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

Sanders describes a friend of hers named Chris Foster; Foster was a student at UC Davis in 1991 and tried his best not to participate in the “regular” aspects of society. He would forage for food from fruit trees and co-ops and sleep outdoors. When these efforts didn’t help his sense of all-consuming dread surrounding climate change, he fell into a deep depression and began failing his classes. He began to pursue a PhD, but his depression and foraging continued and his family became concerned about him; they believed that his sadness was the result of childhood abuse. He attributed his depression to a memory of a trip to Mount St. Helens: One minute he was among evergreens and the next a space where everything had been cut down. He decided then that he never wanted to participate in any of that type of destruction.

Sanders met Foster in 2004 at Brigham Young University, where he was a professor. They became friends, and while Foster was feeling more and more discouraged about climate change, Sanders began her own journey into activism and despair. She felt guilt and anxiety even while participating in environmental protests, using public transportation, and eliminating single-use plastics from her lifestyle. All of the stress took a toll on Sanders and her partner; she eventually went to therapy, but when she told her therapist that she was sad and anxious about the end of the world, they looked at her quizzically and diagnosed her with depression.

Eventually, Sanders and her girlfriend left for a remote cabin in upstate New York. For five years she avoided the news and grieved. Meanwhile, Chris Foster got married and had children. When Sanders saw him, he seemed happier but different. In the past, he’d have let his lawn go to seed so as to not waste water; now he was planting Kentucky Bluegrass in his front yard. Sanders asked him why he was doing this, and he replied, “Because I’ve been sad my whole life and sometimes I just want to sit on my green lawn with my wife and feel love” (235).

Climate change is creating a mental health crisis; psychologists use the term “ecoanxiety” to explain this phenomenon and “ecopsychology” to describe the field studying the effects of climate change on mental health (236). However, if humans are suffering as a result of society, Sanders feels we should treat society alongside the individual. In general, the overlap of physical and emotional illness from climate change necessitates new words to describe these phenomena, which is what a group of artists, philosophers, and doctors are working to create. For example, Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante created the Bureau of Linguistical Reality in San Francisco along with a dictionary of the Anthropocene, which describes the “experience of living through mass climate change” (242).

Glenn Albrecht, an ornithologist in the 1800s, found himself in Upper Hunter Valley, Australia; he expected to see a place described as “Tuscany of the South,” but instead he found the beautiful landscape gone and turned into a giant coal mine. The locals described physical sickness due to the mine as well as emotional distress at losing the place that they called their home; they were losing their sense of belonging. Albrecht noticed a correlation between the health of the land and the health of its people and named this phenomenon “solastalgia.” Later, a clinical psychiatrist in Washington, DC named Lisa Van Susteren would coin the term “pre-traumatic stress disorder” after experiencing symptoms of PTSD in anticipation of future climate disasters.

Currently, Chris Foster lives in a nice home with his wife and two kids—something that he wouldn’t have believed possible a few years earlier. Still, he is devastated about climate change and continues to feel depression as a result. Sanders suggests that it shouldn’t matter whether we are optimistic or pessimistic but rather whether we are honest with ourselves or not. In order to survive amidst climate grief and ecoanxiety, we may sometimes have to close ourselves off to some of it and draw arbitrary boundaries.

In her essay, Westervelt describes the experience of addressing climate change while also mothering her young children: She wants to prepare them for the future without terrifying them. Her friends share this grief and anxiety surrounding their children’s futures, yet these children also propel and motivate their mothers to fight climate change.

Mothers have always been social justice activists. Maternal rhetoric was a catalyst in the civil rights movement and more recently the gun reform movement (250). Community mothering—the act of nurturing your community alongside your own children—is a powerful part of organizing in Black communities and can help organize climate activism as well.

Westervelt criticizes the CEOs of Big Oil who have known about the effects of fossil fuels on the environment for decades but opted to continue forward with fossil fuels for profit. We all must decide between short-term and long-term benefits, and fossil fuel executives chose the short-term benefits and themselves every time. Now climate activism forces mothers to choose between what is best for her own kids in the short term (time with their mother), and what is best for everyone’s kids in the long term (helping to ensure a habitable planet).

Westervelt refers to Dolores Huerta as an example of an activist woman and mother; Huerta organized and co-founded the United Farm Workers, and her children later said that there were times growing up when their mother chose her work over her children. Nevertheless, they realized as they got older that her work was vital to their whole community. Westervelt sees her climate work “not as a conflict with motherhood but as an integral part of it” (254).

Pierce’s poem ruminates on the ending of things; they are beautiful, but they are fleeting. The spring is bursting and blooming with birds and bobcats living in their habitats. The end of things seems beautiful and light; the narrator is barefoot and “sundressed.” The beauty acts as an “absurd comfort,” a placebo for security. Humans are built to marvel and find beauty, clinging to pleasure and simple comforts even as the world is coming to an end. 

Johnston’s essay opens on a beach in British Columbia. Our oceans and ocean life are dying because of human impact. It’s not just endangered species or oceans that are vanishing; it’s life itself, and its restoration will only begin by ending the use of fossil fuels. Johnston relates this call to work to the word “sacrament,” which is a “solemn oath and a mystery” (257). Not everyone will be able to join the work of climate activism, but she urges the reader to do so if they can.

We can be most effective in our movements when we lean on others’ abilities and they lean on ours. Johnston asks us to imagine if just 10% of the United States population began engaging at least one day per week in environmental activism. This would widen the possibilities of what we could do together. We must not disengage: We can choose to show up, even amongst grief and anger and fear.

There’s no way to heal the Earth by simply being “nice and Earth-friendly people—nor even by dying” (261). Johnston writes about her involvement in the #ShellNo fight against Arctic drilling in 2015. For months, Johnston engaged with this fight and witnessed small victories, but it didn’t seem like it would be enough. Months later, though, Shell announced that it would not be moving forward with the project; it cited operational reasons, but The Guardian suggested that the protestors had made Shell aware of the risks of the project and how it would damage their reputation. This showed Johnston the power of showing up together to create change.

Johnston calls for readers to love this world, but also the world that could exist in the future. To prevent this second world from vanishing, we just need to show up.

The poem wonders whether the sun does not want to get out of bed some mornings, whether the sky gets tired of being everywhere at once and changing with the weather, and whether the clouds drift off while trying to hold onto one another.

Moser’s essay discusses the community of grieving people in this climate crisis and the importance of being together in this pain. Finding herself in a “Climate Listening Circle” sponsored by a local church, she listened to other women, young and old, share their vulnerable feelings of worry and despair. These women came to do both climate work and culture work and left knowing that they have sisters and brothers in their struggles.

Moser has attended many circles like this one and has noticed that climate scientists and other professionals in charge of community change (engineers, city planners) are rarely present. This led her to wonder, “what do the people working on climate change need in order to keep showing up […] ?” (271). She outlines three kinds of change that need to happen: ongoing and accelerating change, traumatic change, and transformative change. All who are leaders in this climate movement need insights, training, and support to keep showing up for this work.

Moser suggests that we must “foster[] the adaptive mind” (272)— the set of abilities that allow us to respond with creativity and resilience to the changes we face. Moser and her colleagues launched a project called “The Adaptive Mind” drawing on relevant skills in many different fields to see which of them are learnable and then work with psychologists and climate practitioners to create training and resources to support climate professionals and prevent burnout.

Moser points out the psychosocial challenges of being a climate professional to bring awareness to the issue of burnout. Burnt-out people cannot do their jobs effectively and often leave their jobs. Psychologists have been talking about the physical and mental distress that climate change can have on individuals for decades now, but there is not as much awareness about the physical and mental distress that those working on behalf of the public on climate solutions experience. Climate grief, ecoanxiety, and pre-traumatic stress disorder are all things that climate professionals experience as part of their work.

Moser lists several ways in which we can all take care of ourselves as we face climate change (275): Know we’re not “crazy” but human; take care of ourselves; take a break and enjoy simple pleasures; do what brings us immediate joy; maintain healthy routines; do some mental hygiene; focus our attention on selected things, not everything; nourish ourselves spiritually; seek out social support; get professional support; help change institutional cultures; and seek out communities where we can share one another’s burdens and experience small joys together. Caring for our souls and our bodies and connecting with each other is an act of rebellion in the face of climate change. 

Heglar recalls her time in New York City as a burgeoning journalist in 2006 She began publishing and volunteered at a newsroom. It was in this newsroom where she became familiar with “doomer dudes” (279)—white men who were resigned to the fact that the Earth was ending due to climate change and there was nothing to be done about it. Covering global warming in her own paper The Indypendent, she delved into the topic without knowing that doomer dudes would flood into the open-floor editorial meeting to help plan the issue. She did not expect their “joyful nihilism” on the topic and found herself feeling sad and discouraged after the meeting.

In the years since learning about doomer dudes, she has realized that only privileged white men can afford to quit the climate movement: They have much less to lose because of their status in society. It’s true that there is no stopping climate change—it’s happening now. However, no one knows the outcome of the next few years or decades. There’s no time for nihilist thinking—every degree of warming matters now.

Still, it’s difficult to be blindly hopeful about climate change either. It’s unrealistic and “emotionally stunted” (281). Blind hope and joyful nihilism are “two sides of an overprivileged pendulum swung too far” (282). Heglar points out that we don’t need to be overly optimistic or overly fatalistic; we can just be human. Even if we just save a tiny sliver of this world, that will be better than nothing.