## Metadata - Author: [[Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Katharine K. Wilkinson, Sherri Mitchell, Catherine Pierce, Kate Marvel, Adr...]] - Full Title: All We Can Save - Category: #books ## Highlights - The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and exploits girls, women, and nonbinary people (and constricts and contorts boys and men) also wreaks destruction on the natural world. Dominance, supremacy, violence, extraction, egotism, greed, ruthless competition—these hallmarks of patriarchy fuel the climate crisis just as surely as they do inequality, colluding with racism along the way. Patriarchy silences, breeds contempt, fuels destructive capitalism, and plays a zero-sum game. Its harms are chronic, cumulative, and fundamentally planetary. ([Location 166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=166)) - To transform society this decade—the clear task science has set before us—we need transformational leadership. We need feminine and feminist climate leadership, which is wide open to people of any gender. This is where possibility lives—possibility that we can turn away from the brink and move toward a life-giving future for all. ([Location 222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=222)) - Make your activism intersectional; include all stakeholders in your decision making, and don’t tokenize. ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=360)) - Don’t do things the patriarchal way, the racist way, the exhausting way, or any way that excludes marginalized voices just to be “efficient” and do things fast. ([Location 361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=361)) - Always convey that individual and structural change are both indisputably necessary. ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=364)) - Talk about greenwashing, environmental racism, green gentrification (or as I call it, greentrification), and what a just transition means. ([Location 368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=368)) - A vibrant, fair, and regenerative future is possible—not ([Location 379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=379)) - This mutualistic role, this practice of reciprocity, will require a more nuanced understanding of how ecosystems actually work. ([Location 484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=484)) - Because Indigenous peoples didn’t share European ideas about land ownership, we were considered primitive. Because we had no desire to place the sources of our survival (“natural resources”) into the stream of commerce, we were viewed as ignorant. And because our value system was based on relationships and not currency, we were believed to lack the capacity to live “civilized” lives. ([Location 547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=547)) - Indigenous knowledge is based on millennia-long study of the complex relationships that exist among all systems within creation. It encompasses a broad array of scientific disciplines: ethnobotany, climatology, ecology, biology, archaeology, psychology, sociology, ethnomathematics, and religion. ([Location 552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=552)) - We also recognize that time as it has been described is an illusion. For us, time does not exist as separate epochs unfolding in linear fashion, but as one movement unfolding in all directions simultaneously. ([Location 616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=616)) - Given the opportunity to go to schools that remain bastions of privilege, I came away with a nineteenth-century skill set and a worldview steeped in the so-called Western tradition. ([Location 1150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1150)) - we bend toward justice only as a result of tireless struggle. ([Location 1152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1152)) - the struggle is welcoming to latecomers. 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.] ([Location 1154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1154)) - [In every successful effort to make change, there is some lucky convergence of circumstances. 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.] ([Location 1239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1239)) - Our climate emergency requires big thinking of all kinds, but there is no single elegant solution, no perfect blueprint for a livable future. [We underestimate the power of contribution—of acting within our own sphere of influence to tackle the piece of the problem that is right in front of us. ([Location 1254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1254)) - In a few decades, if we look back from a place of relative comfort and safety, I think we will remember millions of people who saw the unprecedented danger and didn’t look away, who connected with their power and used it to lead change from the ground up.] ([Location 1256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1256)) - Behind every fight that disrupts business-as-usual is an amazingly determined, often small group of people who make their luck with smart organizing and media strategies and, indispensably, the power of law, which gives us all leverage both inside and outside the courtroom. ([Location 1261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1261)) - The future is likely to demand more of us than we know how to give, and we will walk through many different doors to come together in collective action that forces an adequate response from our elected leaders. ([Location 1264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1264)) - Whether we suffer greatly or build together—it is our choice….We must choose whether this moment will lead us to regression or evolution, authoritarianism or greater democracy, extraction or preservation. Our greatest choice is to move towards a cooperative, collaborative world that aligns with scientific consensus. —REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ ([Location 1512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1512)) - [I have spent my life trying to rewrite systems of power, and policy is nothing if not a system for creating and distributing power. That is why, contrary to popular belief, the most important part of a policy proposal is not the details—at least not at the beginning. It’s the vision that the policy presents and the story it tells. 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.] ([Location 1820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1820)) - [The GND emerges from an analysis of the climate crisis that identifies it as a consequence of systems—neoliberalism, strategic racism, unfettered capitalism—and their interaction, rather than simply as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions.] ([Location 1871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1871)) - The United States is a nation of scarcity, and increasingly so. Seventy-eight percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. As of 2018, about 40 percent of Americans could not afford an unexpected $400 expense without going into debt or having to sell off their possessions. About 25 percent of Americans skipped necessary medical care because they couldn’t afford it. [For most people in this country, we are not a nation of prosperity. We are a nation of lack, and a world where resources are increasingly constrained by the climate crisis. If we do not counter this scarcity, how will we build anything but a society of fortresses as the planet continues to warm?] ([Location 1885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1885)) - The vision of power at the heart of the GND is one of redistribution: from private to public, from employer to worker, from the historically advantaged to the historically disadvantaged. That’s because the ability to burn fossil fuels with no limit and no legal repercussions requires two things. First, fossil fuel industries and those who control them (or profit deeply from them) can concentrate enough wealth and political power to override the will of the people—who, by and large, want to stop climate change. Second, there are people and places that can be hurt, even killed, with little consequence. In short, fossil fuel impunity requires intense concentrations of economic and political power among corporations and the wealthy who profit from them. ([Location 1892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1892)) - Over the last forty years, the top 1 percent—whom we will refer to as “the elite”—have captured “more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s,” according to Naomi Klein. This has happened, at least in part, because deregulation and other neoliberal economic policies allowed elites to accrue nearly all of the economic gains since 1980. They have used those gains in turn to finance campaigns—and politicians—and to decimate organized labor. The result has been wage stagnation and rampant economic inequality, with declines in union membership alone accounting for as much as one-third of the growth in income inequality for men and one-fifth for women since 1972. The erosion of worker power particularly decimated communities of color as the 2008 housing crisis, itself a product of deregulation, wiped out generational wealth, leaving many communities of color no better off than they were prior to the civil rights movement. ([Location 1897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1897)) - Economic mobilizations organize an economy to meet needs that can be met only when all of a country’s resources—public and private—are mobilized in line with a central, common strategy and in relentless pursuit of shared goals that supersede all other priorities. To justify an economic mobilization, a crisis must be serious enough—existential enough, really—to demand an all-out “total war effort” from both the public and private sectors. ([Location 1927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1927)) - But every economic mobilization in American history has exploited marginalized people. Ninety-eight percent of the government-backed home loans provided as part of the New Deal and the World War II GI Bill went to White Americans. The highway expansion razed urban communities, erasing decades of wealth for immigrants and people of color. Some New Deal employment programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, prohibited women and made it exceedingly challenging for Black people to participate. Because of this, for millions of Americans, the thought of an economic mobilization creates a justifiable fear—even in the face of a possible apocalypse and especially when coupled with the fallout they know will result from moving away from fossil fuels. We wanted the GND to address these fears directly. ([Location 1933](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=1933)) - [It isn’t a matter of moving climate change further up our priority list. The reason we care about it is because it already affects everything that’s at the top of our priority list: our health, our families, our jobs and the economy, the well-being of our communities and those less fortunate than us who live in them. 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.] ([Location 2058](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2058)) - Is what we know about climate change the truth? Yes, it absolutely is. We’ve known since the 1850s that digging up and then burning coal—and, later, oil and gas—produces heat-trapping gases that are wrapping an extra blanket around the planet. Since then, thousands of studies and millions of data points have confirmed it’s true. [Together with colleagues from Norway and Australia, I’ve even taken the few dozen studies that suggest this isn’t the case and recalculated their work from scratch. In each, we found an error that, when corrected, brought the results right back into line with the thousands of studies that agree the climate is changing, humans are responsible, and the impacts are serious.] ([Location 2082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2082)) - I had persuaded him by beginning with his values, showing my respect for them, and then connecting the dots between what he already cared about and a changing climate. And it worked—because to care about climate change, all we really have to be is a human living on planet Earth. ([Location 2105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2105)) - For years, I assumed that educating people who are already interested in climate change would just be preaching to the choir. But my reporting career has taught me that’s not true. [Most people who are interested in climate change just don’t yet have the tools to talk about it confidently. The choir is there. They want to sing. But they don’t know the words.] My journalism professors taught me our job was to provide those words—to give citizens the information they need to solve society’s most complex problems. Wayne taught me our responsibility was to do that fearlessly, with righteous anger on behalf of society’s most vulnerable. Wayne’s mentor, the legendary Village Voice journalist Jack Newfield, said it best: [“Compassion without anger can become merely sentiment or pity. Knowledge without anger can stagnate into mere cynicism and apathy. Anger improves lucidity, persistence, audacity, and memory.”] ([Location 2241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2241)) - Today, mainstream climate journalism is improving—but not nearly fast enough to keep up with the severity of the crisis. So it is not just up to our journalistic institutions to demand seriousness, righteous anger, and relentlessness from themselves. Every climate-conscious news consumer should demand it too. Our journalism outlets purport to serve the public by giving us the information we need to survive. If we don’t collectively hold media’s feet to the fire, our own toes will be the ones that burn. ([Location 2251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2251)) - The power of culture lies in the power of story. Stories change and activate people, and people have the power to change norms, cultural practices, and systems. Stories are like individual stars. For thousands of years, humans used the stars to tell stories, to help make sense of their lives, to orient them on the planet. Stories work in the same way. When many stars coalesce around similar themes, they form a narrative constellation that can disrupt business as usual. They reveal patterns and help illuminate that which was once obscured. The powerful shine in one story can inspire other stories. We need more transformational stories so that we can connect the dots and shift narratives. ([Location 2305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2305)) - Citizenship, at its core, is a sacred trust between the individual and collective. ([Location 2459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2459)) - Only through the collective can an individual enjoy goods such as a healthy environment and certain kinds of support and security. At the same time, as a citizen, the individual has both the right and the responsibility to hold the collective accountable and to participate in it. In other words, citizenship is a dynamic process of consent and dissent of individuals as part of a larger whole. ([Location 2461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2461)) - When I claim and allow myself to be claimed by citizenship, I declare that I am inextricably part of my community. Therefore, I’m not okay with huge disparities in wealth, health, and income, especially when they fall along lines of race. I’m not okay with economic elites having undue sway over policy outcomes. I’m not okay with fossil fuel use barreling forward or the climate vulnerability so many people already face. Because I am a citizen of this community, because I belong, I feel responsible for reshaping it into a place where we all belong better. ([Location 2467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2467)) - [A 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications found that among hunter-gatherer societies, those with better storytellers are more cooperative. ([Location 2592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2592)) - Or, to borrow from the storyteller Kurt Vonnegut, “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.”] ([Location 2596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2596)) - “Earth is Easy Mode,” tweeted Mika McKinnon, a Canadian field geophysicist and science communicator, in agreement. “If we can’t maintain habitability here, we’re utterly fucked trying to pull off long-term survival anywhere else.” [And yet billions of dollars are being allocated to this effort. What does it say that spinning a story about humans moving into a radioactive vacuum resonates more strongly with many people than our chances of reducing greenhouse gas emissions? ([Location 2610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2610)) - My friend is active in the local civic community but says he’s skeptical even of the activist discourse around sea level rise. “There’s all this talk about ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience,’ ” he said, “and it kind of sounds to me like ‘What’s the least we can do in order to keep the party going?’ ” I told him about someone I knew who had gone to a meeting about climate change where Miami officials talked about how they had to demonstrate to the world that they were all about resilience, and how she had been amazed that they thought that was actually the extent of their job, to just convince people they were on top of things when they absolutely were not. [Get more efficient and find the right incentives to encourage the right kinds of enterprise—that’s the neoliberal thinking on the “reasonable” way to approach this stuff. But, my friend wondered, what if the mature thing to do is to mourn—and then retreat?] ([Location 2796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2796)) - I have to admit, I kind of liked this guy. I liked all of them. They were a likable bunch. That (and being White) is how they’d gotten jobs on the front lines of capitalist hypocrisy. And we all had jobs in it somewhere. How else were we supposed to live? Of course, they made more money than most people, way more. But still, like most of us, if they didn’t act like this was all totally fine, they wouldn’t eat. It seems to me that as long as we live under capitalism, where the motive is profit, we are going to keep burning cheap fossil fuels and sea levels are going to continue to rise. And people have to live somewhere. I just bought a home in a town in rural Northern California that a forest fire could level any day. I’m not smarter or better than the person who will buy a home in Miami. ([Location 2823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=2823)) - Much of the space we call “the climate movement” appears to be modeled after the same systems of inequity and separation we are attempting to change, undo, or outright dismantle. Massive NGOs stick to traditional advocacy methods, techniques that aren’t too disruptive or unfamiliar to the philanthropy they need to ensure hundreds or even thousands of paychecks and programs. Language like “front lines,” “grassroots,” “youth leadership,” and “inclusivity” float over wineglasses at lavish funder gatherings. In such settings, the horizontal patterns of community that build connections and translate wisdom flicker dimly, outranked by the need to know who holds the purse strings and whose name you should know. Connections become transactional or cliquish, hierarchy is entrenched, scarcity mentality is omnipresent, and personal growth is interwoven with westernized “success” as a marker of authority. ([Location 3769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=3769)) - Far too much of our collective energy is directed toward a pursuit that leaves us mirroring capitalism, individualism, and that which we fight. Bringing in more people (and ultimately more dollars) seems to be the only acceptable theory of change. Money—the currency of individualism—hangs like a heavy cloud over campaigns calling for systemic change. ([Location 3779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=3779)) - [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 and people willing to take personal risk for something greater than any one individual. I have seen fear in eyes shielded behind riot gear, fear of a braid of sweetgrass and a prayer, of the person who stands unarmed to protect the land.] ([Location 3800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=3800)) - In westernized society, we are indoctrinated with self, with the pursuit of comfort, from the moment we are born to the moment we die. Birth costs money. Life costs money. Death costs money. The advent of social media has simultaneously connected us to one another and disconnected us from one another. Listening takes a backseat to whoever is speaking the loudest. Climate advocates, those brave souls who stare down mass extinction, walk a fine line: succumbing to ego and maintaining a comfortable living versus ever-evolving efficacy and self-assessment. Ours is a world tinged with doubt. ([Location 3840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=3840)) - We cannot be fooled into thinking there is a shortcut by which our system of democracy can easily fight climate change—that we’ll act just because we have seen the science and know the threat posed to our health, environment, economy, and national security. Democracy is a government “of, by, and for the people.” It is not a dictatorship, and it is not a spectator sport. Without broad-based demand from local communities, states, businesses, and nonprofits, our government cannot succeed. We know this; our ancestors knew this. So it’s time for folks like me, who look at the public process as the cornerstone of our democracy, to step up. [It is time to stop focusing on what government can do and start recognizing the critical role we all play in making government do its job.] Here’s my plan: I’m going to communicate the stakes of this crisis and the opportunities that await us if we get it right. I’m going to make sure that everyone understands the connection between climate change and health. I’m going to lift up the women who are already doing this work and whose ideas and energy will be essential to building the world I want for my grandchildren. I’m not going to let myself get discouraged or burned out. ([Location 3932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=3932)) - traumatic stress disorder, and other climate-induced ills, what’s to be done about them? How do we confront the reality of climate change and convince others to do the same? The environmentalist Alan AtKisson calls this predicament “Cassandra’s Dilemma,” after the princess of Troy who appears in Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon. Cassandra is blessed with seeing the future, but her gift is accompanied by a counterbalancing curse: No one believes her prophecies. AtKisson connects the myth to climate action: [The more a person knows about environmental destruction, the more they will try to warn others, and the more others will, in fear and defensiveness, resist them.] ([Location 4209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4209)) - He called it “ignore-ance,” or “returning from a state of consciousness to a willed state of not knowing.” That’s where he was now, he said, and where so many people insist on being. He was surviving, but he didn’t admire himself. “You do it by pretending,” he said, as if teaching me how. “You pretend that this life is okay, that college football is fun, that driving is normal. You pretend, to justify living a lie.” ([Location 4304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4304)) - [Parents have always worried about their kids’ futures and presents at the same time, and that goes double for mothers who are marginalized in any additional way. Wearing climate goggles is a new version of this special fear, performing hope when you feel terror, preparing your kids for the worst without letting on too much. Trying to make them resilient but not bitter, prepared but not terrified.] ([Location 4336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4336)) - Mom friends, meanwhile, share their climate grief with me, their full-body anxiety. The dread they feel for their kids’ futures, a weird and profoundly sad thing for a mother to feel, looking into the face of a cheery five-year-old. The low-level panic that hums through their bodies while doing normal everyday things like packing lunches and planning play dates, the sudden realization, as they’re stressing about balancing work and parenting, that things are about to get so much worse as “work-life balance” morphs into “work-survival balance.” ([Location 4343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4343)) - The word “sacrament” comes from the Latin word for “solemn oath”—used by early Christians, interestingly, as the translation of the Greek word for “mystery.” This work is, in the deepest sense, both a solemn oath and a mystery; it is a sacrament. We are walking into great darkness, and the light that guides us must come from within. Would you risk your life for someone you love? Would you work day in and day out to give someone a chance at a decent life? Then you know what to do—the imperative of it, if not yet the details. ([Location 4485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4485)) - But at the deepest level, I’ve begun to invert time and shift metaphors so that I can see not only loss but gain. A world with millions of people versus one with none, or a world where half of extant species survive versus one with, say, 5 percent—these are worlds absolutely worth fighting for—though from this relatively full moment in time, it’s hard to celebrate those millions or that half, knowing what will have gone missing. [We have to love not just this vanishing world, in other words, but the many worlds we can still prevent from vanishing. When we think about accelerating extinction, it’s like looking at the terrifying narrows of an hourglass, where only a few will slide through. So sometimes I imagine myself instead on the far side of something more like an ecological birth canal. How many of Earth’s beauties can we help to survive the passage into the next era? Is each one not a gift we can safeguard to the world by our actions?] ([Location 4607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4607)) - If there can be “Fridays for Future,” why not also have “Somedays for Sanity”? Caring for our hearts and minds, rejuvenating our bodies, reconnecting with one another, and deepening into our deepest purpose is taking our psyches seriously. This is an act of rebellion against the extinction of soul. That, too, is climate change work. It is culture change work. And it is essential. ([Location 4820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4820)) - I joined the climate justice movement in earnest in 2014. Since then, [I’ve come across a good many doomer dudes. They have books. They host panels. They are prolific tweeters. They are legion. And they’re almost always White men, because only White men can afford to be lazy enough to quit…on themselves.] I’ve given them a new name: “de-nihilists.” ([Location 4853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4853)) - There’s no denying the severity of our crisis, at least not anymore. There’s no more putting it off on “future generations.” No more “stopping” global warming. It is here. The chickens have roosted. Perhaps the most terrifying part of it all is the uncertainty. The not knowing. It’s unmooring, unnerving. I can understand reaching for something, anything, to be sure about. And if you’ve nursed at the teat of toxic masculinity, I can understand why you might think you need to be the one in the room with clear-eyed vision. The one who knows what’s coming next. But no one does. Because the thing about warming—whether we’re talking about the globe or a fever—is that it happens in degrees. That means that every slice of a degree matters. And right now that means everything we do matters. We quite literally have no time for nihilism. ([Location 4861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4861)) - We can learn the difference between hopelessness and helplessness. Because what if we’ve been doing the equation backward? What if hope isn’t what leads to action? What if courage leads to action and hope is what comes next?] ([Location 4890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4890)) - A tablespoon of soil contains billions of microbes. These tiny bacteria, fungi, protists, and archaea make up the bulk of life in soils. There may be a trillion species of microbes on Earth—99.999 percent still undiscovered. Though invisible to the naked eye, microbes collectively hold more carbon than all animals combined. Billions of tons of carbon sit underground, three times more than in the atmosphere. ([Location 4945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=4945)) - As European settlers displaced Indigenous peoples across North America in the 1800s, they exposed vast expanses of land to the plow for the first time. It took only a few decades of intense tillage to drive around 50 percent of the original organic matter from the soil into the sky as carbon dioxide. The agricultural productivity of the Great Plains decreased 64 percent after just twenty-eight years of tillage by Europeans. The initial rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was due to the oxidation of soil organic matter through plowing. That means human-caused climate change started not just with the Industrial Revolution but with the exploitation of the soil. ([Location 5192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5192)) - [“If you’re not affected by climate change today, that itself is a privilege,” climate activist Andrea Manning says.] ([Location 5223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5223)) - Agriculture continues to have a profound impact on the climate; along with forestry, deforestation, and other land use, it contributes roughly 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. ([Location 5229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5229)) - Our ancestral grandmothers braided seeds and hope into their hair before being forced to board transatlantic slave ships, believing against odds in a future on soil. ([Location 5272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5272)) - According to Brazilian scientist Antonio Donato Nobre, the amount of water in the “aerial river” above the Amazon rainforest exceeds the water flowing in the Amazon River itself. ([Location 5347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5347)) - [As Rachel Carson wrote in an essay called “Clouds,” “Up there is another ocean.”] ([Location 5353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5353)) - When we make the connection between water and climate, the discussion tends to go in one direction: the many ways that climate change will bear on water. For example, since warmer air holds more water, with higher temperatures we are subject to heavier rains and more intense storms, plus the advent of sea level rise and the increased frequency and severity of droughts. What’s been missing from the conversation is the impact of water on climate. While carbon dioxide traps heat, water vapor transports it, alternately holding and releasing thermal energy as it circulates. From that standpoint, we can think of water as the most significant greenhouse gas. ([Location 5363](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5363)) - In Zimbabwe I visited communities where Precious has trained villagers in holistic cattle grazing. Increased water infiltration in animal-treated fields has meant they can grow food for seven months of the year rather than merely two—the difference between being self-sufficient and relying on international food aid. ([Location 5396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5396)) - To produce a raindrop, water molecules need a surface to condense upon. Enter “condensation nuclei”: the flecks of particulate matter around which moisture coalesces, mainly ice crystals, salts, pollen, and scented compounds produced by plants. Nobre notes that in the rainforest, tree leaves emit volatile organic compounds that trigger rain. He calls these “scents of the forest” or, inspired by the animated films his two daughters favor, “pixie dust.” ([Location 5433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5433)) - The beautiful thing is that there is nothing we have to “engineer.” Nature does this for us. Basically, what we need is life: life to transport water and, by extension, to regulate heat; life to seed the rain; life to slow down moving water so that it has a chance to infiltrate.] Creatures from earthworms and dung beetles to beavers and prairie dogs help create meanders so that water lingers in the landscape and soaks in. Microbes provide nutrients to plants so they enrich and stabilize the soil. When appropriately managed, herbivores like cattle and sheep help build carbon, the way the buffalo created our country’s once-fertile prairies. ([Location 5452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5452)) - In Texas, Katherine Ottmers says working with water in the landscape is rewarding—and creative. “I like to think of Casa de Mañana as one big art project. Our canvas is degraded land,” she says. Not that she is naive about the state of the world. Rather than ruing the fact that humans are changing the Earth, she believes we need to embrace the responsibility this entails. “We can be the beavers on the landscape, the keystone species.” She calls their land-restoring project “oasification,” bringing water and life to a parched and wounded landscape. The sign at the rain barn’s entrance reads “Bloom Where You Are Planted.” ([Location 5460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5460)) - [We must reframe our understanding of the problem. Climate change is not the problem. Climate change is the most horrible symptom of an economic system that has been built for a few to extract every precious ounce of value out of this planet and its people, from our natural resources to the fruits of our human labor. This system has created this crisis.] ([Location 5627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5627)) - It’s time for us to make society-wide changes to a system that incentivizes consumption to the point of global imbalance. ([Location 5632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5632)) - [We must establish a new social attitude to see migration as a public benefit—a nature-wide necessity for our global survival—not as a threat to our individual privilege.] ([Location 5639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5639)) - [So as we reframe the problem in a more truthful way and we restructure our social systems in a more just way, all that will be left is for us to re-indigenize ourselves and to conjure a power of the most ancient kind. This necessarily means that we must learn to follow—not tokenize, not exotify, not dismiss—the leadership and the traditional knowledge of a particular local place. ([Location 5650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5650)) - We must see that even the best of us are entangled in an unjust system, and we must acknowledge that your survival requires us to figure out how to reach a shared liberation together. ([Location 5658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5658)) - When we buy something, we are making decisions that shape the future. It’s easy to get lost in the smaller choices, like using a plastic straw. We can forget that the bigger choices, like what car we buy or whether to buy a car at all, have a much larger impact. It’s even easier to miss the choices we can’t make, like taking a train to a nearby city when no train service exists. ([Location 5736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5736)) - [When we start to see the choices that are not available, we can begin to see the role of political power in our daily lives. Who decides what options are available for us to choose in the first place?] ([Location 5739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5739)) - When electric lightbulbs were first invented in the late 1800s, the new industry was radically innovative. Thomas Edison, for example, hoped to move away from coal toward wind and solar energy. ([Location 5745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5745)) - The U.S. military is an energy guzzler—it is the institution that consumes the most fossil fuels in the world. In fact, its carbon emissions are greater than those of many countries. In recent years, the U.S. military has emitted more greenhouse gases than Denmark. ([Location 5786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5786)) - No one can unilaterally choose to live in a low-carbon economy. The goal is not self-purification but structural change. As Bill McKibben has put it: “Changing the system, not perfecting our own lives, is the point. ‘Hypocrisy’ is the price of admission in this battle.” ([Location 5795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5795)) - When I come to the end of my life, I want the scales to show that I prevented more carbon emissions than I caused. And there is no way to make that happen if I work only on myself. My offset plan is activism. ([Location 5896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=5896)) - Killer whales, I learned meanwhile, are matrilineal. Grandmothers are vital to the group’s survival; according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the pod turns to the eldest female whales to lead their foraging efforts, a particularly vital skill when food is scarce. These postmenopausal females draw on stores of “ecological knowledge” derived from decades of life experience. [The whole pod arrives at strategies together, turning to their culture and history for clues, and picks up the slack for one another, sharing food. ([Location 6088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=6088)) - In our time of disturbance and radical change, we are crossing a threshold, a portal, or an unseen bridge from one world to another. It could be said that the bridge is either collapsing beneath us, or being made as we walk together, in the long twilight hours when one civilization gives way to another. —GENEEN MARIE HAUGEN ([Location 6138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=6138)) - When disasters happen, the person right in front of you is your best chance at survival. That’s when we understood: The times we will be facing are going to require us to recognize that the most important thing around us is community.] ([Location 6217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=6217)) - It is naive to tether our hopes to a world without climate change and the losses it brings. It is naive to ignore how many hopes are now long shots. But that doesn’t mean we quit. We must not cede the future to those who recklessly gamble it. Every tenth of a degree of warming, every centimeter of sea level rise, every increasingly unnatural disaster, every species, every life—all of it matters. ([Location 6269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=6269)) - What we do now is dream. From a foundation of science and community, we must imagine the future we want to live in, and the future we want to pass on, and every day do something to reel the dream closer to reality. ([Location 6302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=6302)) - We hope this book embodies that kindred circle. 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 life-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. ([Location 6318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085XK1FD8&location=6318))