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

The poem’s speaker insinuates that someone told her the Earth loves her. She wonders how this could be, after everything. Nature continually takes care of humans, providing places for them to cry and grieve. The trees take care of themselves, knitting a language through their root systems.

Journalist Emily Atkin explains that one reason for the climate crisis is a failure to respond to information. The fossil fuel industry has spread misinformation surrounding the climate crisis, and the media takes any information it finds and spreads it. Citizens therefore haven’t had the quality of information needed to make informed decisions and form opinions about climate change. It is a journalist’s job to cover the facts about the climate crisis, Atkin argues; in fact, journalism is essential to democracy.

Earlier in her career, Atkin felt the need to be neutral in her reporting. She quickly realized that she did not want to be neutral about an issue that was causing people to suffer. She then changed jobs and began reporting in the political sphere during the 2016 presidential election. She disliked this position as well, finding that people were still not taking the big issues seriously. Her next reporting position was for a conservative leaning broadcast group where she hoped that she could move the needle on certain issues. Despite her hard work, she found that there wasn’t much change in her viewers’ reaction to climate change.

One of Atkin’s journalist mentors, Wayne Berrett, passed away during one of her job changes. She ruminated on what he would do in her position, and she realized that he would tell the truth about everything. She felt that she knew the truth about climate change and that it was time to share it in a hard-hitting way. She no longer wanted to be objective about the most harmful issues facing our world. After trying many jobs, she eventually started her own publication called HEATED. She began to use her righteous anger to advocate for society’s most vulnerable. She says that it’s up to us to urge the media and journalists to give the public the information they need to survive. 

Rodriguez addresses the leaders, organizers, and funders of the climate movement with a letter (121). She focuses on the power of culture within the climate movement and the ways that culture influences social change. Our society needs stories of what a just, sustainable world could look like.

Rodriguez writes of her upbringing with immigrant parents in East Oakland, California. She and her community were victims of industrial pollution in ways that white, affluent communities were not. As she grew older, she became aware of the intersections of injustice: “violence, poverty, drugs, government neglect, and environmental racism” (122). However, the bulk of stories and cultural content that exists surrounding climate change is very white-centric and outdated. Diverse stories about climate are lacking because those who control the output of the media are typically white men. This lack of diversity narrows the collective view and understanding of climate change and how it affects different types of people and communities.

Storytelling and culture are aspects of the climate movement that have so far been largely ignored. Rodriguez gives seven ways that we can “harness the power of culture for climate action” (123):

1.      We can pass the mic to artists and culture-makers of color (123).

2.    Build diverse cultural infrastructure (124).

3.    Include artists and makers in your work (124).

4.    Make human stories to move human beings (125).

5.    Create culture to challenge consumption (125).

6.    Let culture connect us to nature (126).

7.    Stand in the power of yes (126).

The stories we decide to highlight will determine whether or not society can heal and move forward. It’s time to write new stories to heal the planet and injustice.

Kate Knuth’s essay asserts that climate citizenship is a way to create transformations in the climate crisis. During her schooling at Oxford, Knuth watched the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina; it was this coverage that made her realize that climate change was not just about devastating natural disasters, it was about the imperfect systems of society climate change was forcefully exposing. She decided to move back to her hometown in Minnesota and campaign for the House of Representatives. Her campaigning taught her that listening is a critical part of gaining people’s trust and support. She learned that “democracy depends on people’s willingness to share their hopes and fears with one another” to make a better future (130).

Investment in democracy and citizenship are vital components of transforming our society. Currently, the elite’s preferences outweigh those of the average American. This is not proper democracy—average citizens need to have a voice. Knuth calls for an intentional practice of “climate citizenship” (131). Citizenship makes you part of a community; being part of a community requires you to care about the issues your community is facing. We are part of Earth’s community, which makes us responsible for caring about the issues facing the Earth.

Knuth recounts a summer she lived in the Czech Republic with her husband and her toddler daughter. Spending time in the unbearable heat and perusing the Museum of Communism in Prague led her to contemplate the fragility of America’s democracy and the impending effects of climate change. She writes that “living in a democracy is not a given’’ (134); in fact, it has been rare over the course of human history (134). Thinking of the fragility of democracy and the planet allowed Knuth to remember the “necessity and potential” of both (134). Climate citizenship requires advocating and showing up in small and big ways for our planet. Attending meetings, running for positions of leadership, and participating in protests are ways that we can practice climate citizenship.

The poem’s speaker describes taking out the recycling with another person; they point out the constellations in the sky above them, naming the few that they recognize. Thinking of the stars, the narrator begins to imagine their place in the universe. They imagine standing up for those with voices that are not heard and using their bodies to bargain for the safety of others and Earth. They imagine being able to make themselves so big that others view them as constellations in the sky.

In her essay, Kendra Pierre-Louis explains the mindset she grew up with about the Earth: that humans were destined to destroy the planet. The United States has historically valued “progress,” but this progress has always come at the cost of the environment. It also implies that we should not be satisfied with the present, but always look forward to future progress.

Pierre-Louis references Robin Wall Kimmerer who surveyed 200 third-year ecology students and found that the majority of them thought that humans and nature were not a good combination. Kimmerer was shocked and disappointed that so many young people devoted to the environment could not identify beneficial relationships between people and nature. There are many examples of communities that live in harmony with the environment, but it’s difficult to find those within the US. What’s more, our culture tends to “reaffirm the idea that where humans go, ecological devastation inevitably follows” (139). Media espousing this message includes Waterworld, The Hunger Games, Avatar, WALL-E, and Star Trek. Stories are powerful and can shape our existence and the way that we live in the world.

Pierre-Louis encourages us to envision a future where we live harmoniously with the environment. The Marvel film Black Panther represents such a future in the fictional African country of Wakanda, which beautifully integrates both nature and technology. This modern society can maintain its ecosystems partly because there are no suburbs. In the United States, suburbs drew people seeking to escape the pollution and substandard housing of the city, but the creation of suburbs has actually increased the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Pierre-Louis advocates for urban living; suburbs make humans reliant on cars, and the building of suburbs and roads is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the film, Wakandans tell a story about themselves and their community that is not based on “conquest and scarcity” but about “improving the quality of their lives without destroying the environment that they depend on” (144). Pierre-Louis suggests that we reframe the way that we think about climate change and create a story about climate change as an opportunity to repair our relationship to the Earth while making our own lives better.