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

In this essay, Bastida recalls the climate crises she experienced in her hometown, San Pedro Tultepec in Mexico; she remembers years of drought (the worst in Mexico in 70 years) followed by heavy rainfall that caused flooding and destruction among poor communities. She recalls moving to New York City, where she experienced Superstorm Sandy and realized that climate justice is about protecting vulnerable communities. Bastida urges readers to realize that they don’t need to understand all of the science of climate change in order to be part of the solution.

She issues a call to the youth of her generation to use the tools at their disposal to make change. She references her Otomi-Toltec ancestry, which taught her that “you take care of the Earth because she takes care of you” (4). A cultural and mental shift is necessary in society if we want to see change. Part of this cultural shift is learning to work collaboratively rather than competitively. The movement needs to be intergenerational; though the youth seem to be leading the movement, older generations also need to play a part.

Bastida distinguishes between climate action and climate justice, the latter of which is a necessity for our world if we want to take care of each other. She lists 10 tips for being a climate justice activist: join an initiative; maintain communication with your peers and the adults of the organizations you partner with; take care of yourself and others; make your activism intersectional; don’t do things the patriarchal way, the racist way, the exhausting way, or any way that excludes marginalized voices for the sake of efficiency; convey the necessity of both individual and structural change; meet people where they’re at in climate knowledge; use accessible language; and talk about greenwashing, environmental racism, and green gentrification (6).

Benyus’s essay begins with the debate between scientists Frederic Clements and Henry Gleason about communities of vegetation and how plants grow together. Clements was of the opinion that plants benefit from one another and cooperate with each other. He called these communities of plants “organismic” because of how interwoven they seemed to be (9). Gleason was of the opinion that the “communities” Clements described were actually random happenstance and that “there was no mutual aid” in the plant communities (9). For the first half of the 21st century, Clements’s philosophy was widely accepted. Soon after, Gleason’s ideologies prevailed and individualism, in both human and plant life, became the favored theory.

While Benyus was studying forestry, ecologist Ray Callaway was conducting research of his own. The dominant opinion, thanks to Gleason, was that the blue oak trees in California should be cut down so that the grasses below would not have to compete for resources. Through his “Clementsian” research, Callaway found that the “nutrient totals under oaks were five to sixty times greater than in open grasslands” (10), proving that the grasses would actually thrive under the oaks rather than in the open. Callaway has since authored research on “facilitation” among plant life—he has found that plants actually enhance each other’s growth.

Benyus writes about Suzanne Simard, another professional forester, who conducted research on the relationship between Douglas fir and paper birch trees in British Columbia and found that the relationship was mutually beneficial: The trees exchanged carbon that benefitted each other’s growth. Benyus encourages the reader to “step into the flow of the carbon cycle” to better understand how our collective and individual carbon footprints are affecting the earth’s atmosphere (13).

Bass’s poem imagines the meteor that made the dinosaurs become extinct and then the volcanoes that wiped out reptiles and sharks and fish. She compares this massive loss to a typical human “bad day.” She details her longing for creatures that are close to extinction. The sight of a woman in a bright red sweater on the bus reminds her of a cardinal, and she again aches for the animals—this time a polar bear.

She arrives home and her grown son has a headache; he lies down in her lap and she sings him songs. She ends with the lines, “There never was / anything else. Only these excruciatingly / insignificant creatures we love” (15).

Mitchell’s essay focuses on Indigenous knowledge. In the late 1800s, racist beliefs about Indigenous peoples led to their exploitation and to the marginalization of Indigenous knowledge while colonial scholarship became mainstream. Mitchell writes that “the Indigenous ways of knowing and being that European colonists saw as primitive and uncivilized are now being actively sought out to save our environment and humankind from the brink of extinction” (17). The centrality of wealthy white men to all power and authority from colonization to the present day has limited access to ideas and information (23). Diversity is key to coming up with new solutions for our climate crisis.

Many Indigenous peoples have prophecies that correspond to our present day: In 1970, a Hopi elder from the village of Hotevilla prophesied natural disasters and corruption; in 1877, Crazy Horse delivered a prophecy at the place where protestors would gather in 2016 to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline; and wisdom keeper Jim Dumont prophesied about the “time of the seventh fire” in which the “light-skinned people would be given a choice of two paths […] the path of unity and peace, or stay on the current path and destroy themselves and countless others with them” (27).

Mitchell equates the destruction of Indigenous peoples with the destruction of Mother Earth. Indigenous knowledge and an awareness of kinship will lead humans back to life and harmony with the planet.

Marvel begins the essay with a description of an empty plane flying over the Amazon rainforest; this airplane will drop “mineral sunscreen” into the atmosphere to block some sunlight and preserve the temperature of the Earth a little longer. She describes this process as “geoengineering” and a temporary fix for a big problem. She relates this phenomenon to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and his self-created monster.

The speaker declares in this poem that if she cannot save the world, then she just wants to feel her child (or maybe a lover) safe and happy in her arms. She says that she wants to take in the beauty of the world outside and not indoors. If humans are dying, she wants to “bleed Love” and begin a new life if the one she knows is ending.

This essay explores the concept of emergence. As defined by Nick Obolensky, “[E]mergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions” (37). Brown gives the examples of birds migrating, caterpillars morphing into butterflies, and one dandelion turning into a field of dandelions to describe the idea of destiny in nature. These different organisms don’t have to think about these actions or transformations--they happen because it is in their destiny.

Brown suggests that we are constantly changing ourselves and the world around us. We have been conditioned as a society to compete with one another and with the world around us, but emergence leads us to see and make authentic connections instead. These connections will be what guides us to lasting change.

Decades of emotional appeals about saving future generations have not convinced those with the power to mitigate climate change. Since 1988, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen over 40% and continue to rise. The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, humans did not exist.

The children on whose behalf these early appeals were made have grown up and are now the ones lobbying for change. Climate strikes were widespread in 2019 across 125 countries. Still, this visibility and action should not make us feel complacent, nor should we give in to feelings of powerlessness.

In London, a group called Extinction Rebellion has urged political leaders to treat climate change as the emergency it is, performing drastic protests like shutting down a large part of central London. These actions led to Wales and Scotland declaring a state of climate emergency in 2019; the British Parliament then followed their example. In the United States, a group called the Sunrise Movement occupied the office of Representative Nancy Pelosi, calling on Congress to adopt “a rapid decarbonization framework” (43).

One month before this protest in the United States, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report that inspired much more urgency in regards to the climate crisis. They projected that in order to keep warming below 1.5 °C, the world would need to halve emissions by 2030 and reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. This change will require action from all major economies and a shift in society overall. Many are therefore calling for the United States and other governmental leaders to adopt the Green New Deal or similar policies.

Klein asserts a model of decentering white, Western ideals and instead sharing power and resources with Indigenous communities, designing housing with input from communities of color, and embracing community rather than giving all control of conservation to military and federal agencies. Noting that young people are ready for change, she argues that rebuilding something made for everyone is the only way forward.