SALIENT FEMMES

The language around the climate crisis, the journalist Anne Karpf writes in How Women Can Save the Planet, can conceal as much as it reveals. Take “natural disaster”. There is nothing “natural” about the disasters that have struck our planet owing to global heating. They are, Karpf says, the culmination of long-term environmental degradation caused by human activity. Then again, consider “human activity”. When speaking about the crisis, campaigners in the west commonly invoke a universal “we”, setting up an abstract notion of “humanity” harming a vulnerable planet. David Attenborough famously warned last year: “We’ve not just ruined the planet, we’ve destroyed

But what happens if we