Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

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Ariana Brocious: Yeah, me too. I came away from my conversation with her feeling a bit more upbeat about where we're at in this moment in the climate crisis and what the future holds and how much power we have to change it. In addition to climate optimism, she is a vibrant voice on women's rights. Her 2014 essay, Men Explain Things to Me, has been credited with coining the term mansplaining, which is a cultural phenomenon that I think many of us are familiar with. And mansplaining in particular can be kind of an easy cultural touch point. But the truth is that her work is resonant on all sorts of subjects. Violence, I think, is also very clarifying. That is, in a way, almost easier to deal with than the other thing that’s happened — decades of denying, trivializing the climate crisis, all the greenwashing, the pretending that they are doing what the climate requires. When it comes to a lot of fossil fuel–related entities and beneficiaries of the industry, we see delay, distraction, false promises, which are almost harder to fight than violence.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, this is actually a great segue. I'd like to ask you to read something and this is an excerpt from an essay you wrote in, following the 2016 presidential election called How to Survive a Disaster. Tom Rivett-Carnac: [00:43:24] How wonderful to get a chance to sit with Thelma and Rebecca and talk about this amazing project they're undertaking. Good on them for diving in and taking the initiative at this critical moment at such an important element of the narrative. What did you both leave that conversation with?The future will be decided by a race between two powerful forces — the mounting impacts of climate change, which are becoming more apparent every day, and the accelerating power of climate solutions and climate activists around the world. We can still win this race, although we only have a narrow window of time to do so. But we get no mulligans, no do-overs, and no time to spare. We get only one shot at it. This amazing volume reminds us that we can still win this race — if we come together and try. Contributors include Julian Aguon, Jade Begay, adrienne maree brown, Edward Carr, Renato Redantor Constantino, Joelle Gergis, Jacquelyn Gill, Mary Annaise Heglar, Mary Anne Hitt, Roshi Joan Halifax, Nikayla Jefferson, Antonia Juhasz, Kathy Jetnil Kijiner, Fenton Lutunatabua & Joseph `Sikulu, Yotam Marom, Denali Nalamalapu, Leah Stokes, Farhana Sultana, and Gloria Walton. Whether you’re already heavily involved in the climate movement or a complete newcomer, the essays are an energising read that will undoubtedly give you hope – the active type, not the passive kind – for the future. The lasting message we should take away? “Fight like hell, and don’t give up,” Solnit concludes.

Five years ago, 10 years ago, a lot of people weren’t worried about the climate. They didn’t care about it, they didn’t think about it, they didn’t see it as urgent, they weren’t engaged with it, nor were they supportive of the need to pursue the solutions. That’s really different now. Greg Dalton : You're listening to a conversation with Rebecca Solnit about the need for optimism in the climate imperative. This is Climate One. Coming up, why connecting with other people is so important. You’ve probably read different iterations of the arguments towards transitioning away from fossil fuels many times over. The information isn’t new, and because of this, it’s easy to slide through the facts and figures without much impact. But the overall effect of the book is cumulative. It takes a while to situate itself, roots curling into your heart and gut, even as one’s mind is assaying the scope of the information on offer. An energizing case for hope about the climate, from Rebecca Solnit ("the voice of the resistance"– New York Times), climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Humble, ordinary stuff. People doing what they can, where they can, joining up with other like-minded folks to rebuild, repair, and stand off the rising dark.In Hope in the Darkyou’ve emphasized how activism can bring about change in a non-linear way, how sometimes it is subtle and slow but how, within it, we must recognize the importance of victories. What are the most significant victories of today’s climate movement?

Rebecca Solnit: I feel like there's concentric circles of climate understanding, and then I feel like I'm making a model of Dante's hell, we'll set that aside. think his ring sort of descended, mine might ascend. Maybe this is purgatory. But I feel like the denialists are just refusing the information, and I think a lot of it is because what the natural world is constantly telling us is everything is connected to everything else, and we all have responsibility towards the whole, which is a very anti rugged individualist, anti free marketeer, um, libertarian thing, so it's ideologically offensive to conservatives. But they're so far over there, they kind of don't matter, and um, but climate defeatists who abound often are also not particularly, they don't deny that climate is real. They often deny that solutions are real, that the movement is real, that coverage is real, that people caring is real. So they have their own amount of denial. There's a kind of depression where you just want to sit in the corner or curl up in fetal position or whatever, but these sort of evangelists of giving up, like the energized ones, I don't fully understand it. But I find that a lot of times that very often that their facts are wrong and that their frameworks about how change works and the nature of power is often wrong, too. And then within that, I think there's a lot of people who care, who would like to hope, but who haven't been offered hope. And then what's really interesting, when you get to the organizers, the scientists, the journalists, the people who are really involved, they're scared, but they're not despondent. They know that this is the decisive decade, that it, that future is what we will make it in the present. There are parameters, of course. We can't make it like we never burned those trillions of tons of fossil fuel and put all that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere. But we have tremendous choices in this moment. And the difference between the best case scenario and the worst case scenario is profound. I wrote an essay last year called Despair is a Luxury because for most of us giving up, at some level we secretly know that we can give up and our lives will still be relatively comfortable and safe. There is a lot of fuss about carbon capture technologies – and a very nice old joke that the best carbon capture technology of all is called a tree. The nonexistent technology of large-scale, human-made carbon capture is often brought up to suggest that we can keep producing those emissions. We cannot. Geoengineering is another distraction beloved by technocrats, apparently because they can imagine big, centralised technological innovation, but not the impact of countless small, localised changes. In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, we really need that. I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Rebecca recently at the Commonwealth Club of California, and we had a nice wide ranging discussion. And we started with talking about her ability to take the long view of things. One of the curious things about the climate crisis is that the uninformed are often more grim and fatalistic than the experts in the field – the scientists, organisers and policymakers who are deep in the data and the politics. Too many people like to spread their despair, saying: “It’s too late” and “There’s nothing we can do”. These are excuses for doing nothing, and erase those doing something. That’s not what the experts say. Ariana Brocious: I love that last line and this idea of finding paradise, of finding solace and comfort and community and togetherness in the worst of times. And, uh, you write in that essay and I think in some other places about responses to disasters like Hurricane Katrina. So, how did you come to this idea that these times that can seem like the most dire can actually be, um, really powerful and uplifting and community building? The American left, someone once told a friend of mine, is bad at celebrating its victories. (The same may well go for the left in other countries, too.) We have victories. Some of them are very large, and are why your life is the shape it is. The victories are reminders that we are not powerless, and our work is not futile. The future is not yet written, but by reading the past, we see patterns that can help us shape that future.