All We Can Save

Published in 2020 and edited by marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and climate strategist Katharine K. Wilkinson, All We Can Save brings together essays, poetry, and art by sixty women working on climate. Its range is deliberate: scientists, lawyers, policy designers, farmers, organizers, journalists, artists, and Indigenous leaders appear in the same volume because no single profession can explain, much less resolve, a crisis that reorganizes every sphere of life.

The anthology moves from “Root” to “Rise,” placing reflection and relationship beside litigation, energy policy, food systems, oceans, movement strategy, and political transformation. Contributors such as Xiye Bastida, Sherri Mitchell, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Leah Penniman, Tara Houska, Kate Marvel, and adrienne maree brown do not offer one climate program. They show instead how different kinds of knowledge become useful at different scales, from a community defending land to a government redesigning infrastructure.

Its central feminist intervention is an argument about power and leadership. Women and girls are disproportionately exposed to many climate harms while remaining underrepresented where capital, science, and policy priorities are set. The book asks what becomes possible when leadership is organized around collaboration, accountability, creativity, and care, but these qualities should not be read as biologically feminine. Their political value comes from institutions and practices that cultivate them, not from an innate moral superiority assigned to women.

That distinction matters because climate politics can easily celebrate individual heroines while leaving extraction intact. The strongest pieces connect gender to race, Indigeneity, class, labor, disability, geography, and colonial history; they ask who owns land, who breathes polluted air, whose work absorbs disaster, and whose proposed “solution” creates a new sacrifice zone. Climate justice here is not a decorative promise of inclusion but a conflict over resources, authority, and whose losses count.

The volume also treats emotion as part of political capacity. Grief, fear, anger, love, pleasure, and resolve are neither private distractions nor substitutes for policy: they shape whether people can remain in movements long enough to build power. Poems and personal essays interrupt the expert voice, making room for mourning without turning despair into spectacle and for hope without pretending that optimism is evidence.

As an anthology, the book’s strength is plurality rather than a tightly defended thesis. Its contributors sometimes emphasize different levers—courts, electoral policy, direct action, cultural narrative, ecological restoration, or mutual care—and that friction is useful. The later development of reading circles and teaching materials also reveals an implicit method: knowledge becomes politically consequential when readers deliberate together and translate it into situated action.

There are limits to this breadth. The collection is largely oriented toward the United States, its sixty voices remain an editorial selection rather than a map of the whole climate movement, and short contributions cannot fully establish every empirical claim or strategic dispute. Its language of “feminine” leadership can also slide into essentialism if detached from the structural analyses inside the essays. Readers should therefore notice who is absent and resist treating representation alone as redistribution.

The most productive way to read All We Can Save is not as a catalogue of inspiring women or a demand to finish every page in sequence. Choose one section, identify the scale at which each contributor acts, and pair it with locally grounded climate research or organizing from the place where you live. Then ask three questions throughout: who decides, who bears the cost, and what relationships must endure for a solution to remain just?