The Conceivable Future

"This reassuring consideration of a deeply personal matter teams seamlessly with a reasoned, emphatic call to action." - Booklist, Starred Review . ABooklist Top 10 Book on the Environment & Sustainability 2024 . Winner, Nellie Bly Book Award for journalistic non-fiction, Chanticleer International Book Awards 2024
Explore the ways in which the climate crisis is affecting our personal decisions about family planning, parenting, and political action.
In The Conceivable Future, authors Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli explore the ways in which the climate crisis is affecting our personal decisions about family planning, parenting, and political action. This book offers fresh, timely answers to questions such as: How do I decide to have a baby when there's the threat of environmental collapse? How do I parent a child in the middle of the climate crisis? What can I actually do to help stop global warming?
Drawing from their decade of work with the organization Conceivable Future, Kallman, a sociologist and Rhode Island State Senator, and Ferorelli, an activist and former Climate Bureau editor, offers both informed perspective and practical steps for taking meaningful action in combating the climate crisis, while also making smart, balanced decisions when it comes to starting and maintaining a family.
First, The Conceivable Future explores what the real threats are to reproductive, gestational, and infant health (spoiler: it's inequality, heat, and fossil fueled pollution), and debunks the myths of personal carbon footprint, and the harmful legacy of population control. The authors examine the successes and impediments of women-led movements around the world and share what they've learned through ten years of organizing to bring attention to the reproductive crisis that is climate change.
Finally, the book looks at what can be done about the climate crisis today. By taking these steps, we can both understand the crisis on its own terms, and stay rooted in the human scale, where our lives retain their full meaning.
The Conceivable Future is a must-read for all who want to make a difference in the world--and secure a sustainable future for all our families.

Meghan Kallman is an environmental activist. She has taught college in the Rhode Island state prison, and was elected to the city council in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where she served two terms before winning a seat in the Rhode Island State Senate in 2020, a position she still holds. Meghan is on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in the graduate School for Global Inclusion and Social Development. As a sociologist and researcher, she has published many peer-reviewed research articles, as well as two books, The Third Sector: Community Organizations , NGOs, and Nonprofits, and The Death of Idealism: Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps. Alongside colleague Stephanie Malin, she recently published Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change.
Josephine Ferorelli is a writer, visual artist, and yoga instructor, and a longtime Chicago resident. After participating in Occupy Wall Street in 2011 Josephine began to write and edit climate coverage for Occupy.com. She collaborated with photographer Danny Lyon on a book called Burn Zone (2016), and in 2016 she wrote an account of her own arrest, with forty other activists, outside a BP oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. Josephine also writes about the climate crisis from a yogic and buddhist perspective on her blog, Grandgather.com.
In 2014, Meghan and Josephine co-founded the organization called Conceivable Future.
Conceivable Future's work has appeared in media outlets including The Atlantic, CBC, BBC, The Independent, The Nation, Telemundo, USA Today, The Irish Times, Vice, Salon, Yahoo News, Vox, The Years Project, WNYC, The Huffington Post, NBC News, NPR, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. Meghan and Josephine contributed an essay in the collection Motherhood In Precarious Times (2018).