Power and hope

When I described this month’s book, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right? I said it left me “exhilarated” and “optimistic”. I wanted to take a moment to unpack a little of what I meant by that.

Part of what I enjoyed was getting a quickfire primer across a whole battery of ideas—everything from divestment to decarbonization, from investment to immigration reform. The conversations are illuminating, approachable discussions of specific concepts: by the time you reach the end pages, you’ll have gotten to understand how kelp farming can contribute to climate improvements, or how we need better disaster management to ready ourselves for what’s next. 

Elsewhere, patterns keep coming up: the power of money, action versus consensus, political will, better decision-making. There’s also drumbeat of perverse incentives, where the rules produce the opposite effect of what’s intended. Food activist Leah Penniman, for example, points out that farms have to pay to be certified organic, putting an extra burden on those who are trying to improve conditions, rather than requiring non-organic farms to pay for the right to ignore best practice. 

Bill McKibben, meanwhile, gives a short exposition on divestment and the idea that “your cash is carbon” and how businesses have been unintentionally incentivized to move their carbon footprint off their balance sheet and into their investment portfolio. Basically, the argument goes, America’s four biggest banks continue investing in and lending money to fossil fuel companies, which not only undermines but perhaps entirely cancels out everyone else’s efforts to achieve lower carbon usage elsewhere. This, he argues, is particularly pernicious for big, cash-rich companies that have net zero pledges—because even if they meet their own targets for climate action, the banks are still investing their cash into producing “extraordinary clouds of carbon” and perhaps erasing their efforts completely.

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At first I was a little skeptical of the conversation format: worried that I was just reading podcast transcripts or (worse) listening to a TED talk. But by the end of the book, I appreciated how it made each idea separate, concise. Conversations have been a way to learn going back to Socratic dialog and before. Plus, putting these discussions side by side meant that I didn’t have to remember who was who, and allowed the interviewees not just to talk to the author, but also to the reader and to each other.

And that’s another part of what I got out of What If We Get It Right?: it created a place where ideas were slamming into one another; where I could create my own connections and cross-pollination between different concepts. I could see these all living side by side, and see some ways that they apply to my own life and work.

There were a few places that left me wanting a little more; the conversations on AI seemed loose and hand-wavy (but isn’t that AI in general?) and while there was a lot of mention of community, it didn’t always feel like there was much depth to it beyond warm and fuzzies. A few speakers, meanwhile, seemed to struggle to articulate their ideas outside of buzzwords—maybe a consequence of age or a limited viewpoint.

But the other part I really took away from this book was that getting it right on climate will require many simultaneous efforts and success is not pass/fail. There will be big approaches and small ones, there will be sprints and long term pushes. And while we know that the worst outcome is possible, each of these approaches together can result in a whole spectrum of outcomes.

So often, I think, it feels like survival requires the whole world to pass a test. You can do everything in your power, but if your neighbor continues polluting, then it counts for nothing. No wonder we feel paralyzed by climate doom.

But by the end of the book, I felt that every piece of progress can actually count. If there are more people like you, and fewer people like your neighbor, the balance will shift—maybe not to complete success, but further away from complete failure. And if the tapestry of approaches can weave together properly, that change can nudge further and further towards a tomorrow that isn’t just less painful, but better in lots of ways.

What If We Get It Right? truly underscored that there are no singular solutions; that you can only solve wicked problems by really approaching them from many angles at once, but they don’t all need to be complete victories to have an impact on what comes next. I think maybe you can find some power in that, or at least a little hope.

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I’ll sign off with some other news from around our little world. First, some upcoming live events. Annalee Newitz (Stories Are Weapons, CUR009) is appearing tonight and tomorrow at the Emerald City Comic-Con in Seattle. Meanwhile Ferris Jabr (Becoming Earth, CUR003) is doing a few dates this spring in Tucson, Oregon and San Francisco to mark the paperback release of the book. Sorry folks who are not in the west, but that’s how it goes!

Second, Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation have announced the shortlist for the J Anthony Lukas prizes for non-fiction.

There’s lots of good reading in the 10 shortlisted books, but subscribers may be particularly familiar with one title on the list; our November 2024 pick, Rebecca Nagle’s By The Fire We Carry (CUR007) is nominated for the main book prize. The judges said it “braids together the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days with a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native land rights more than a century later.”

Don’t forget you can read Rebecca’s interview with the club from last year, and if you didn’t join the club until after November, we still have a few copies in stock. And good luck!

Hopefully we’ll have details of the Q&A with Ayana for you in next week’s update.

Onward

Bobbie