78: Soul and soil are not separate
All We Can Save offers fertile ground in which readers can find their roots in the climate fight
A great anthology takes a bundle of seemingly divergent works and assembles them together to represent a coherent form of their own—a creation greater than the sum of its parts. In their excellent 2019 collection Shapes of Native Nonfiction, editors Theresa Warburton and Elissa Washuta take special care to explore not just the content of the submissions within, but also the form their prose takes—the way of telling. “To speak only about the contents of these vessels would be to ignore how their significance is shaped by the vessels that hold them,” they write in the introduction. To reflect that interest, they structured the book’s contents around the form of a basket, with sections organized as different components of Native basket weaving, like coiling, plaiting, and twining.
“We have understood this project as a way to hold—to hold together and to hold in place.… we see the basket not as a metaphor, but rather as a structure (form) through which to understand how the pieces included here come together in this space.”
I was thinking about this while reading the 2020 anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis because, while the material it delivers is very powerful on its own, it’s the way these essays and poems come together that makes the book even more resonant than what is conveyed in its individual entries. But instead of a basket, All We Can Save takes on a form that is like a rich soil, supporting an ecosystem of voices and ideas that are distinctive, but support and interact with each other to encourage further growth.
It’s a book that, in both overall form and individual arguments, challenges the industrial monocultures of the Anthropocene—undercutting gatekeepers, hierarchies, dominance over nature and each other. Instead, it flattens and diversifies the ways in which we might approach this topic, opting for a chorus of complementary voices. It’s for this reason that I think All We Can Save is more than just a collection of essays about climate change—it serves as an important primer that can help people find their place within a changing world that demands the best from all of us.
I guess I have read quite a few books about climate change I do not care to add them up, and some have been kind of boring and many of them have been very useful and eye-opening. But as I’ve mentioned before, you kind of take what you need from each, as every author brings a very different perspective to a problem that can viewed from near-infinite angles. So I’ve found David Wallace-Wells, for example, to be one of the most effective writers when it comes to portraying the devastating scope of the problem—how climate is now the box within which all other problems fit inside. Elizabeth Kolbert is a master at pulling together researchers’ insights and presenting coherent and compelling snapshots of the field. Cristina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac offer a view from inside global negotiations, and the relentless optimism it requires to keep working against the odds.
But reading All We Can Save made me think that the anthology is maybe the perfect format for a climate change book. Because coming to grips with this problem is something that can’t be done by tapping into any one expert’s insights or even one journalist’s analysis of many insights (except for me my analysis is flawless like subscribe and share). Climate change is not so much a topic as it is a hyperobject, massively distributed across time and space such that you can’t see or hold it in front of you, even though you know it is there. Viewing it is more like looking through a kaleidoscope than a telescope.
That said, All We Can Save does bring a certain perspective of its own, what you could call a climate justice lens, although not strictly so. Climate justice is an accurate way to describe the book’s themes but it also feels insufficient, as it accurately brings to mind the efforts of people who are most impacted by climate change, for example, communities in coastal Louisiana or Indigenous water and land protectors fighting polluting oil and gas infrastructure. Such stories are present in All We Can Save, but the book’s portrayal of climate justice feels broader. It’s a way of thinking about climate change that centers human experience in both its harms and solutions, bearing the full emotional weight that comes with it—devastation, hope, anger, love, mourning.
While men certainly do carry this perspective, inviting only women authors to contribute was an intentional course correction in a field that for decades has been embodied by a white guy in a fleece vest or a suit and tie. As the issue takes center stage, that dynamic threatens to get worse, not better, as billionaires, corporate CEOs, politicians, and mainstream journalists can no longer ignore the problem, so they anoint themselves its leading voices. As I constantly complain about, such voices tend to cast the climate problem as one primarily of top-down expertise, engineering solutions, and bloodless economic policy, which has cordoned off the topic from mass participation.
There is no shortage of policy, expertise, or solutions in this book—it is bursting with all three—but always rooted firmly in human lives and experiences, from all walks of life, making the messages within accessible and familiar, regardless of your own base of knowledge. That’s the rich soil I’m referring to—a diversity of voices speaking with an emotional honesty often lacking in climate discourse, but critical to creating a flourishing movement.
Of course, there’s also a lot of writing in this book about actual soil, which are some of my favorite entries. In “Reciprocity,” by biologist Janine Benyus, she writes about her work in forestry, and how, often reflecting changing political winds, the cooperative community theory of ecology—that species thrive by sharing mutual benefits—has fallen out and back into favor. “One of the fallouts of our fifty-year focus on competition is that we came to view all organisms as consumers and competitors first, including ourselves. Now we’re decades into a different understanding.”
Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer who started Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, writes powerfully about the work it took to restore biodiversity to the nutrient-stripped soils its founders inherited. “As Larisa Jacobson, codirector of Soul Fire Farm, explains, ‘Our duty as earthkeepers is to call the exiled carbon back into the land and to bring the soil life home.’” The farm simultaneously works to heal and restore Black Americans’ connection to the land, which was poisoned by slavery as a means of enriching the country through cash crops. Land use and the repair of soil are an underrated and critical climate change solution, as Project Drawdown outlines, but here again, we’re talking about the human bond with our surroundings, regenerative over industrial growth, literally and figuratively. As a Terry Tempest-Williams poem featured in the book states, “Soul and soil are not separate.”
Some other favorite essays:
Rihanna Gunn-Wright’s explainer on what the Green New Deal really is. “The best policy proposals—that is, the proposals that move the most people to fight for them—present a clear narrative about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how the government plans to fix it.”
Kate Marvel’s cutting take on the hubris of solar geoengineering, in which we “mask the hangover but continue the bender.”
Mary Annaïse Heglar on privileged gatekeepers, both nihilists and optimists.
Emily Atkin’s journey to casting aside neutrality as a climate journalist.
Kate Knuth’s formulation of climate citizenship, and the “sacred trust between the individual and the collective.”
Katharine Hayhoe’s stories of talking about climate change in front of oil and gas executives, Rotary Clubs in West Texas, a Successful Canadian Women’s Dinner, even her husband, a former climate skeptic. “To care about a changing climate we don’t have to be a tree hugger or an environmentalist (though it certainly helps); as long as we are a human alive today, then who we already are, and what we already care about, gives us all the reasons we need.”
The most gut-wrenchingly honest thing I’ve read about climate change and being a parent, by Amy Westervelt. “It’s a constant choice between me, my kids, and the greater good. And I almost never feel like I’m making the right decision.”
And so many more. I already knew I was going to like All We Can Save, because I like the work of so many of its contributors. But the way in which the anthology format weaves together all of these voices to make individual points, while building this larger, interactive philosophy on how to interact with climate change, makes it, for my money, one of the best books on climate change you can read. Not only that, I think it’s the perfect book for someone who maybe grasps the idea of climate change and cares about it, but has struggled to find where their own lives fit into the larger, profoundly overwhelming topic. It’s a book that provides fertile ground in which readers can find their own roots in the climate fight, to understand how their own stories and lives fit into this ecosystem, and how their contribution can make it more diverse and resilient.
Nice things, cont.
This week I listened to an interview with Heather McGhee (yes it was on Ezra Klein), whose new book The Sum of Us is getting a lot of attention. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds amazing I can’t wait, and I gather she starts her argument with the framing of “why we can’t have nice things” which was the theme of last issue’s newsletter about why our infrastructure is so terrible. McGhee’s premise is that for centuries, Americans have all been sold this false zero-sum story (like the the “one-up/one-down” world view bell hooks describes) that’s prevented everyone in America from having better lives through widely available public goods.
She uses the devastating example of public swimming pools, which were these thriving community resources all over the country until integration, when municipalities shut them down and literally paved them over rather than allowing people of color to also have access. She extends that metaphor to resources like affordable public education, home ownership, and health care coverage, where in all cases white Americans have drastically cut back their own access to protect where they sit in social hierarchies. While the zero-sum story has bled beyond racial divides, McGhee argues that a racial analysis is the only way to understand and dismantle it. From the interview:
It’s really important to not ignore how profoundly racialized the story of the American economy and government is and has been for all of our history. So if you try to bring color blind tools to convince people about their economic self interest while ignoring just how profoundly racialized the economic story is, you just won’t succeed.
Links
A savage takedown of corporate sustainability efforts, from a former staffer at the Rocky Mountain Institute. “Sustainable business practices haven’t just been a distraction (bad), nor a dodge of hard, controversial work (sinister), nor even intentionally duplicitous (corrupt). The approach has been evil because it represents complicity. Complicity with the fossil fuel industry and the structure it created…”
Less than one percent of Phoenix’s population, the “water one-percenters,” consume 7.5% of all water delivered by the Salt River Project. Here are some other gross factoids. In metro Phoenix, which receives an average of 8 inches of rainfall a year, water prices are among the lowest in the nation. The average resident uses 115 gallons a day, while US average is 83 gallons. Tucsonans average 85 gallons.
Four years ago, California emerged from a record breaking drought emergency. Now it’s on the brink of another one.
The case for rewilding our cities.
Isaac Chotiner has been doing some incisive interviews about the humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border. The latest unpacks the “interlocking set of failures” in the American immigration system that got us to this point.
Boston is piloting free public transportation.
Cape Cod is a COVID hot spot right now, but it’s also bracing to be flooded with tourists and doesn’t have enough workers to handle them due to foreign travel restrictions and also service jobs not paying enough for people to risk their lives.
This massive federal funeral assistance program is a grim reminder of just how much we’ve lost in the past year.
Amid a unionization effort that Amazon juuuuust now defeated, the company’s official twitter account heckled a congressman who pointed out that its workers have to pee in bottles. The Amazon account said that is not true, then later had to apologize and clarify that yes, in fact its workers do have to pee in bottles.
Following multiple audits that found no voter fraud in the 2020 election, Arizona’s Senate president is still desperately trying to find evidence of voter fraud. She recently hired a Florida cybersecurity firm called Cyber Ninjas to crack the case.
Want to read yet another article about how we are hitting the pandemic wall? Of course you do. “Things take longer to get done, she said, in part because she doesn’t want to do them.”
I endorse
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so let’s plug Hecho con Ganas, the project of LA-based artist Ernesto Yerena Montejano, who you may know from his protest art and collaborations with Shepard Fairey and others. All of his work is beautiful and he has a very active Instagram. But he also has a store where you can buy prints, stickers, and sometimes shirts. I recently bought this awesome Day of the Dead themed shirt, which sent a portion of sales to Covid relief in Yaqui communities. Go buy his stuff!
Listening
Looks like emo winter has become emo spring. Here’s a fave from Restorations, Civil Inattention.
Watching
I recently watched Godzilla vs. Kong, which is an emotional film about how patriarchy and capitalism are bringing pain and suffering to a very large gorilla and all of the people he loves and the only thing that can save him is finding the will to change so he can live a life that is not driven by violence and domination but only after he defeats Mechagodzilla.
As an honest and mostly healthy middle-aged adult, I am finally eligible to get the covid vaccine as the state opened it up to people who have one of a number of mild health complications, of which I have a couple that are frankly none of your business.
It has been fun to discover that the dystopian process of finding a vaccine appointment is a remarkably similar to when I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch online, including having to create a Walmart.com account and regularly refreshing different company websites at odd hours of the day. I hope that emerging from the pandemic is as good as Zelda Breath of the Wild, but honestly, that is a pretty high bar I’m skeptical.
I probably need to wait on the vaccine anyway as I finish up a short prescription of prednisone for a fucked up nerve in my neck. It’s doing the job but have you guys taken this stuff it is like raaaaah manic. Doctors say oh you should probably not take it at night but they should really say this stuff is going to make you vibrate and also you should avoid any online shopping. I keep wanting to shave my head again but seems like I should probably hold off I think it might be a side effect.
I hope that this newsletter, for you reader, is a lot like a short prescription of prednisone, in that it eases any aches and pains you may be having and fills you with an uncontrollable surge of energy for a little while.
Tate