Economics
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All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward.
"A powerful read that fills one with, dare I say . . . hope?"-The New York Times
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.
All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States-scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race-and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society.
Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on one another or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, the book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.
With essays and poems by:
Emily Atkin • Xiye Bastida • Ellen Bass • Colette Pichon Battle • Jainey K. Bavishi • Janine Benyus • adrienne maree brown • Régine Clément • Abigail Dillen • Camille T. Dungy • Rhiana Gunn-Wright • Joy Harjo • Katharine Hayhoe • Mary Annaïse Heglar • Jane Hirshfield • Mary Anne Hitt • Ailish Hopper • Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe • Emily N. Johnston • Joan Naviyuk Kane • Naomi Klein • Kate Knuth • Ada Limón • Louise Maher-Johnson • Kate Marvel • Gina McCarthy • Anne Haven McDonnell • Sarah Miller • Sherri Mitchell, Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset • Susanne C. Moser • Lynna Odel • Sharon Olds • Mary Oliver • Kate Orff • Jacqui Patterson • Leah Penniman • Catherine Pierce • Marge Piercy • Kendra Pierre-Louis • Varshini • Prakash • Janisse Ray • Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez • Favianna Rodriguez • Cameron Russell • Ash Sanders • Judith D. Schwartz • Patricia Smith • Emily Stengel • Sarah Stillman • Leah Cardamore Stokes • Amanda Sturgeon • Maggie Thomas • Heather McTeer Toney • Alexandria Villaseñor • Alice Walker • Amy Westervelt • Jane Zelikova
"A powerful read that fills one with, dare I say . . . hope?"-The New York Times
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.
All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States-scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race-and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society.
Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on one another or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, the book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.
With essays and poems by:
Emily Atkin • Xiye Bastida • Ellen Bass • Colette Pichon Battle • Jainey K. Bavishi • Janine Benyus • adrienne maree brown • Régine Clément • Abigail Dillen • Camille T. Dungy • Rhiana Gunn-Wright • Joy Harjo • Katharine Hayhoe • Mary Annaïse Heglar • Jane Hirshfield • Mary Anne Hitt • Ailish Hopper • Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe • Emily N. Johnston • Joan Naviyuk Kane • Naomi Klein • Kate Knuth • Ada Limón • Louise Maher-Johnson • Kate Marvel • Gina McCarthy • Anne Haven McDonnell • Sarah Miller • Sherri Mitchell, Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset • Susanne C. Moser • Lynna Odel • Sharon Olds • Mary Oliver • Kate Orff • Jacqui Patterson • Leah Penniman • Catherine Pierce • Marge Piercy • Kendra Pierre-Louis • Varshini • Prakash • Janisse Ray • Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez • Favianna Rodriguez • Cameron Russell • Ash Sanders • Judith D. Schwartz • Patricia Smith • Emily Stengel • Sarah Stillman • Leah Cardamore Stokes • Amanda Sturgeon • Maggie Thomas • Heather McTeer Toney • Alexandria Villaseñor • Alice Walker • Amy Westervelt • Jane Zelikova
Editorial Reviews
Begin
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she's due. In 1856 Foote theorized that changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect the Earth's temperature. She was the first woman in climate science, but history overlooked her until just a few years ago.
Foote arrived at her breakthrough idea through experimentation. With an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four thermometers, she tested the impact of "carbonic acid gas" (the term for carbon dioxide in her day) against "common air." When placed in the sun, she found the cylinder with carbon dioxide trapped more heat and stayed hot longer.
From a simple experiment, she drew a profound conclusion: "An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature . . . must have necessarily resulted." In other words, she connected the dots between carbon dioxide and planetary warming, and she did it more than 160 years ago.
Foote's paper, "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun's Rays," was presented in August 1856 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then published. For unknown reasons it was read aloud by Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, rather than by Foote herself. That was three years before Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own more detailed work on heat-trapping gases-work typically credited as the foundation of climate science.
Did Tyndall know about Foote's research? It's unclear-though he did have a paper on color blindness in the same 1856 issue of The American Journal of Science and Arts as hers. In any case, we have to wonder if Eunice Newton Foote ever found herself remarking, as so many women have: "I literally just said that, dude."
Foote wasn't only a scientist. She was involved in the early movement for women's rights too. Her name appears on the list of signatories to the 1848 Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments"-a manifesto created during the first women's rights convention in the United States-right below suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Foote's husband, Elisha, and abolitionist-philosopher Frederick Douglass also signed on, under "gentlemen." (Of note: John Tyndall opposed women's suffrage.)
Foote, it seems, was a climate feminist.
The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and exploits girls, women, and nonbinary people (and constricts and contorts boys and men) also wreaks destruction on the natural world. Dominance, supremacy, violence, extraction, egotism, greed, ruthless competition-these hallmarks of patriarchy fuel the climate cris...
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she's due. In 1856 Foote theorized that changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect the Earth's temperature. She was the first woman in climate science, but history overlooked her until just a few years ago.
Foote arrived at her breakthrough idea through experimentation. With an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four thermometers, she tested the impact of "carbonic acid gas" (the term for carbon dioxide in her day) against "common air." When placed in the sun, she found the cylinder with carbon dioxide trapped more heat and stayed hot longer.
From a simple experiment, she drew a profound conclusion: "An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature . . . must have necessarily resulted." In other words, she connected the dots between carbon dioxide and planetary warming, and she did it more than 160 years ago.
Foote's paper, "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun's Rays," was presented in August 1856 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then published. For unknown reasons it was read aloud by Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, rather than by Foote herself. That was three years before Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own more detailed work on heat-trapping gases-work typically credited as the foundation of climate science.
Did Tyndall know about Foote's research? It's unclear-though he did have a paper on color blindness in the same 1856 issue of The American Journal of Science and Arts as hers. In any case, we have to wonder if Eunice Newton Foote ever found herself remarking, as so many women have: "I literally just said that, dude."
Foote wasn't only a scientist. She was involved in the early movement for women's rights too. Her name appears on the list of signatories to the 1848 Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments"-a manifesto created during the first women's rights convention in the United States-right below suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Foote's husband, Elisha, and abolitionist-philosopher Frederick Douglass also signed on, under "gentlemen." (Of note: John Tyndall opposed women's suffrage.)
Foote, it seems, was a climate feminist.
The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and exploits girls, women, and nonbinary people (and constricts and contorts boys and men) also wreaks destruction on the natural world. Dominance, supremacy, violence, extraction, egotism, greed, ruthless competition-these hallmarks of patriarchy fuel the climate cris...
Readers Top Reviews
Paul G. WardRandy Ds
This book contains a wonderful collection of mostly well-written essays on our planetary crisis. However, if you are a while male with a passion for planetary wellness, you may want to skip the foreword presented by apparently anti-male feminist editors, which could dissuade you from reading the essays and learning many valuable lessons from inspirational female writers. Maybe the climate crisis is not gender neutral and maybe the dominant public voices on the climate crisis have been white men, but disparaging men, many of whom exhibit both masculine and feminine characteristics, may not promote a truly collaborate approach. Yes, the climate crisis is a leadership crisis, and certainly requires more characteristically feminine leadership but let’s make this a collaborate rather than a divisive aspiration.
J. Spearman
This book is incredibly informative, insightful and inspiring. The editors found such a powerful balance of writers to take on the many sides to the climate discussion from the policy to racial injustice elevating the entire movement as a result. I’ve never been more committed to doing my part and All We Can Save is a big reason.
sonya34
I'm pretty well-versed in the climate movement, including writings by several people in this collection, so I wasn't sure if it would feel like a retread of what I already know. But it is SO much more. The book quickly gets past the general outlines of the climate emergency, what's at stake, and who the leaders of the climate feminist movement are. And then, it's new terrain, at least for me. New ways of thinking about the situation, new facts about what's actually possible, what impacts the movement has already made, and where things are unraveling quickly. I love the poetry, and the specific, particular, even localized essays. This is such a worthy read.
katewickhamElo
Some chapters (perhaps I should call them essays) were inspiring and provided information I had not known. Others were more basic or even had errors. For example, one chapter stated that there would be 200 million displaced by climate by the end of the next century. What? By 2050 143 million are estimated to be displaced. By the end of this century there is an estimate for 1 billion. I did a quick search to come up with those numbers. Then in a later chapter another author quoted the 143 million I found. As a minimum the editors should have noticed the serious discrepancy in the two. One of the best chapters, in my opinion, credited Thomas Edison with promoting wind and solar power. The only issue is that another person had actually installed a wind energy system in a home years before Edison publicly promoted renewable energy. It would have been appropriate to have credited the earlier installation.
Catharine Reeve
All We Can Save is a clarion call to action on behalf of our besieged Earth. It highlights numerous creative, insightful, and exciting examples of what is being done right now, though you likely have heard of none of them. GretaThunberg is right: the adults have failed the children and the planet--but not these adults. I scribbled notes like mad as I read story after story of amazing success all over the country. I stopped reading only to look around at my desert yard and begin to think of how I can transform it into more productive use, how I can amend the soil, find water in the dew. Specific examples throughout these 40+ stories are beyond inspiring: they bring reality to hope. Read this book, tell your friends about these undaunted women, and start walking the talk. Two things: 1. I read this book in the wake of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death. And with each of these women, I thought that without the doors the amazing RBG opened, they could not be doing what they are. 2. Fanstatic Fungi is an indie movie about mushrooms, and one of the most inspiring films you'll see for right now. Here's to the women in this book, to RBG, and to all the readers whose life will be changed by these stories. Most of all, here is to our Mother Earth.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Begin
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she's due. In 1856 Foote theorized that changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect the Earth's temperature. She was the first woman in climate science, but history overlooked her until just a few years ago.
Foote arrived at her breakthrough idea through experimentation. With an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four thermometers, she tested the impact of "carbonic acid gas" (the term for carbon dioxide in her day) against "common air." When placed in the sun, she found the cylinder with carbon dioxide trapped more heat and stayed hot longer.
From a simple experiment, she drew a profound conclusion: "An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature . . . must have necessarily resulted." In other words, she connected the dots between carbon dioxide and planetary warming, and she did it more than 160 years ago.
Foote's paper, "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun's Rays," was presented in August 1856 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then published. For unknown reasons it was read aloud by Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, rather than by Foote herself. That was three years before Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own more detailed work on heat-trapping gases-work typically credited as the foundation of climate science.
Did Tyndall know about Foote's research? It's unclear-though he did have a paper on color blindness in the same 1856 issue of The American Journal of Science and Arts as hers. In any case, we have to wonder if Eunice Newton Foote ever found herself remarking, as so many women have: "I literally just said that, dude."
Foote wasn't only a scientist. She was involved in the early movement for women's rights too. Her name appears on the list of signatories to the 1848 Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments"-a manifesto created during the first women's rights convention in the United States-right below suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Foote's husband, Elisha, and abolitionist-philosopher Frederick Douglass also signed on, under "gentlemen." (Of note: John Tyndall opposed women's suffrage.)
Foote, it seems, was a climate feminist.
The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and exploits girls, women, and nonbinary people (and constricts and contorts boys and men) also wreaks destruction on the natural world. Dominance, supremacy, violence, extraction, egotism, greed, ruthless competition-these hallmarks of patriarchy fuel the climate crisis just as surely as they do inequality, colluding with racism along the way. Patriarchy silences, breeds contempt, fuels destructive capitalism, and plays a zero-sum game. Its harms are chronic, cumulative, and fundamentally planetary.
And these structures are being actively upended. The People's Climate March and the Women's March. School strikes for climate and the #MeToo movement. Rebellions against extinction and declarations that time's up. More than concurrent, these phenomena are connected by the systems they seek to transform and the values that guide them.
The climate crisis is not gender neutral. Climate change is a powerful "threat multiplier," making existing vulnerabilities and injustices worse. Especially under conditions of poverty, women and girls face greater risk of displacement or death from extreme weather disasters. Early marriage and sex work-sometimes last-resort survival strategies-have been tied to droughts and floods. There is growing proof of the link between climate change and gender-based violence, including sexual assault, domestic abuse, and forced prostitution. Tasks core to survival, such as collecting water and wood or growing food, fall on female shoulders in many cultures. These are already challenging and time-consuming activities; climate change can deepen the burden, and with it struggles for health, education, and financial security.
The list of harmful impacts caused by our rapidly changing climate goes long and it goes wide, especially for girls and women of color, those in the Global South, and those who are rural or Indigenous. In very real ways, the climate crisis thwarts the rights and opportunities of women and girls, as well as nonbinary people. These realities make gender-responsive strategies for climate resilience and adaptation critical. And they mean that bold climate action is critical to our aspirations for gender equality and justice.
However, the story does not, and must ...
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she's due. In 1856 Foote theorized that changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect the Earth's temperature. She was the first woman in climate science, but history overlooked her until just a few years ago.
Foote arrived at her breakthrough idea through experimentation. With an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four thermometers, she tested the impact of "carbonic acid gas" (the term for carbon dioxide in her day) against "common air." When placed in the sun, she found the cylinder with carbon dioxide trapped more heat and stayed hot longer.
From a simple experiment, she drew a profound conclusion: "An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature . . . must have necessarily resulted." In other words, she connected the dots between carbon dioxide and planetary warming, and she did it more than 160 years ago.
Foote's paper, "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun's Rays," was presented in August 1856 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then published. For unknown reasons it was read aloud by Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, rather than by Foote herself. That was three years before Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own more detailed work on heat-trapping gases-work typically credited as the foundation of climate science.
Did Tyndall know about Foote's research? It's unclear-though he did have a paper on color blindness in the same 1856 issue of The American Journal of Science and Arts as hers. In any case, we have to wonder if Eunice Newton Foote ever found herself remarking, as so many women have: "I literally just said that, dude."
Foote wasn't only a scientist. She was involved in the early movement for women's rights too. Her name appears on the list of signatories to the 1848 Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments"-a manifesto created during the first women's rights convention in the United States-right below suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Foote's husband, Elisha, and abolitionist-philosopher Frederick Douglass also signed on, under "gentlemen." (Of note: John Tyndall opposed women's suffrage.)
Foote, it seems, was a climate feminist.
The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and exploits girls, women, and nonbinary people (and constricts and contorts boys and men) also wreaks destruction on the natural world. Dominance, supremacy, violence, extraction, egotism, greed, ruthless competition-these hallmarks of patriarchy fuel the climate crisis just as surely as they do inequality, colluding with racism along the way. Patriarchy silences, breeds contempt, fuels destructive capitalism, and plays a zero-sum game. Its harms are chronic, cumulative, and fundamentally planetary.
And these structures are being actively upended. The People's Climate March and the Women's March. School strikes for climate and the #MeToo movement. Rebellions against extinction and declarations that time's up. More than concurrent, these phenomena are connected by the systems they seek to transform and the values that guide them.
The climate crisis is not gender neutral. Climate change is a powerful "threat multiplier," making existing vulnerabilities and injustices worse. Especially under conditions of poverty, women and girls face greater risk of displacement or death from extreme weather disasters. Early marriage and sex work-sometimes last-resort survival strategies-have been tied to droughts and floods. There is growing proof of the link between climate change and gender-based violence, including sexual assault, domestic abuse, and forced prostitution. Tasks core to survival, such as collecting water and wood or growing food, fall on female shoulders in many cultures. These are already challenging and time-consuming activities; climate change can deepen the burden, and with it struggles for health, education, and financial security.
The list of harmful impacts caused by our rapidly changing climate goes long and it goes wide, especially for girls and women of color, those in the Global South, and those who are rural or Indigenous. In very real ways, the climate crisis thwarts the rights and opportunities of women and girls, as well as nonbinary people. These realities make gender-responsive strategies for climate resilience and adaptation critical. And they mean that bold climate action is critical to our aspirations for gender equality and justice.
However, the story does not, and must ...
