Get optimistic with March's book of the month

A few weeks ago, watching the news reports on the wildfires around Los Angeles, seeing friends post about their homes being burned to the ground, I had a moment of pure, total climate doom. What can we do to change this? How do we stop this becoming our everyday? What are we making for ourselves? A real future didn’t seem possible at all.

Then I read this month’s book, and everything shifted. 

What If We Get It Right? (OneWorld, 2024) is a tremendous collection of interviews and ideas gathered by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and conservation campaigner and the host of the podcast How To Save a Planet. And it’s our Curious Reading Club pick for March 2025.

The format surprised me a little: this is a book full of short, chatty pieces rather than the long, discursive narrative storytelling I often tend towards. It features policy wonks and teenage activists alongside farmers and movie directors and AI pioneers. There are poems and there are worksheets and there are provocations. It was a mix that felt like an acquired taste at first, and not every part resonated with me the same way. 

But as I dug deeper in, I found myself exhilarated: my brain started finding connections between these people’s ideas and my own life; new questions began appearing that I didn’t even know I had; and I felt wired into a different, more optimistic way of dealing with a global challenge.

Now, I won’t pretend it got rid of the gloomy feeling entirely, and it’s certainly not naive in its depiction of the future—or how hard it will be to get there. But it did energize me and remind me that there are answers all around us, if only we look properly and act accordingly.

Copies of What If We Get It Right? are heading to club members now, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

And another piece of good news: author Q&As are back! We’ll be holding a live club discussion with  Ayana later in March, although we’re still pinning down the details. More updates will come on that, but I’d love it if you were able to join us to talk about the ideas laid out in the book. 

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts about this month’s pick, or suggestions for future books, then let me know. And if you’re not a paying subscriber and want to get inspired too, there’s no better time to sign up and get a monthly dose of non-fiction delivered straight to your door.

Onwards

Bobbie