July 31, 2024 • 34 mins
In June 2024, the planet hit a terrifying milestone: 12 straight months of global temperatures at or above 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels. But even as the impact of climate change becomes more visible and far-reaching, the opportunity to change the trajectory of this global crisis remains possible. Hope is possible. Today, we’re sharing a conversation with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, a leading voice on the climate crisis and a dogged champion of possibility and promise.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi everybody.
It's Amy Martin, and I'm really
excited to tell you that season
five of threshold will be coming
out later this year.
More on that soon- ish.
But I'm also excited about what we
have to share with you today.
This is a conversation I had
recently with author Rebecca Solnit.
(00:22):
I imagine a lot of you are already
familiar with her work.
She's written more than 20 books.
Her essays are frequently published
in major newspapers and magazines.
She has a column in The Guardian.
She has the kind of mind that
refuses to be siloed.
In one essay, she might move from
family dynamics to global politics
to ecological crisis.
(00:44):
But two themes emerge repeatedly
in her work.
Her fierce commitment to justice
and her refusal of cynicism.
She has a unique ability to braid
the two together.
She's a blunt truth teller
and also a dogged defender of
possibility and promise.
One powerful example of this is her
(01:05):
essay entitled, "Difficult
is not the Same as Impossible."
Here are some excerpts from the
first few paragraphs:
"It is late.
We are deep in an emergency,
but it's not too late because
the emergency is not over.
(01:25):
The outcome is not decided.
We are deciding it
now.
An emergency is when a stable
situation destabilizes.
When the house catches fire, or
the dam breaks or institution
implodes.
When the failure or sudden change
or crisis calls for
urgent response,
(01:46):
it's when it becomes clear that the
way things work is
not how they're going to be.
An emergency can involve terrible
loss, or it can bring about
magnificent transformation.
And while it's unfolding, the
outcome can be impossible to
foresee.
Or it can depend on what you
and we do.".
(02:10):
I spoke to Rebecca Solnit in April
of 2024.
I want to talk with you
about the earth, about the natural
world in lots of different ways.
But I guess to start with, I just
need to acknowledge that I kind of
hate the words the natural world,
because as soon as we say them, or
nature or the environment,
(02:30):
we've immediately set up this
conceptual divide of there's
us, and then there's everything
else, just like the most
narcissistic framing ever.
And, and yet these
are the concepts.
You know, I've inherited this is the
language we have.
And so I'm curious how you
think about how we talk
about this thing we call the natural
(02:51):
world.
One thing that your question brings
up that I find so interesting
is 30
or so years ago, people
often talked about nature and
culture as though they were equal
and separate spheres.
And that has changed
profoundly. I think indigenous
and environmental perspectives
(03:12):
have reminded us that nothing
is outside nature.
We can never be independent of
nature.
So I actually think your question
opens up the fact that we've changed
that a lot. More and more, we
recognize that human beings
are biological creatures,
not separate from the rest of living
nature and the inorganic
(03:32):
nature we depend on beyond
that. And that shift has actually
been one of the really exciting
things I've seen in my life.
And truly, when
I started trying to think
about the natural world creatively,
intellectually, politically,
I was surrounded by people
who really talked about, you know,
nature is almost optional,
(03:54):
or a place you could step into and
step out of.
It was this finite place with
a beyond to it.
I remember somebody saying, you
don't understand us in New York.
Nature is in the past tense.
And I used to say, if
you're holding one of those paper
cups of coffee, people in New York
were always holding the papers
from trees. The water is from your
(04:14):
Adirondacks Watershed Preserve.
The milk is from a pastoral
landscape. The coffee is from
a tropical landscape.
Just that cup of coffee is four
different natural landscapes
in your hand going into your
biological body.
So learning to see the systems
and to think of the world in terms
of systems, I think has really
undone the nature culture binary,
(04:36):
as has acknowledging the presence of
indigenous people
who weren't at war with nature
and trying to live outside it the
way industrial civilization so
often has.
So that's what that question brings
up for me, that I think is actually
an interesting starting point of
how much, although the words
remain the same, the way
we use them in the way we think has
(04:57):
actually changed so
much in my lifetime.
For the better, I think.
Yeah. And I think the reason I
wanted to start with language is not
because I'm interested in trying
to find like, perfect terms
because no such thing exists,
but because I'm interested
in the concepts behind them and what
they lead us to and what they close
(05:19):
off. And, that's
something that I hear you
so eloquently make the case for in
your work is that thoughts matter.
Ideas matter.
What we believe in matters.
It's not trivial.
And it made me wonder if you feel
like that concept
itself is under threat.
If you feel like it has to be
defended like that.
(05:39):
The idea that beliefs matter
is something that people don't
believe anymore.
I think it is
somewhere between threatened and
forgotten.
I think we live in a world in
which a lot of social media, news
media, etc.
have a really short term time frame.
For example, last week
(06:00):
the president canceled more student
debt.
There's a way
you can tell that story where it
happened last week, a very
powerful man gave it to us out
of his own free will.
There's another story you can tell.
Where in 2011,
a bunch of people gathered at
Zuccotti Park to start
(06:20):
Occupy Wall Street, which became
a national and international
movement focusing on economic
injustice and really reframing
it in moral terms,
economic terms, imaginative
terms, and very powerful new ways.
Out of that came a movement for debt
abolition, focusing on medical
debt, housing debt, and particularly
(06:41):
student debt.
The student debt abolition movement
informed the public of how
destructive and corrupt
and manipulative that system
was.
So if you take the long term
perspective, which I'm often arguing
for with the sense that hope
and memory are so connected,
you can see this began as an idea,
a shift in values, a grassroots
(07:03):
campaign.
What begins as books, stories,
slogans often ends
up as, you know, laws,
policies, actual forests
protected, shifts
in how we think, how we
act, how we legislate,
who we protect, what we
consider normal.
And so much of my work has been
(07:23):
tracing that larger process.
How did this thing that ended up
as legislation, as law, as
the protection of this population
or this environment, how did that
begin in the margins, in the shadows
with one person, a few people,
a grassroots movement that was seen
as extreme,
unrealistic?
Ridiculous.
(07:44):
How did something migrate from
the margins to the center,
from a radical idea to the
way we all think?
I and there's a point at which women
having the vote, the abolition
of slavery, the protection
of the environment were all seen as
these kind of radical, disruptive
ideas in the same way that
the end of the fossil fuel industry
(08:05):
is. So we're constantly
changing, which is another thing
that's invisible when you have this
short term perspective.
So just that whole path of change, I
think is tremendously important.
And in the world of short term
ideas, tremendously
under-recognized, so much
of my work has been trying to give
people back the full
trajectory, which I think gives us
(08:28):
confidence that what we
do matters, a kind of orientation
we can't have otherwise,
and a sense of hope.
Yeah.
And and I think one of the things
that does is
it locates us within a
problem or within a quest
in a really important way.
I feel like in a Paradise Built in
(08:49):
Hell, but other books as well,
you do this great job of
encouraging us to
think about what we're thinking
about ourselves and how that
has such an impact on outcomes.
And I guess when it comes to
climate, I'm curious, what beliefs
do we have that are slowing us down,
or what's one belief that's really
slowing us down that we could get
(09:09):
rid of, and another that you would
really like to see more people take
up?
Well, the way I see it is right
now, we have a lot of scientists,
deeply engaged people, climate
organizers, activists,
climate journalists, etc.
who understand the situation very
well. And the only thing impeding us
is the fact that we need to be more
(09:30):
powerful than the fossil fuel
industry and the other
vested interests trying to
delay, slow down, deny
what we need to do.
Around the periphery are a lot of
people who are less well informed.
Often they have factually
wrong ideas, but they often also
have outdated ideas.
There was a point at which we didn't
(09:51):
have the solutions.
When leaving.
The age of fossil fuels behind was
impossible.
One of the shocking things, I think,
because it's so wonderful that so
under-recognized, is that wind
and solar were really primitive,
expensive, inadequate technologies
at the turn of the century.
We really didn't have
what we needed to leave
(10:12):
the age of fossil fuel behind.
We've had an astounding energy
revolution.
And, you know, I did an anthology
with my coeditor, Thelma Young,
Lieutenant, to a book called Not Too
Late because literally a lot of
less informed people think it's too
late. It's not too late.
Every 10th of a degree of warming,
we can prevent every good
climate solution.
(10:32):
We can implement matters.
I think a lot of people think in all
or nothing terms, if we can't save
everything, we can't save
anything.
You know, the perfect, I say
often, is the enemy of the good,
often a very loud and aggressive
enemy of the good.
One of the narratives I hear a lot
(10:52):
around climate is the tension
between doing things fast
and doing them fairly, kind of
framed as there's people over here
who want to do decarbonization
as fast as they possibly can.
There's people over here saying,
yes, but we need it to be inclusive.
We need it to include indigenous
rights, human rights more broadly,
justice.
And I'm seeing more and more a
story of like, which one are we
(11:13):
going to choose?
And I.
I always react against
binaries like that.
And yet I have myself reported
on some cases where
there is some real tension between
larger justice issues and climate
issues. And I wonder what you think
about that framing overall
and kind of how you relate to
(11:35):
to those sorts of questions.
I think that there are lots of
individual situations in which
groups are pitted against each
other. More vulnerable and less
vulnerable groups, whether it's
around extracting materials
are and manufacturing them for
renewables or where they get
cited, etc.
but often it's the other way around
(11:55):
and, you know, there's money to
be made in siting solar and wind
on your property.
And a lot of native reservations
are eagerly taking it up.
And the Navajo reservation has
a lot of people who've never had
electricity because they're so
remote.
So I think it's it's sometimes a
false binary and a and that also
a lot of times it's just a question
(12:17):
of whether you do those things, but
how you do those things.
And we I think we can do those
things fast and we can do them
right. But I also think underlying
that, we're constantly being
given a narrative of scarcity.
Underlying that is the idea that we
live in an age of abundance and what
climate requires offices,
austerity, sacrifice, renunciation.
(12:40):
And I think you can turn that upside
down in so many ways.
We live in an era of austerity.
The wealthiest 1% of human beings
have a bigger climate impact than
the poorest 66%
of humanity.
So it's not all of us benefiting
from this environmental destruction.
And what we actually need to do for
the climate could bring on an
(13:01):
age of abundance.
You know, I think we're really poor
right now and hope were
poor and relationships were poor
in social trust and solidarity.
What we actually need to do
in the big picture, I
think, benefits everyone in
a lot of different ways.
And we need to see that
(13:21):
we can do what we need to do in
solidarity with farmers
in Bangladesh, with indigenous
people in the Arctic, with
indigenous people in the tropics,
with island dwellers in the South
Pacific.
And that, in a sense,
despair giving up for
those of us who have options is a
form of loss of solidarity
(13:42):
as well as often the
result of conclusions
reached from misinformation,
disinformation, or
lack of careful enough attention
to the information that what we do
right now matters.
We'll have more with Rebecca Solnit
(14:02):
after this short break.
Welcome back to my conversation with
author and activist Rebecca Solnit.
One of her most influential books
(14:22):
is A Paradise Built in Hell,
published in 2009.
In it, she examines the behavior
of communities ravaged by disaster,
fires, earthquakes, terrorism.
And she makes the case that these
catastrophes can open
up opportunities for people to
discover strengths in themselves
and the people around them that they
(14:43):
didn't know they had.
I wanted to explore this paradox
with her in this time of
multiple intersecting disasters.
I mean, there's so many different
dimensions of it.
We're now recognizing that the
natural world is indeed fragile,
and we've broken a lot
of it in ways that are dangerous.
But I think there's a narrative
(15:04):
about human fragility that is not
helpful.
If you believe you're terribly
fragile, you may respond
to harm in a different way.
If you believe that your trauma is
your identity, it's very
hard to say, well, I got over that
trauma, you know,
and I think there's a way that
trauma is often made into
(15:24):
a kind of badge legitimizing
you. We're in a world.
We're in a I'm in the progressive
world. I think we're very suspicious
of power.
So a lot of people run around
pretending they don't have power,
that they're they're oppressed and
not the oppressor.
And I think it's possible, actually,
to have power and try and use
it for good.
And knowing what power you have is
(15:45):
really important so that you can
use it. You can be a
creative, constructive participant.
But my friend Roshi Joan Halifax
talks about post-traumatic growth
that often the most difficult things
that happen to us shape
us. But what we do with those
experiences is partly up to us.
They can give us deeper empathy for
other people.
(16:07):
To who these things happen.
They can make us more politically
engaged.
They can make us find our own
strength and resilience.
And I think that often
repair, regrowth,
regeneration, resilience
are possible.
I have heard people on the
frontlines of climate being tired
(16:27):
of being told that they're resilient
because it can seem like, suck it
up, you know, ignore
the damage.
And there's a huge amount of damage,
whether it's child abuse or climate
devastation, that we need to do
everything we can to prevent
from happening.
But we also need to recognize
that when damage
is done, there's often many roads
(16:49):
forward.
Sometimes I see the
what feels to me like a kind
of a fetishization of
of the fragility that we have,
though just attaching to it as an
identity, almost as a reaction,
especially in the U.S., against
centuries long denial of
vulnerability.
You know that we have this history
of like always having to
(17:09):
position ourselves as, you know,
the biggest, the toughest, the
strongest, the hero.
But what I'm trying to figure out is
how can we create a space where
we can recognize how vulnerable
we are, how vulnerable
we're making ourselves by
disrupting the climate, among other
things, without kind of falling
into a cult of fragility.
(17:30):
And that's the place where I feel
like your work directs us toward as
some kind of third space where
we can say and see
the losses, the damage, the
vulnerability, be honest about it.
But then where we can
be generative, where new stories
can grow and where that's not
where we just stay stuck.
How do we start imagining
(17:51):
new stories to come out of that
space that are neither the
apocalypse or utopia,
but something more realistic
and has more, more possibilities?
And I grew up in an era where women
were told to just suck it up, and
you had no sense of humor if you saw
thought being groped, harassed,
threatened, stalked, even
raped, wasn't funny.
(18:12):
And, you
know, be cool, and
don't make waves, etc..
So I think it's, you know,
really important to recognize
these things are terribly harmful.
They're not okay.
And to hear those stories, one of
the most influential things in this
regard is a very powerful piece,
the nature writer environmental
(18:33):
writer Barry Lopez wrote in
the LA weekly in the 1990s.
He grew up in the San Fernando
Valley, just north of LA proper,
with a single mom, passionately
in love with the landscape and
horrifically traumatized by
a friend of his mother's, pretending
to be a doctor who sexually abused
(18:54):
him for years and terrorized
him to keep him silent
and filled him with deep shame as
well as the physical and psychic
abuse.
And so Barry, who was
a friend of mine and a
huge influence on me earlier
with his book Arctic Dreams and some
of his other writing, did some
remarkable things in this story.
(19:15):
And the two that I
think really matter in this context
was one he talked about what
helped him survive.
It wasn't just that a terrible thing
happened to me, but that
his homing pigeons, the landscape,
his ability to roam through it
freely on his bicycle, the
joy he took in that open water and
land really
lifted his spirit at a time
(19:37):
that his spirit was also being
crushed.
And he was also
telling us that, speaking
from the position of someone who
grew up to be a remarkable
and gifted writer who had in
many ways a rich and meaningful
life, full of adventures,
contact conversations, deep
relationships to indigenous people
(19:57):
in the Arctic and elsewhere, to
scientists, to animals,
to the natural world.
An enviable life in many respects,
and I think he was trying to say in
that that it can damage you,
but it doesn't end your life.
It does terminate you.
I think he acknowledged that there
are many kinds of suffering
all around and that,
(20:17):
you know, girls and women
particularly experienced sexual
abuse.
But, you know, so do boys
and sometimes men.
And so also saying, my, my
suffering is not unique.
And to see it in the framework
of empathy,
I think is really important.
It makes it less lonely.
(20:38):
So many people have had this
experience.
We need to recognize it happens
a lot, and we're hearing
it in other ways now with the
stories about,
Native American and,
First Nation boarding schools in the
U.S. and Canada, the sexual
abuse there.
So Berry did those two things,
recognizing that the
(21:00):
terrible things that happen to you
don't stop the wonderful
things that happen to you, which can
help you deal with those other
things, and that it doesn't
make you unusual.
It makes you part of, tragically,
a very large, part
of the population.
So I think that framework is really
useful.
And I'm not saying that there isn't
real oppression and it's tremendous
(21:21):
around transphobia, homophobia,
ableism, racism,
misogyny and, you
know, ageism and a host of other
things, but
just that every story we tell
has consequences.
And finding our strengths,
I think, can be a tremendous
(21:42):
blessing for
our inner psychic lives
and for our ability to participate.
We're going to take another short
break and then come back with the
rest of my conversation with Rebecca
Solnit.
(22:12):
In her book Men Explain Things
to Me. Published in 2014,
Rebecca Solnit wrote, "I'm
grateful that after an early life
of being silenced, sometimes
violently, I grew up to have
a voice.
Circumstances that will always buy
me to the rights of the voiceless."
Rebecca describes herself as a
battered child.
(22:34):
She says she spent long hours
outdoors, in part to escape
the violence in her home.
Her other refuge was books.
I was always in love with stories as
soon as I was a person who had
language.
As soon as I learned how to read
early in first grade,
books became so magical because
reading was the ability
to unlock the treasures
(22:55):
within every book.
And I pretty quickly decided
that first year that I wanted to
write books, but I didn't really
think about what that meant.
It was my final career choice
that I'd never really wavered
from.
Nobody around me when I was growing
up had big ambitions for me.
I was often told that I wasn't going
(23:16):
to amount to much,
and that I should aim low and my
ambitions.
My mother would.
Even when I was getting awards,
you know, in my 40s, my
mother would say, this is all such
a surprise. You were just a mousy
little thing.
And.
Thanks, mom.
Yeah. And,
(23:38):
you know, so it's been surprising.
It's been it's been complicated.
I have to remind myself that most
people on earth feel
under-recognized and unheard,
and that there are
ways in my personal life I can feel
that way. But as a, you know, as
a writer who gets platforms
like The Guardian newspaper,
Harper's Magazine,
(23:59):
at, this podcast,
I am very well heard in other
ways, and I have a lot of
credibility which young women
often don't have and I didn't have
as a young woman.
I feel that it also
imposes tremendous responsibility,
you know, and that I must use my
superpowers for good.
Well, I know we need to head towards
(24:21):
wrapping up, and I want to bring us
back to climate.
You're such a great storyteller, and
you also have so many things to say
about why we need
better stories, different stories.
And I think one of the real
challenges of the climate crisis is
the challenge it presents.
On the story front.
I think for a lot of people, it
feels a little bit like sitting
through the worst doctor's
(24:41):
appointment in the world where they
know there's a bad diagnosis
coming, but it seems to take like
decades to just
just tell me the thing.
I feel like that might be one of the
reasons why people tend to gravitate
toward an apocalyptic narrative is
it's just like it's easier
to know something.
So I will imagine everything
crumbling.
(25:01):
Societies falling apart and
everyone, you know, going after each
other in the most terrible way.
Because at least then I have
something to like hold on to.
And not just this what is happening.
It's so disorienting.
And yet that isn't going to solve
it. We can't just sit here and keep
reimagining the apocalypse.
And I just want to read back to you
a sentence that you said that I
(25:22):
think really gets to the heart of
the matter. You said.
We're not very good at telling
stories about 100 people doing
things, or considering that the
qualities that matter in saving a
valley or changing the world
are mostly not physical courage
and violent clashes, but
the ability to coordinate and
inspire and connect with lots
of other people and create stories
about what could be and how
(25:44):
we get there.
I so agree with you.
And I also think those are stories
that are harder to tell.
Those are stories that are not going
to get you a Netflix deal.
So, how
do we tell those stories in ways
that really reach a lot
of people?
I think they're told in a lot of
nonfiction books.
One that comes to mind is my friend
Adam Hochshield's Bury the Chains,
(26:06):
about how a dozen Quaker men
in the 1770s decided
to try and abolish slavery in the
British Empire, which for
an already marginalized religious
minority could seem completely
ridiculous. But one of them lived to
see it through.
And, of course, enslaved and
formerly enslaved people and other
people were already trying to do
that. But we do need those
(26:27):
stories, because we're besieged with
superhero stories in
which most of us are ordinary
rabble. We're powerless, we're
selfish, we're petty, we're
short sighted.
If we're not actually
venal. We also see this in stories
about disasters and the terrible
Hollywood disaster movies.
So we need the ubermensch, the
superhero who's exceptional
(26:50):
to save us. And he's usually some
muscly young dude
who's also a loner,
you know, some kind of Superman,
Batman, Spiderman figure.
And the truth is, the world is
changed by people
who in some sense are very ordinary
but are very stubborn.
And as that sentence from the
essay, when the hero is the problem
(27:11):
describes, the skills
are often the ability to,
you know, organize your skills to
inspire, motivate people, help
them find common ground, help them
find hope and power, and engage
and do the work and see that that
the work will take us where we want
to go.
That's not the story we hear.
But as for the fatalism,
(27:32):
there's two things about that.
There's one that's specific to
climate, which is I spend
a lot of time reading what climate
scientists and climate activists
have to say.
None of them are despondent.
None of them have given up.
All of them recognize we're in a
very grave and dangerous situation.
All of them recognize that
we're in a what I call the decade of
(27:53):
decision. What we do right now
matters tremendously, not
for the next 10 or 100 years, for
the next 10,000 years,
and that the difference between the
best and worst case situation
is profound for many places,
many species, many human
populations.
They also recognize that we
can't save everything.
But that doesn't mean we can't save
(28:14):
nothing, that there
will be inevitable losses.
But there's also a lot
that can be saved and protected
if we do what we should do.
But then there's a larger context I
want to talk about.
There's a book by the Buddhist
teacher Pema Chadron
called Comfortable with Uncertainty,
which I find such a powerful title
because actually, where most of us
(28:36):
are not very comfortable with
uncertainty, we want
to know what's going to happen.
And I find that people get attached
to dumber ism, defeatism,
despair, cynicism
as a form of certainty.
Oh, we can't possibly win.
It will never work.
We're all going to die.
There's nothing we can do.
For those of us who live fairly
(28:57):
safe and comfortable lives, it
means nothing is demanded of us.
If we give up, we relatively safe
people just have to stay home and be
bitter and cynical.
Which is, I don't think, a
particularly pleasant job, but a
really easy one.
And so I see this tendency
that comes, I think, from two big
habits in American
storytelling, one of which is
(29:19):
a false story about the nature of
power that it resides in a very few
individuals who are rich or
famous or hold political
positions.
But we have innumerable examples
the civil rights movement, the
abolitionist movements, the women's
movement, the environmental movement
showing that we
ordinary people as
grassroots movements, civil society,
(29:42):
are so tremendously powerful.
People often have a very short term
version of how change works, and
I call it instant results
guaranteed, or your money back,
like those like those silly mail
order products and advertisements
in my youth, you know, they really
think if you have a protest on
Tuesday and all the politicians
don't say we were wrong and
you were right, and you're getting
(30:03):
exactly what you asked for right
away, they think that if you don't
get that, you don't get anything.
There are so many movements
that accomplish incredibly
important things.
It often takes a long time.
It took 11 years to stop the
Keystone XL pipeline.
All those 11 years, people told
us we were wasting our time.
We would never win.
(30:24):
And there were 11 years in which we
didn't win.
Harvard finally divested from
fossil fuels. For ten years, the
student movement looked like
it was losing because it hadn't won.
And then they won.
You spent a lot of time not
achieving your goal before you
achieve your goal.
Change takes time.
It doesn't happen in predictable,
linear ways.
Sometimes it's like tension building
up to the earthquake.
(30:46):
So change often happens
in indirect and unpredictable ways.
It often takes a while.
It often happens because of people
who are dismissed and trivialized.
And so we need good stories
about change in power, which
give you a different
kind of certainty, the certainty
that you don't know what's going to
happen. But at least you have some
(31:07):
really good models and templates
from the past.
And so I think uncertainty
can actually be
indistinguishable ultimately
from possibility.
It's possible that terrible things
will happen.
It's also possible that wonderful
things can happen.
We are making the future in the
present. So what we do now
(31:27):
and in the near future matters
tremendously for the long term.
I think there's hope in that.
There's power in that, and there's a
real understanding that
uncertainty is a
blessing and not a curse.
And so we also need good stories
to do that.
Well, Rebecca Solnit, thank you
so very much for your time
and all your thoughts and all your
(31:48):
work in this, the skills in the
imaginative space that you are
bringing to to this really
intense time in human history.
I know I personally have benefited
so much from your work and will
continue to.
You're welcome.
As do millions of others.
This episode was edited by Erika
(32:09):
Janik with help from Sam Moore.
The music was by Todd Sickafoose.
Special thanks to Ben Trefny from
KALW in San Francisco.
Hi everybody.
It's Amy Martin, and I'm really
excited to tell you that season
five of threshold will be coming
out later this year.
More on that soon- ish.
But I'm also excited about what we
have to share with you today.
This is a conversation I had
recently with author Rebecca Solnit.
(00:22):
I imagine a lot of you are already
familiar with her work.
She's written more than 20 books.
Her essays are frequently published
in major newspapers and magazines.
She has a column in The Guardian.
She has the kind of mind that
refuses to be siloed.
In one essay, she might move from
family dynamics to global politics
to ecological crisis.
(00:44):
But two themes emerge repeatedly
in her work.
Her fierce commitment to justice
and her refusal of cynicism.
She has a unique ability to braid
the two together.
She's a blunt truth teller
and also a dogged defender of
possibility and promise.
One powerful example of this is her
(01:05):
essay entitled, "Difficult
is not the Same as Impossible."
Here are some excerpts from the
first few paragraphs:
"It is late.
We are deep in an emergency,
but it's not too late because
the emergency is not over.
(01:25):
The outcome is not decided.
We are deciding it
now.
An emergency is when a stable
situation destabilizes.
When the house catches fire, or
the dam breaks or institution
implodes.
When the failure or sudden change
or crisis calls for
urgent response,
(01:46):
it's when it becomes clear that the
way things work is
not how they're going to be.
An emergency can involve terrible
loss, or it can bring about
magnificent transformation.
And while it's unfolding, the
outcome can be impossible to
foresee.
Or it can depend on what you
and we do.".
(02:10):
I spoke to Rebecca Solnit in April
of 2024.
I want to talk with you
about the earth, about the natural
world in lots of different ways.
But I guess to start with, I just
need to acknowledge that I kind of
hate the words the natural world,
because as soon as we say them, or
nature or the environment,
(02:30):
we've immediately set up this
conceptual divide of there's
us, and then there's everything
else, just like the most
narcissistic framing ever.
And, and yet these
are the concepts.
You know, I've inherited this is the
language we have.
And so I'm curious how you
think about how we talk
about this thing we call the natural
(02:51):
world.
One thing that your question brings
up that I find so interesting
is 30
or so years ago, people
often talked about nature and
culture as though they were equal
and separate spheres.
And that has changed
profoundly. I think indigenous
and environmental perspectives
(03:12):
have reminded us that nothing
is outside nature.
We can never be independent of
nature.
So I actually think your question
opens up the fact that we've changed
that a lot. More and more, we
recognize that human beings
are biological creatures,
not separate from the rest of living
nature and the inorganic
(03:32):
nature we depend on beyond
that. And that shift has actually
been one of the really exciting
things I've seen in my life.
And truly, when
I started trying to think
about the natural world creatively,
intellectually, politically,
I was surrounded by people
who really talked about, you know,
nature is almost optional,
(03:54):
or a place you could step into and
step out of.
It was this finite place with
a beyond to it.
I remember somebody saying, you
don't understand us in New York.
Nature is in the past tense.
And I used to say, if
you're holding one of those paper
cups of coffee, people in New York
were always holding the papers
from trees. The water is from your
(04:14):
Adirondacks Watershed Preserve.
The milk is from a pastoral
landscape. The coffee is from
a tropical landscape.
Just that cup of coffee is four
different natural landscapes
in your hand going into your
biological body.
So learning to see the systems
and to think of the world in terms
of systems, I think has really
undone the nature culture binary,
(04:36):
as has acknowledging the presence of
indigenous people
who weren't at war with nature
and trying to live outside it the
way industrial civilization so
often has.
So that's what that question brings
up for me, that I think is actually
an interesting starting point of
how much, although the words
remain the same, the way
we use them in the way we think has
(04:57):
actually changed so
much in my lifetime.
For the better, I think.
Yeah. And I think the reason I
wanted to start with language is not
because I'm interested in trying
to find like, perfect terms
because no such thing exists,
but because I'm interested
in the concepts behind them and what
they lead us to and what they close
(05:19):
off. And, that's
something that I hear you
so eloquently make the case for in
your work is that thoughts matter.
Ideas matter.
What we believe in matters.
It's not trivial.
And it made me wonder if you feel
like that concept
itself is under threat.
If you feel like it has to be
defended like that.
(05:39):
The idea that beliefs matter
is something that people don't
believe anymore.
I think it is
somewhere between threatened and
forgotten.
I think we live in a world in
which a lot of social media, news
media, etc.
have a really short term time frame.
For example, last week
(06:00):
the president canceled more student
debt.
There's a way
you can tell that story where it
happened last week, a very
powerful man gave it to us out
of his own free will.
There's another story you can tell.
Where in 2011,
a bunch of people gathered at
Zuccotti Park to start
(06:20):
Occupy Wall Street, which became
a national and international
movement focusing on economic
injustice and really reframing
it in moral terms,
economic terms, imaginative
terms, and very powerful new ways.
Out of that came a movement for debt
abolition, focusing on medical
debt, housing debt, and particularly
(06:41):
student debt.
The student debt abolition movement
informed the public of how
destructive and corrupt
and manipulative that system
was.
So if you take the long term
perspective, which I'm often arguing
for with the sense that hope
and memory are so connected,
you can see this began as an idea,
a shift in values, a grassroots
(07:03):
campaign.
What begins as books, stories,
slogans often ends
up as, you know, laws,
policies, actual forests
protected, shifts
in how we think, how we
act, how we legislate,
who we protect, what we
consider normal.
And so much of my work has been
(07:23):
tracing that larger process.
How did this thing that ended up
as legislation, as law, as
the protection of this population
or this environment, how did that
begin in the margins, in the shadows
with one person, a few people,
a grassroots movement that was seen
as extreme,
unrealistic?
Ridiculous.
(07:44):
How did something migrate from
the margins to the center,
from a radical idea to the
way we all think?
I and there's a point at which women
having the vote, the abolition
of slavery, the protection
of the environment were all seen as
these kind of radical, disruptive
ideas in the same way that
the end of the fossil fuel industry
(08:05):
is. So we're constantly
changing, which is another thing
that's invisible when you have this
short term perspective.
So just that whole path of change, I
think is tremendously important.
And in the world of short term
ideas, tremendously
under-recognized, so much
of my work has been trying to give
people back the full
trajectory, which I think gives us
(08:28):
confidence that what we
do matters, a kind of orientation
we can't have otherwise,
and a sense of hope.
Yeah.
And and I think one of the things
that does is
it locates us within a
problem or within a quest
in a really important way.
I feel like in a Paradise Built in
(08:49):
Hell, but other books as well,
you do this great job of
encouraging us to
think about what we're thinking
about ourselves and how that
has such an impact on outcomes.
And I guess when it comes to
climate, I'm curious, what beliefs
do we have that are slowing us down,
or what's one belief that's really
slowing us down that we could get
(09:09):
rid of, and another that you would
really like to see more people take
up?
Well, the way I see it is right
now, we have a lot of scientists,
deeply engaged people, climate
organizers, activists,
climate journalists, etc.
who understand the situation very
well. And the only thing impeding us
is the fact that we need to be more
(09:30):
powerful than the fossil fuel
industry and the other
vested interests trying to
delay, slow down, deny
what we need to do.
Around the periphery are a lot of
people who are less well informed.
Often they have factually
wrong ideas, but they often also
have outdated ideas.
There was a point at which we didn't
(09:51):
have the solutions.
When leaving.
The age of fossil fuels behind was
impossible.
One of the shocking things, I think,
because it's so wonderful that so
under-recognized, is that wind
and solar were really primitive,
expensive, inadequate technologies
at the turn of the century.
We really didn't have
what we needed to leave
(10:12):
the age of fossil fuel behind.
We've had an astounding energy
revolution.
And, you know, I did an anthology
with my coeditor, Thelma Young,
Lieutenant, to a book called Not Too
Late because literally a lot of
less informed people think it's too
late. It's not too late.
Every 10th of a degree of warming,
we can prevent every good
climate solution.
(10:32):
We can implement matters.
I think a lot of people think in all
or nothing terms, if we can't save
everything, we can't save
anything.
You know, the perfect, I say
often, is the enemy of the good,
often a very loud and aggressive
enemy of the good.
One of the narratives I hear a lot
(10:52):
around climate is the tension
between doing things fast
and doing them fairly, kind of
framed as there's people over here
who want to do decarbonization
as fast as they possibly can.
There's people over here saying,
yes, but we need it to be inclusive.
We need it to include indigenous
rights, human rights more broadly,
justice.
And I'm seeing more and more a
story of like, which one are we
(11:13):
going to choose?
And I.
I always react against
binaries like that.
And yet I have myself reported
on some cases where
there is some real tension between
larger justice issues and climate
issues. And I wonder what you think
about that framing overall
and kind of how you relate to
(11:35):
to those sorts of questions.
I think that there are lots of
individual situations in which
groups are pitted against each
other. More vulnerable and less
vulnerable groups, whether it's
around extracting materials
are and manufacturing them for
renewables or where they get
cited, etc.
but often it's the other way around
(11:55):
and, you know, there's money to
be made in siting solar and wind
on your property.
And a lot of native reservations
are eagerly taking it up.
And the Navajo reservation has
a lot of people who've never had
electricity because they're so
remote.
So I think it's it's sometimes a
false binary and a and that also
a lot of times it's just a question
(12:17):
of whether you do those things, but
how you do those things.
And we I think we can do those
things fast and we can do them
right. But I also think underlying
that, we're constantly being
given a narrative of scarcity.
Underlying that is the idea that we
live in an age of abundance and what
climate requires offices,
austerity, sacrifice, renunciation.
(12:40):
And I think you can turn that upside
down in so many ways.
We live in an era of austerity.
The wealthiest 1% of human beings
have a bigger climate impact than
the poorest 66%
of humanity.
So it's not all of us benefiting
from this environmental destruction.
And what we actually need to do for
the climate could bring on an
(13:01):
age of abundance.
You know, I think we're really poor
right now and hope were
poor and relationships were poor
in social trust and solidarity.
What we actually need to do
in the big picture, I
think, benefits everyone in
a lot of different ways.
And we need to see that
(13:21):
we can do what we need to do in
solidarity with farmers
in Bangladesh, with indigenous
people in the Arctic, with
indigenous people in the tropics,
with island dwellers in the South
Pacific.
And that, in a sense,
despair giving up for
those of us who have options is a
form of loss of solidarity
(13:42):
as well as often the
result of conclusions
reached from misinformation,
disinformation, or
lack of careful enough attention
to the information that what we do
right now matters.
We'll have more with Rebecca Solnit
(14:02):
after this short break.
Welcome back to my conversation with
author and activist Rebecca Solnit.
One of her most influential books
(14:22):
is A Paradise Built in Hell,
published in 2009.
In it, she examines the behavior
of communities ravaged by disaster,
fires, earthquakes, terrorism.
And she makes the case that these
catastrophes can open
up opportunities for people to
discover strengths in themselves
and the people around them that they
(14:43):
didn't know they had.
I wanted to explore this paradox
with her in this time of
multiple intersecting disasters.
I mean, there's so many different
dimensions of it.
We're now recognizing that the
natural world is indeed fragile,
and we've broken a lot
of it in ways that are dangerous.
But I think there's a narrative
(15:04):
about human fragility that is not
helpful.
If you believe you're terribly
fragile, you may respond
to harm in a different way.
If you believe that your trauma is
your identity, it's very
hard to say, well, I got over that
trauma, you know,
and I think there's a way that
trauma is often made into
(15:24):
a kind of badge legitimizing
you. We're in a world.
We're in a I'm in the progressive
world. I think we're very suspicious
of power.
So a lot of people run around
pretending they don't have power,
that they're they're oppressed and
not the oppressor.
And I think it's possible, actually,
to have power and try and use
it for good.
And knowing what power you have is
(15:45):
really important so that you can
use it. You can be a
creative, constructive participant.
But my friend Roshi Joan Halifax
talks about post-traumatic growth
that often the most difficult things
that happen to us shape
us. But what we do with those
experiences is partly up to us.
They can give us deeper empathy for
other people.
(16:07):
To who these things happen.
They can make us more politically
engaged.
They can make us find our own
strength and resilience.
And I think that often
repair, regrowth,
regeneration, resilience
are possible.
I have heard people on the
frontlines of climate being tired
(16:27):
of being told that they're resilient
because it can seem like, suck it
up, you know, ignore
the damage.
And there's a huge amount of damage,
whether it's child abuse or climate
devastation, that we need to do
everything we can to prevent
from happening.
But we also need to recognize
that when damage
is done, there's often many roads
(16:49):
forward.
Sometimes I see the
what feels to me like a kind
of a fetishization of
of the fragility that we have,
though just attaching to it as an
identity, almost as a reaction,
especially in the U.S., against
centuries long denial of
vulnerability.
You know that we have this history
of like always having to
(17:09):
position ourselves as, you know,
the biggest, the toughest, the
strongest, the hero.
But what I'm trying to figure out is
how can we create a space where
we can recognize how vulnerable
we are, how vulnerable
we're making ourselves by
disrupting the climate, among other
things, without kind of falling
into a cult of fragility.
(17:30):
And that's the place where I feel
like your work directs us toward as
some kind of third space where
we can say and see
the losses, the damage, the
vulnerability, be honest about it.
But then where we can
be generative, where new stories
can grow and where that's not
where we just stay stuck.
How do we start imagining
(17:51):
new stories to come out of that
space that are neither the
apocalypse or utopia,
but something more realistic
and has more, more possibilities?
And I grew up in an era where women
were told to just suck it up, and
you had no sense of humor if you saw
thought being groped, harassed,
threatened, stalked, even
raped, wasn't funny.
(18:12):
And, you
know, be cool, and
don't make waves, etc..
So I think it's, you know,
really important to recognize
these things are terribly harmful.
They're not okay.
And to hear those stories, one of
the most influential things in this
regard is a very powerful piece,
the nature writer environmental
(18:33):
writer Barry Lopez wrote in
the LA weekly in the 1990s.
He grew up in the San Fernando
Valley, just north of LA proper,
with a single mom, passionately
in love with the landscape and
horrifically traumatized by
a friend of his mother's, pretending
to be a doctor who sexually abused
(18:54):
him for years and terrorized
him to keep him silent
and filled him with deep shame as
well as the physical and psychic
abuse.
And so Barry, who was
a friend of mine and a
huge influence on me earlier
with his book Arctic Dreams and some
of his other writing, did some
remarkable things in this story.
(19:15):
And the two that I
think really matter in this context
was one he talked about what
helped him survive.
It wasn't just that a terrible thing
happened to me, but that
his homing pigeons, the landscape,
his ability to roam through it
freely on his bicycle, the
joy he took in that open water and
land really
lifted his spirit at a time
(19:37):
that his spirit was also being
crushed.
And he was also
telling us that, speaking
from the position of someone who
grew up to be a remarkable
and gifted writer who had in
many ways a rich and meaningful
life, full of adventures,
contact conversations, deep
relationships to indigenous people
(19:57):
in the Arctic and elsewhere, to
scientists, to animals,
to the natural world.
An enviable life in many respects,
and I think he was trying to say in
that that it can damage you,
but it doesn't end your life.
It does terminate you.
I think he acknowledged that there
are many kinds of suffering
all around and that,
(20:17):
you know, girls and women
particularly experienced sexual
abuse.
But, you know, so do boys
and sometimes men.
And so also saying, my, my
suffering is not unique.
And to see it in the framework
of empathy,
I think is really important.
It makes it less lonely.
(20:38):
So many people have had this
experience.
We need to recognize it happens
a lot, and we're hearing
it in other ways now with the
stories about,
Native American and,
First Nation boarding schools in the
U.S. and Canada, the sexual
abuse there.
So Berry did those two things,
recognizing that the
(21:00):
terrible things that happen to you
don't stop the wonderful
things that happen to you, which can
help you deal with those other
things, and that it doesn't
make you unusual.
It makes you part of, tragically,
a very large, part
of the population.
So I think that framework is really
useful.
And I'm not saying that there isn't
real oppression and it's tremendous
(21:21):
around transphobia, homophobia,
ableism, racism,
misogyny and, you
know, ageism and a host of other
things, but
just that every story we tell
has consequences.
And finding our strengths,
I think, can be a tremendous
(21:42):
blessing for
our inner psychic lives
and for our ability to participate.
We're going to take another short
break and then come back with the
rest of my conversation with Rebecca
Solnit.
(22:12):
In her book Men Explain Things
to Me. Published in 2014,
Rebecca Solnit wrote, "I'm
grateful that after an early life
of being silenced, sometimes
violently, I grew up to have
a voice.
Circumstances that will always buy
me to the rights of the voiceless."
Rebecca describes herself as a
battered child.
(22:34):
She says she spent long hours
outdoors, in part to escape
the violence in her home.
Her other refuge was books.
I was always in love with stories as
soon as I was a person who had
language.
As soon as I learned how to read
early in first grade,
books became so magical because
reading was the ability
to unlock the treasures
(22:55):
within every book.
And I pretty quickly decided
that first year that I wanted to
write books, but I didn't really
think about what that meant.
It was my final career choice
that I'd never really wavered
from.
Nobody around me when I was growing
up had big ambitions for me.
I was often told that I wasn't going
(23:16):
to amount to much,
and that I should aim low and my
ambitions.
My mother would.
Even when I was getting awards,
you know, in my 40s, my
mother would say, this is all such
a surprise. You were just a mousy
little thing.
And.
Thanks, mom.
Yeah. And,
(23:38):
you know, so it's been surprising.
It's been it's been complicated.
I have to remind myself that most
people on earth feel
under-recognized and unheard,
and that there are
ways in my personal life I can feel
that way. But as a, you know, as
a writer who gets platforms
like The Guardian newspaper,
Harper's Magazine,
(23:59):
at, this podcast,
I am very well heard in other
ways, and I have a lot of
credibility which young women
often don't have and I didn't have
as a young woman.
I feel that it also
imposes tremendous responsibility,
you know, and that I must use my
superpowers for good.
Well, I know we need to head towards
(24:21):
wrapping up, and I want to bring us
back to climate.
You're such a great storyteller, and
you also have so many things to say
about why we need
better stories, different stories.
And I think one of the real
challenges of the climate crisis is
the challenge it presents.
On the story front.
I think for a lot of people, it
feels a little bit like sitting
through the worst doctor's
(24:41):
appointment in the world where they
know there's a bad diagnosis
coming, but it seems to take like
decades to just
just tell me the thing.
I feel like that might be one of the
reasons why people tend to gravitate
toward an apocalyptic narrative is
it's just like it's easier
to know something.
So I will imagine everything
crumbling.
(25:01):
Societies falling apart and
everyone, you know, going after each
other in the most terrible way.
Because at least then I have
something to like hold on to.
And not just this what is happening.
It's so disorienting.
And yet that isn't going to solve
it. We can't just sit here and keep
reimagining the apocalypse.
And I just want to read back to you
a sentence that you said that I
(25:22):
think really gets to the heart of
the matter. You said.
We're not very good at telling
stories about 100 people doing
things, or considering that the
qualities that matter in saving a
valley or changing the world
are mostly not physical courage
and violent clashes, but
the ability to coordinate and
inspire and connect with lots
of other people and create stories
about what could be and how
(25:44):
we get there.
I so agree with you.
And I also think those are stories
that are harder to tell.
Those are stories that are not going
to get you a Netflix deal.
So, how
do we tell those stories in ways
that really reach a lot
of people?
I think they're told in a lot of
nonfiction books.
One that comes to mind is my friend
Adam Hochshield's Bury the Chains,
(26:06):
about how a dozen Quaker men
in the 1770s decided
to try and abolish slavery in the
British Empire, which for
an already marginalized religious
minority could seem completely
ridiculous. But one of them lived to
see it through.
And, of course, enslaved and
formerly enslaved people and other
people were already trying to do
that. But we do need those
(26:27):
stories, because we're besieged with
superhero stories in
which most of us are ordinary
rabble. We're powerless, we're
selfish, we're petty, we're
short sighted.
If we're not actually
venal. We also see this in stories
about disasters and the terrible
Hollywood disaster movies.
So we need the ubermensch, the
superhero who's exceptional
(26:50):
to save us. And he's usually some
muscly young dude
who's also a loner,
you know, some kind of Superman,
Batman, Spiderman figure.
And the truth is, the world is
changed by people
who in some sense are very ordinary
but are very stubborn.
And as that sentence from the
essay, when the hero is the problem
(27:11):
describes, the skills
are often the ability to,
you know, organize your skills to
inspire, motivate people, help
them find common ground, help them
find hope and power, and engage
and do the work and see that that
the work will take us where we want
to go.
That's not the story we hear.
But as for the fatalism,
(27:32):
there's two things about that.
There's one that's specific to
climate, which is I spend
a lot of time reading what climate
scientists and climate activists
have to say.
None of them are despondent.
None of them have given up.
All of them recognize we're in a
very grave and dangerous situation.
All of them recognize that
we're in a what I call the decade of
(27:53):
decision. What we do right now
matters tremendously, not
for the next 10 or 100 years, for
the next 10,000 years,
and that the difference between the
best and worst case situation
is profound for many places,
many species, many human
populations.
They also recognize that we
can't save everything.
But that doesn't mean we can't save
(28:14):
nothing, that there
will be inevitable losses.
But there's also a lot
that can be saved and protected
if we do what we should do.
But then there's a larger context I
want to talk about.
There's a book by the Buddhist
teacher Pema Chadron
called Comfortable with Uncertainty,
which I find such a powerful title
because actually, where most of us
(28:36):
are not very comfortable with
uncertainty, we want
to know what's going to happen.
And I find that people get attached
to dumber ism, defeatism,
despair, cynicism
as a form of certainty.
Oh, we can't possibly win.
It will never work.
We're all going to die.
There's nothing we can do.
For those of us who live fairly
(28:57):
safe and comfortable lives, it
means nothing is demanded of us.
If we give up, we relatively safe
people just have to stay home and be
bitter and cynical.
Which is, I don't think, a
particularly pleasant job, but a
really easy one.
And so I see this tendency
that comes, I think, from two big
habits in American
storytelling, one of which is
(29:19):
a false story about the nature of
power that it resides in a very few
individuals who are rich or
famous or hold political
positions.
But we have innumerable examples
the civil rights movement, the
abolitionist movements, the women's
movement, the environmental movement
showing that we
ordinary people as
grassroots movements, civil society,
(29:42):
are so tremendously powerful.
People often have a very short term
version of how change works, and
I call it instant results
guaranteed, or your money back,
like those like those silly mail
order products and advertisements
in my youth, you know, they really
think if you have a protest on
Tuesday and all the politicians
don't say we were wrong and
you were right, and you're getting
(30:03):
exactly what you asked for right
away, they think that if you don't
get that, you don't get anything.
There are so many movements
that accomplish incredibly
important things.
It often takes a long time.
It took 11 years to stop the
Keystone XL pipeline.
All those 11 years, people told
us we were wasting our time.
We would never win.
(30:24):
And there were 11 years in which we
didn't win.
Harvard finally divested from
fossil fuels. For ten years, the
student movement looked like
it was losing because it hadn't won.
And then they won.
You spent a lot of time not
achieving your goal before you
achieve your goal.
Change takes time.
It doesn't happen in predictable,
linear ways.
Sometimes it's like tension building
up to the earthquake.
(30:46):
So change often happens
in indirect and unpredictable ways.
It often takes a while.
It often happens because of people
who are dismissed and trivialized.
And so we need good stories
about change in power, which
give you a different
kind of certainty, the certainty
that you don't know what's going to
happen. But at least you have some
(31:07):
really good models and templates
from the past.
And so I think uncertainty
can actually be
indistinguishable ultimately
from possibility.
It's possible that terrible things
will happen.
It's also possible that wonderful
things can happen.
We are making the future in the
present. So what we do now
(31:27):
and in the near future matters
tremendously for the long term.
I think there's hope in that.
There's power in that, and there's a
real understanding that
uncertainty is a
blessing and not a curse.
And so we also need good stories
to do that.
Well, Rebecca Solnit, thank you
so very much for your time
and all your thoughts and all your
(31:48):
work in this, the skills in the
imaginative space that you are
bringing to to this really
intense time in human history.
I know I personally have benefited
so much from your work and will
continue to.
You're welcome.
As do millions of others.
This episode was edited by Erika
(32:09):
Janik with help from Sam Moore.
The music was by Todd Sickafoose.
Special thanks to Ben Trefny from
KALW in San Francisco.
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