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

The climate crisis is the result of social, political, and economic systems that are wildly skewed to benefit those who already have so much.

We need to have a whole cultural shift, where it becomes our culture to take care of the Earth, and in order to make this shift, we need storytelling about how the Earth takes care of us and how we can take care of her.

It’s a constant question for me every time I’m entranced by the beauty of this world: what does it mean to love this place? What does it mean to love anyone or anything in a world whose vanishing is accelerating, perhaps beyond our capacity to save the things that we love most? We still have the chance to make the space for hope- to act in such a way that hope might exist for others who come after us. Not everyone can focus on this work- many people are too full up with the difficulties of their daily lives...But if you can, then the world needs you, and it needs you right now, because anything that we do this year or next is worth ten of the same thing ten years from now. LOVING A VANISHING WORLD by Emily N. Johnston

It’s too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save one another and a great many other species too. Let’s put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less ornate, but with room for all those who need shelter and care.

building community is a requisite foundation for building a better world.

The plain truth is that capitalism needs to evolve if humanity is going to survive. Rose Marcario

If you’re not affected by climate change today, that itself is a privilege. ---Andrea Manning

the great pull of the universe is a desire to live in harmony with the Creator, which is expressed most effectively in our own lives by living harmoniously with the rest of creation.

Though Indigenous peoples comprise only about 5 percent of the global population, our lands hold approximately 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity and an estimated 40 to 50 percent of the remaining protected places in the world.

[The keepers of Indigenous knowledge carry thousands of years of data on things such as medicinal plant properties, biodiversity, migration patterns, climate changes, astronomical events, and quantum physics.

This makes us, however unintuitively, the most powerful people that have ever lived…Nothing has threatened our ecologies more than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and the affluent consumer culture…But we have also been granted an astonishingly beautiful gift that has never before been given to humans: the chance to shepherd human and animal life into the coming centuries and millennia, when we know that much of it would otherwise disappear. That’s a power that should make us very humble and a privilege that can motivate us profoundly. In a way, our darkness- the knowledge that without our great effort, many or most of Earth’s creatures will vanish- is what reveals the light within, the seed of life and possibility that we share with all of Earth’s life, the one that we can carry forward. For better and for worse, we are the ones at the intersection of knowledge and agency. LOVING A VANISHING WORLD by Emily N. Johnston

Did It Ever Occur to You That Maybe You’re Falling in Love? BY AILISH HOPPER We buried the problem. We planted a tree over the problem. We regretted our actions toward the problem. We declined to comment on the problem. We carved a memorial to the problem, dedicated it. Forgot our handkerchief. We removed all “unnatural” ingredients, handcrafted a locally-grown tincture for the problem. But nobody bought it. We freshly-laundered, bleached, deodorized the problem. We built a wall around the problem, tagged it with pictures of children, birds in trees. We renamed the problem, and denounced those who used the old name. We wrote a law for the problem, but it died in committee. We drove the problem out with loud noises from homemade instruments. We marched, leafleted, sang hymns, linked arms with the problem, got dragged to jail, got spat on by the problem and let out. We elected an official who Finally Gets the problem. … We watched carefully for the problem, but our flashlight died. We had dreams of the problem. In which we could no longer recognize ourselves. We reformed. We transformed. Turned over a new leaf. Turned a corner, found ourselves near a scent that somehow reminded us of the problem, In ways we could never Put into words. That Little I-can’t-explain-it That makes it hard to think. That Rings like a siren inside.

SHE TOLD ME THE EARTH LOVES US by Anne Haven McDonnell She said it softly, without a need For conviction or romance. After everything? I asked, ashamed. That’s not the kind of love she meant. She walked through a field of gray Beetle-bored pine, snags branching Like polished bone. I forget sometimes How trees look at me with the generosity Of water. I forget all the other Breath I’m breathing in. Today I learned that trees can’t sleep With our lights on. That they knit A forest in their language, their feelings. This is not a metaphor. Like seeing faces across the crowd, We are learning al the old things, Newly shined and numbered. I’m always looking For a place to lie down And cry. Green, mossed, shaded. Or rock-quiet, empty. Somewhere To hush and start over I put on my antlers in the sun. I walk through the dark gates of the trees. Grief waters my footsteps, leaving A trail that glistens.

The sacred is all around us, always. The sacred is in each of our bodies, a miracle of life and water and earth. It is present in every object we touch, every wall and window we somehow believe separates us from our Mother. We each hold the beauty of creation in every fiber of our being. We are never far from the answer to the problem we have created- it is within each of us. SACRED RESISTANCE by Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe, Couchiching First Nation

Our steady resistance forms cracks in the world of profit margins. It transitions us away from self-destruction. We are a thorn in the side of a world that believes it must extract to exist, a bone-deep reminder there are other ways of being…Some of us leave the land to bring our case to the financiers of the industry we oppose, to present the data and oppositional testimony the banks ostensibly have no knowledge of. In here, I feel like an exotic bird to be examined for potential danger. In here, alongside discussion of financial investments, I remind corporate heads that they drink water and breathe air. As awkward as it can be to remind a person of their own humanity, it has proven exceedingly effective to bring Indigenous rights and the voice of the land into these spaces. SACRED RESISTANCE by Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe, Couchiching First Nation

Nature is cyclical. It curves and revolves, with little use for linear ways… Adrienne Rich’s 1977 poem “Natural Resources” unlocked the title of the book. “My heart is moved by all I cannot save,” she writes. Ours too- and by all that we can. The work at hand is hard and uncertain, yet we find our warrior spirits, charge ahead, and care for one another every step of the way. We will stumble as we chart this unmapped path; let’s forgive our fallibility, safeguard our empathy, and lead with kindness as we go. In more poignant words from Adrienne Rich: There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.

To address our climate emergency, we must rapidly, radically reshape society. We need every solution and every solver. As the saying goes, to change everything, we need everyone. What this moment calls for is a mosaic of voices- the full spectrum of ideas and insights on how we can turn things around.

If there is one theme that runs through the collection, it is ferocious love- for one another, for Earth, for all beings, for justice, for a live-giving future. Let’s move forward with love, not conquest; humility, not righteousness; generous curiosity, not hardened assumptions. It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much. Let’s proceed with broken-open hearts, seeking truth, summoning courage, and focused on solutions.

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is- it’s to imagine what is possible. bell hooks

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.

But in my experience, there is always one essential ingredient: scrappy people who are willing to work backward from goals that seem impossibly ambitious at the start.] —

[what can “too expensive” mean when we are contemplating the inundation of the world’s most populous cities, dire food and water shortages, mass migrations, the sixth extinction?]

We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way.”]

[Every plant, tree, and animal carries its own unique wisdom and can teach us how to live harmoniously with one another and in relationship with Mother Earth.

To see beyond what despair sees—to move from the feeling toward the possibility—calls for things we have in abundance: love, imagination, and a willingness to simply tend the world as best we can, without guarantee of success.

[Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, society needs cultural diversity to grow new possibilities. Monoculture deadens our collective potential.]

Living in this time of crisis, for our democracy as well as the climate, is breaking my heart open and creating space for new understanding. The weight of history is on our shoulders, but this moment is alive with possibility.]

For many people who have been comfortable until now, it is seemingly impossible to accept that anything so disruptive as climate change is possible. Either it’s a hoax or things will somehow continue to be fine. [It’s a profound kind of entitlement to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that we can go on living as we are.]

Climate change is only one symptom of a larger problem. 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. As a result, people have forgotten how to live in relationship with the rest of creation. They have lost their respect for their elders in the natural world, such as the trees, waters, soils, and millions of other species that thrived on Mother Earth long before human beings arrived.

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.