Book Report: All We Can Save - Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
Is it still a dead mom book if it's about saving the life of our one and only Mama Earth?
Book Report: All We Can Save - Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
I heard about this one on NPR, a couple of years ago, in my car. It sounded like a hopeful and diverse collection of writings, all by women, designed to inform and inspire us into action for our planet. Right up my alley! I put it on the list, and finally read it in May.
As an environmentalist since before I knew the term, and a professional conservation biologist, I often find “save the planet” resources frustrating, because so often the messages are the same simple ones we’ve been hearing since my childhood: Think globally, act locally. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Versions of this are maddening to me, because if we had all just DONE those things a little more thoroughly back in the 80s when I first started doing them, we might have saved ourselves. REDUCE is the biggest one, and it gets ignored more and more in our voracious convenience culture. It means, do less. DO LESS. Buy less plastic, buy fewer and smaller cars, use less energy and water. These are not that hard, and it REALLY pisses me off how few people in our country take these things into consideration in their daily lives. Recycling programs are disappearing across the country instead of improving, and one factor in that is that regular people cannot read the simple guidelines and put the correct stuff in the correct bin. This is why we can’t have nice things. This is why the U.S. lags far behind most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and so many other countries on green initiatives. Americans prioritize convenience over the planet, the animals, and each other. It’s deeply disheartening.
This book is NOT the same old environmental messages. This book is a collection of essays by all sorts of experts: biologists, Native American leaders, CEOs, journalists, attorneys, government planners, founders of nonprofits, professors, legislators, a clothing designer, a cartoonist, an architect, a mayor, a Black Creole farmer, and two heads of the EPA. Sixty women wrote this book, each bringing a fresh viewpoint to the climate crisis, each offering solutions -from small to sweeping- which, when assembled, could really change things. “Inspiring” doesn’t even begin to cover it. This book brought tears of hope to my eyes and a list of action items to my hands. As soon as I finished reading it, I started looking into my local community meetings and volunteer opportunities. We can change things, but we must act. We absolutely cannot stand by and wait for others to act. Mama Earth needs every last one of us, doing something. And not just fucking recycling.
I very much enjoyed this one as an audiobook - many of the essays were narrated by their authors, but other familiar voices joined in too, like Janet Mock, Sophia Bush, Ilana Glazer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jane Fonda, America Ferrera, and Bahni Turpin (whom I loved as the narrator of the Children of Blood and Bone books too).
One of the most striking moments of this book was in an essay called Black Gold by Leah Penniman. Penniman is a Black Creole farmer, and she invites school groups to visit her farm to learn about food production and responsible farming practices. She shared this perspective which shouldn’t surprise me at all, but which I had never thought about, despite being a New Orleans native and lifelong anti-racism activist, and fancying myself rather educated on food and farming as well:
“Almost without exception when I ask Black visitors to the farm what they first think of when they see the soil, they respond with ‘slavery’ or ‘plantation.’ Our families fled the red clays of Georgia for good reason: the memories of chattel slavery, sharecropping, and lynching were bound up with our relationship to the earth.”
It’s one of the many intersections I simply had not examined before.
I’m thankful to this book for so many thoughtful, varied, and seasoned voices. I find that hearing a fresh take on old battles invigorates me for the fight ahead. If you’re feeling a little bit hopeless or frustrated with the climate crisis, I highly recommend this book as a refreshing kick in the pants.