All We Can Save

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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson


Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she s due. In 1856 Foote theorized that changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect the Earth s temperature. She was the first woman in climate science, but history overlooked her until just a few years ago.

Foote arrived at her breakthrough idea through experimentation. With an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four thermometers, she tested the impact of carbonic acid gas (the term for carbon dioxide in her day) against common air. When placed in the sun, she found the cylinder with carbon dioxide trapped more heat and stayed hot longer.

From a simple experiment, she drew a profound conclusion: An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature . . . must have necessarily resulted. In other words, she connected the dots between carbon dioxide and planetary warming, and she did it more than 160 years ago.

Foote s paper, Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun s Rays, was presented in August 1856 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then published. For unknown reasons it was read aloud by Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, rather than by Foote herself. That was three years before Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own more detailed work on heat-trapping gases work typically credited as the foundation of climate science.

Did Tyndall know about Foote s research? It s unclear though he did have a paper on color blindness in the same 1856 issue of The American Journal of Science and Arts as hers. In any case, we have to wonder if Eunice Newton Foote ever found herself remarking, as so many women have: I literally just said that, dude.  

Foote wasn t only a scientist. She was involved in the early

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and Brooklyn native. She is co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, co-founder of the climate initiative The All We Can Save Project, and co-creator of the podcast How to Save a Planet. In 2021, she was named to the Time 100 Next list.

Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson is an author, strategist, teacher, and homegrown Atlantan, named one of fifteen Women Who Will Save the World by Time. Her writing has been featured in The Drawdown Review and the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and she is the author of Between God & Green.

A feast of ideas and perspectives, setting a big table for climate movement, declaring all are welcome. Rolling Stone

A fiery, hopeful manifesto on how to make sense of the staggering loss posed by climate change and take justice-oriented action in spite of it. Mashable

Hopeful and illuminating, All We Can Save is an anthology of essays by women at the forefront of the climate crisis. So often climate writing can make us feel doomed and anxious, but this collection is a comfort because of its honesty and courage . . . a reminder that we can work with hope towards a better future. BuzzFeed