CONTRIBUTORS
The heart of the book is 20 interviews with visionary farmers and financiers, activists and architects, producers and policy wonks, and others showing us the way forward, offering answers to the title question.
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is the president of Earthjustice, which represents more than five hundred clients free of charge, harnessing the power of law to force climate solutions while protecting healthy communities and ecosystems. Abbie has litigated precedent-setting cases that have held polluters accountable and cleared the way for clean energy nationally.
+ “Litigating in a Time of Crisis,” All We Can Save, contributing essayist (One World, 2020)
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is an Academy Award–winning writer, director, and producer of films including Don’t Look Up, The Big Short, Vice, and Anchorman. He is an executive producer of TV shows, including Succession, was head writer at Saturday Night Live, founded Yellow Dot Studios, and is on the board of Climate Emergency Fund, where he works to get much-needed funds and resources into the hands of climate activists committed to civil disobedience.
+ Why our secret weapon against the climate crisis could be humour, co-authored with Ayana (The Guardian, 2022)
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is a Pakistani human rights and climate defender, co-founder of Fossil Free University, and climate advisor to the UN Secretary-General. Ayisha’s work focuses on uplifting the rights of marginalized communities while holding polluting companies accountable. She has led campaigns for the creation of the Loss and Damage fund and for a conflict of interest policy on Big Oil at the UNFCCC, and is working on the Rights of Future Generations.
+ Climate Anxiety: An Illness of the System (Mariwala Health Initiative -ReFrame, no. 5, 2022)
+ “The Youth Activist's Perspective,” The Revolution Will Not Be Litigated, contributing essayist (OR Books, 2023)
+ “What Does Equity Mean to You,” The Climate Book, contributing essayist (Penguin Random House, 2022)
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is an author, environmentalist, and activist. In 1989, he published The End of Nature, the first book for a common audience about global warming. Bill is founder of the nonprofit Third Act, which organizes people over the age of sixty for action on climate and justice, and a co-founder and senior advisor emeritus at 350.org, a climate campaign that works in 188 countries.
• billmckibben.com
• thirdact.org+ Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007)
+ Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (Holt McDougal, 2020)
+ Eaarth (St. Martins Press, 2011)
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is a former commercial fisherman turned ocean farmer who pioneered the development of regenerative ocean farming. Born and raised in Newfoundland, he left high school at the age of fourteen to work on fishing boats from the Grand Banks to the Bering Sea. He is the owner of Thimble Island Ocean Farm and executive director of the nonprofit GreenWave, which trains new ocean farmers.
+ Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures Farming the Ocean to Fight Climate Change (Penguin Random House, 2019)
+ The Big Blue Gap in the Green New Deal, co-authored with Chad Nelsen and Ayana (Grist, 2019)
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and his family co-own and operate Bascom Hollow Farm in Gill, Massachusetts, which raises pastured beef and pork, pumpkins, and timber. He is professor emeritus at Brandeis University, where he was chair of the Environmental Studies program. Brian co-founded and directed Land’s Sake, a community farm in Weston, Massachusetts, and was director of education at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
+ Go Farm, Young People, and Help Heal the Country (New Perennials Publishing, 2022)
+ Wildlands and Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities: Broadening the Vision for New England (Harvard Forest, 2017)
+ A New England Food Vision (Food Solutions New England, 2014)
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is an architect and advocate based in New Orleans who established the contemporary design justice movement. He is founder and principal of Colloqate Design, a nonprofit architecture and urban planning practice focused on expanding the field of design justice. He is a design critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and 2025–2026 president of the National Organization of Minority Architects.
+ Race, Architecture, and Tales for the Hood (TED Talk, 2016)
+ Design Justice for an Unjust World (Next City, 2019)
+ America’s Cities Were Designed to Oppress (City Lab, 2020)
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is an attorney, climate justice organizer, and a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana. She serves as the Vision and Initiatives partner for the nonprofit Taproot Earth, which she co-founded. Colette spearheads efforts around equitable climate-disaster recovery, migration, community economic development, and energy democracy.
+ Gulf to Appalachia Climate Action Strategy (Taproot Earth, 2023)
+ Placed Here, In This Calling, On Being with Krista Tippett (podcast interview), 2022
+ Climate change will displace millions. Here's how we prepare (TED Talk, 2019)
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is a visual artist and educator who considers the liminal and transitory spaces in which Black identities are formed. Deeman is concerned with the multiple ways selfhood manifests through queer, transnational, and hybrid modes; and how we find a sense of belonging and “home” through migratory patterns, memory, personal biography, and ancestral legacy.
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is a film and television producer, cultural commentator, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Black List, the company that celebrates and supports great screenwriting and the writers who do it via film production, its annual survey of best unproduced screenplays, an online marketplace, live staged script readings, screenwriter labs, and film-culture publications.
• franklinleonard.com
• blcklst.com+ Hollywood’s Anti-Black Bias Costs It $10 Billion a Year (The New York Times, 2021)
+ How I Accidentally Changed the Way Movies Get Made (TED Talk, 2017)
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is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents, best known for her National Book Award–winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming and her Newbery Honor–winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. She has served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate and the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. She has been awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal and named a MacArthur Fellow.
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of Tesuque Pueblo and the Diné Nation, works at the intersections of climate and environmental justice policy and Indigenous rights. Jade has worked with Indigenous-led organizations and Tribes from the Amazon to the Arctic to advance Indigenous-led solutions and self-determination through advocacy campaigns, research, storytelling, and narrative strategies. She is currently developing a research project on the impacts of climate change on Native people in the United States.
+ Required Reading: Climate Justice, Adaptation and Investing in Indigenous Power(NDN Collective, 2021)
+ Climate action should focus on communities, not just carbon (TED Talk, 2022)
+ An Indigenous Systems Approach to the Climate Crisis (Stanford Innovation Review 2021)
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is an expert in ocean and climate policy and the politics of achieving policy change. She is a co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab and an advisor for nonprofits and foundations. Jean spent two decades advising members of the U.S. Congress on the conservation and sustainable management of ocean and other natural resources.
+ Climate Readiness Framework for Coastal Cities (Urban Ocean Lab, 2024)
+ Blueprint for Ocean Climate Action (Ocean Defense Initiative, et al., 2022)
+ An Equitable and Just Ocean Policy Platform (Ocean Justice Forum, 2022)
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is a clean-energy entrepreneur serving as director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. Previously, he was co-founder and president at Generate Capital. He also founded SunEdison, a company that pioneered “pay as you save” solar financing, and served as the founding CEO of the Carbon War Room, a global nonprofit to help entrepreneurs address climate change.
+ Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy (ICOSA, 2013)
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is a Vermont-based author and journalist who tells stories to explore and illuminate scientific concepts and cultural nuance. She takes a clear-eyed look at global environmental, economic, and social challenges, and finds insights and solutions in natural systems. Whatever she’s doing, she will stop to listen to the song of the hermit thrush.
+ “Water Is A Verb,” All We Can Save, contributing essayist (One World, 2020)
+ The Reindeer Chronicles (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020)
+ Water in Plain Sight (St. Martin’s Press, 2016; Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019)
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is VP of communications and policy at Patagonia, where she is responsible for the development and execution of Patagonia’s global communication strategy and the advancement of key policy issues related to the company’s business and advocacy priorities. She has over twenty years of experience working in government, politics, and the private sector.
+ The Future of the Responsible Company by Vincent Stanley with Yvon Chouinard (2023)
+ Billionaire No More: Patagonia Founder Gives Away the Company (written by David Gelles for New York Times, 2022)
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is a climate scientist and writer living in New York City. Her first book, Human Nature, will be published by Ecco press in 2025. Kate has a doctorate in astrophysics, so she knows Earth is the best place in the entire universe.
+ "A Handful of Dust," All We Can Save, contributing essaying (One World, 2020)
+ Fifth National Climate Assessment, co-author, U.S. Global Change Research Program
+ Human Nature (Ecco Press, 2024)
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is a landscape architect focused on climate adaptation and biodiversity in the built environment. She is the founder and principal of the landscape architecture practice SCAPE, which pioneered a joint approach to community engagement and ecological infrastructure. Kate is also a professor at Columbia University with a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and the Climate School.
+ Toward an Urban Ecology (Monacelli, 2016)
+ Petrochemical America, co-author, with photographer Richard Misrach (Aperture, 2012)
+ “Mending the Landscape,” All We Can Save, contributing essayist (One World, 2020)
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is dean ad interim and professor of energy and environmental policy at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She directs the Climate Policy Lab and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Fletcher. She works on low-carbon, climate-resilient growth strategies in major emerging economies around the world.
+ The Coming Carbon Tsunami: Developing Countries Need a New Growth Model—Before It’s Too Late (Foreign Affairs, 2021)
+ Titans of the Climate: Explaining Policy Process in the United States and China (The MIT Press, 2018)
+ The Globalization of Clean Energy Technology (The MIT Press, 2014)
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is an award-winning climate reporter currently on staff at Bloomberg. Previously, she reported for the Gimlet/Spotify podcast How to Save a Planet, The New York Times, and Popular Science (Pop-Sci), where she wrote about science, the environment, and, occasionally, mayonnaise.
+ 'Wakanda Doesn't Have Suburbs': How Movies Like Black Panther Could Help Us Save the Planet (Time, 2020)
+ How rising groundwater caused by climate change could devastate coastal communities (MIT Technology Review, 2021)
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is a Black Kreyol farmer, mother, soil nerd, author, and food justice activist who founded Soul Fire Farm with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. She facilitates food sovereignty programs including farmer trainings, food distribution, and organizing toward equity in the food system.
+ Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018)
+ "Black Gold," All We Can Save, contributing essayist (One World, 2020)
+ Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (Harper Collins, 2023
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is the author of nineteen volumes of poetry and seventeen novels, including the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers. Her newest book of poetry is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Born in center-city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she is active in antiwar, feminist, and environmental causes.
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is a founder, venture investor, and technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, a new startup that creates Pi, a personal AI. He previously worked at Google as VP of AI Products and AI Policy. Before that, he co-founded DeepMind, which was bought by Google in 2014.
+ The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma (Crown, 2023)
+ What is AI Anyway? (TED Talk, 2024)
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is a Romanian architect, curator, writer, and educator based in New York and Berlin. Her studio’s work is an undisciplined collection of projects across scales, programs, and collaborators, always in the pursuit of the affect of physical space. She is co-founder of the Blueprints of Justice studio at MIT and curator of the 2024 Architecture Biennial Beta Timișoara.
+ Curator Architecture Biennial Beta Timișoara, Romania (2024)
+ Co founder Blueprints of Justice Studio MIT & Stanford Legal Design Lab
+ “Fresa” an ode to the migrant agricultural workers in Logrono, Spain, 2023
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examines contemporary socio-political, cultural, and environmental realities through the tradition of architectural utopianism, from a sci-fi-inspired and Afro-surrealist perspective. Olalekan regularly combines digital illustration and 3D computer models with photographs, hand drawings, and collage to produce detailed illustrations, photomontages, VR experiences, adaptable and mobile architectural sculptures, and large-scale public installations that examine architecture and its relationship to place and community through an eco-political lens.
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is senior curator in the department of architecture and design of the Museum of Modern Art, where she also serves as the founding director of research and development and as a member of the Web3 taskforce. From Milan, Italy, Paola is a trained architect who describes herself as a “pasionaria of design.”
• instagram.com/design.emergency
+ Design Emergency podcast and book (Phaidon Press, 2022)
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is a Brooklyn-based entrepreneur who advances climate and sustainability solutions. She is co-founder and CEO of CREO Syndicate, a think-and-do tank that catalyzes private capital into the decarbonization transition. Under Régine’s leadership, CREO Syndicate has become a global knowledge center for climate investing, and, in partnership with a community of family offices, family foundations, and family-controlled businesses, is facilitating investment in the climate marketplace, de-risking solutions, and decarbonizing their operations.
+ Capitalism vs. Climate, panel discussion with Naomi Klein, moderated by Ayana (Pioneer Works, 2021)
+ The secret club for billionaires who care about climate change (Bloomberg, 2020)
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is a policy expert and Chicago native who helped to develop the Green New Deal. She is a senior fellow and resident author with the Roosevelt Society, and was previously director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute, and a 2013 Rhodes Scholar. Rhiana aims to create, in collaboration, a body of work that examines the role of economic policy and large-scale economic transformation in catalyzing just and rapid responses to the climate crisis.
+ Resolution: Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal, U.S. Congress, 2019
+ “A Green New Deal for All of Us,” All We Can Save, contributing essayist (One World/PRH, 2020)
+ All Economic Policy Is Climate Policy: Tools for a Post-Neoliberal Green Transition, By Suzanne Kahn and Rhiana Gunn-Wright (Roosevelt Institute, 2023)
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is an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. She primarily studies nonprofits, volunteerism, and informal aid efforts in disaster. She is the co-founder of Disaster Researchers for Justice.
+ Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis (Park Row, 2021)
+ America’s Disaster Recovery System is a Disaster (New York Times, 2023)
+ Subscribe to her monthly newsletter: https://substack.com/@disasterology
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is an acclaimed spoken-word artist who believes story is an act of survival. He is a two-time National Poetry Champion whose work explores democracy and technology, climate and racial justice, family and grief, purpose and possibility, and, of course, love. In addition to registering more than a million voters while touring with the Declaration of Independence, he is Ayana’s favorite cousin.
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is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, teacher, and farmer. He is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, essays, and fiction. For fifty-nine years, he has been farming and writing with his wife at Lane’s Landing Farm in Kentucky. As a prominent defender of agrarian values and supporter of the local economy, he sees industrial farming, strip mining, and war as opposite to the health of the world.
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is a climate justice activist from an Otomi-Toltec Indigenous community located in Central Mexico. She is co-founder and executive director of the international youth-led organization Re-Earth Initiative, and a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2018, she has become a leading speaker, organizer, and author who is driven to make the climate movement more inclusive and diverse.
+ “Calling In,” All We Can Save, contributing essayist (One World, 2020)
+ If you adults won't save the world, we will (TED Talk, 2020)
