March 2025 - All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis Essays edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

Book Blog #7

March 2025 book:  All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Essays edited by  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

Blog post by Rachel Shiryayeva

Our March book (see title above), selected in honor of International Women’s Day, provoked mixed reactions. One of us did not care for it, another said it did not give due credit to the older generations (for their environmental work), and yet another read every page of the forty-three essays and called the book “a milestone.”

The essays in this book about the climate crisis are creatively categorized into eight sections: Root, Advocate, Reframe, Reshape, Persist, Feel, Nourish, and Rise. Poems and quotations are also included in the book.

One of the notable essays in the “Root” section was “Reciprocity”, by Janine Benyus. Benyus opened up her essay with a look back at her days as a forestry  degree major. She described the influential ecologists Edward Clements and Henry Gleason, and how their opposing philosophies affected views on plant growth: While Gleason claimed plants were individuals that competed with one another for survival, Clements proposed plants were cooperators that helped one another.

It was interesting to learn that Gleason’s ideas on competition had been replaced by Clements’s theories of cooperation, but that the theory of competition came back in vogue as the Cold War was starting. (It was as if you could not even speak of communism for plants.)  Benyus explains that it took fifty years of inconclusive research for the ideas of cooperation to regain some footing. She describes the mutually beneficial relationships of plants growing in forests, and she also mentions some more recent work done by ecologist Ray Callahan, who wrote the book Positive Interactions and Interdependence in Plant Communities.

Many essays spoke of the importance of listening to the wisdom of indigenous peoples. One of these was “Indigenous Prophecy and Mother Earth”, by Sherri Mitchell and Weh’Na Ha’mu Kwasset, of the Penawahpskek Nation. The authors point out that “Human beings have fallen out of alignment with life. . . . Their beliefs and ways of being have shifted dramatically from those of their ancestors, taking them further and further away from the sources of their survival” (p.20). They also say that “...the U.N. and scientific communities have all pointed to indigenous people as being the key to addressing climate change” (p.19). I found it especially interesting how this essay was suggestive of Benyus’s essay and its claims that different plant species aid one another. Kwasset and Mitchell make a similar statement about humanity: “Human diversity is just as critical to society as biodiversity is to an ecosystem; without it there can be no healthy functioning” (p.23).

We spoke of the frightening statistic in “Becoming a Climate Citizen”, an essay by Kate Knuth. Knuth writes “A recent study found that 30 percent of people born in the 1980s believe it is “essential” to live in a democracy, versus 72 percent of people born in the 1930s” (p.131). As Mitchell and Kwasset did in their essay, Knuth stresses the importance of everyone’s participation in transforming society: she believes we need to “reweave the fabric of our democracy” (p.131) with “an intentional practice of climate citizenship”(p.131). While she recognizes people have become wary of terms such as “citizenship” for good reasons, she believes it is “...a sacred trust between the individual and collective” (p.132), and only through the collective will we be able to achieve a healthy environment.

Another essay one of our book club members brought up for discussion was Under the Weather, by Ash Sanders. One thing I found compelling in this essay was that there were so many detailed personal stories. I was moved to learn about the depths of the suffering and alienation those individuals experienced in their often lonely struggles against climate change. Here is a glimpse at some of the people we read about:

Chris Foster slept outside and tried to live on fallen fruit. He scavenged for persimmons and radishes, eating nothing else for a whole (university) term. He sat in a dark apartment to not waste electricity.

Ash Sanders (the author, and at one time a student of Foster’s): worked 54-hr weeks, mostly unpaid, to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

Lise Van Susteren, a clinical psychiatrist, had thought that once the world had all of the data, we would rush to work at fixing the problem, but, on the contrary, carbon emissions only got worse.  She experienced pre-TSD for things she knew would happen. When she tried to sleep, she saw the faces of climate refugees; she saw animals  and people trapped because of natural disasters.

Alicia Escott’s response to failed climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009 was to write letters to extinct animals, trying to fill them in on what they had missed.

This essay also talked about Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante’s efforts to establish a lexicon “...to describe the destabilizing experience of living through mass climate change” (p.241); Concern was expressed about the fact that while psychologists tend to treat individuals, it is outside of the psychologist’s experience to recognize that what many individuals are suffering from is not a problem of an isolated “sickness” but rather that they are suffering from living in a broken society, so the profession needs to stop situating sickness solely in the individual.  This way, we can begin to consider how to treat society rather than just individuals.

I don’t remember how the question came up, but at the end of our meeting, someone was asked “How much time do you think we have left . . .?”  With uncertainty, the speaker said something about three generations. . . Four generations?

 No one seemed to have anything to add to this. Or was it just that our book club hour had come to an end? I can’t assume I know what was passing through the minds of everyone else, but to speak for myself, I felt uneasy.

The strength of this uneasiness comes and goes, but it always exists in the back of (our?) minds. It is an uneasiness that many of us have just gotten used to living with, because no matter what we do individually, we are aware that the necessary changes to protect life on this planet can only be brought about through laws.* For example, I as an individual can choose not to use the supermarket’s plastic bags for produce, but what if these bags were simply against the law, and the stores stopped providing them? What if there were no plastic bags, and people had no choice but to live without them?**

As our book of the month pointed out, it is not that we don’t know what needs to be done about the climate crisis, the problem is that we are not doing it. And we’re running out of time. Please check the IPCC (of the United Nations: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for in-depth information.

https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/

*Right, but our individual actions are still better than nothing. And we can show support for environmental laws. Here is a link to a short article with ideas on what we can do:

https://thewestendnews.com/what-should-we-do-now-suggestions-for-environmentalists/

**After writing this, it occurred to me that I had heard about single-use plastic being banned in Indonesia and Hawaii, and I wondered where else such plastics have been banned. In a quick internet search, I have just learned that ten states do ban single-use plastics, including our near neighbors Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. If you live in a state that bans single-use plastic, I’d love to hear about your experience shopping for groceries. 

And for all readers: What are your thoughts on global warming? Or maybe you have an experience to share, a story to tell?

Feel free to leave a comment!