set a high bar, but thismovement-forging book format is replicable by anyone elsewhoalso believes that modernity shouldn’t undo itself.