Rebecca Solnit: “The vast majority of people want climate action”

Rebecca Solnit is an activist and author of more than 25 books, including the collection of essays Men explain things to me. Her new book, The beginning comes after the endargues that we have seen a revolution in rights and ideas in the last 50 years, thanks to a new recognition of the interdependent relationships of nature and humanity. She talked to New Scientist‘s The world, the universe and us podcast about how she came to write it—and where we go from here.

Rowan Hooper: I want to start with a quote from your book by the scientist Thomas Berry, who talked in 1978 about how the Earth was in trouble because we don’t have a good history. It reminded me of the ecologist David Abram, who said that we cannot restore the earth without restoring it. Why do we need new stories?

Rebecca Solnit: I think a lot of the new stories are new to white people and industrial capitalism. They are old for many indigenous people. Berry’s quote came at a moment when it still felt like white settler colonialist culture was not only dominant, but almost all-encompassing, in a way that it no longer does.

We live in a radically different world, where many of the old stories have resurfaced. One of the most exciting, profound things in my life has been seeing Native Americans take back land rights, language, pride, and an important role in public discourses around the history of this hemisphere—about what kind of relationship humans can have with nature—and become important leaders, especially for the climate movement. They have changed the way the rest of us think about the world.

It makes me think that perhaps this whole colonialist industrial era was a detour, an arrogant mistake, the catastrophic consequences of which we are living through now with climate chaos and the rest. I think the old stories are being synthesized with new stories from science in “everything is connected” ways – of interconnection, of process, of symbiosis.

One of the big themes in your book is how we are inseparable from nature, and the growing scientific recognition of that.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because many people seem to live in a perpetual present where they don’t remember how profoundly the world has changed, including changing stories, values, assumptions, unpacking or dismantling some old ones.

When I was young people really talked about nature and culture as separate; animals were seen as having no language, intelligence, emotions, and used tools. All that has been destroyed by Jane Goodall and her successors.

This new science that has emerged from many directions truly describes us as inseparable from nature. And no one is more central to that than Lynn Margulis, the microbiologist whose first major paper in the 1960s was rejected by, I think, 12 publishers before it was published. It argued that eukaryotic cells arose from the fusion of two different types of cells. She went on to look at other types of symbiosis as fundamental to complex life, and to see life as coming together and cooperating rather than breaking apart and competing, which was the classic social Darwinist story—not to blame Darwin for social Darwinists.

It is to understand that all parts of a system play a role in the system as a whole, and you cannot extract any parts without damaging the system. It’s really different from the mechanistic notion of how to manage nature, with pesticides and shooting all the wildlife in an agricultural area because they’re competing with the cows or the sheep or the crops, and not understanding that the coyotes, the hawks, they all have a role to play.

But it will take a lot to slow down the ever-growing capitalism that is devouring the planet.

It is, but something that I, as a climate activist, will always make clear is that the vast majority of people on earth, every survey, opinion poll and study has shown, want climate action and nature conservation. It is a minority – either directly or indirectly benefiting from the fossil fuel industry – that prevents us from making the transitions we should be making.

At the same time, we are making many transitions through better farming techniques and better renewable energy. But it’s not fast enough. It’s not good enough.

This is a deadline. Human rights have always felt that it is a tragedy for this generation, but maybe they will be achieved in the next generation. It took 80 years for American women to vote from the start of the campaign, but we don’t have time for climate change.

You wrote Hope in the dark during the US presidency of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. That book was about the activist achievements that can create the change we need. But now we have President Trump rolling back that progress. Is your new book some sort of sequel?

Hope in the dark tried to give people a different sense of the nature of change. I see a lot of activists thinking, if we have a protest on Tuesday and we don’t get what we want on Wednesday, then we won’t achieve anything. While change is so often slow, unpredictable and indirect, and perhaps we underestimate the power that stories, culture, grassroots activism have to radically remake the world.

This book looks at how when you add it all up, everything has changed so profoundly. We live in a radically different world than the one I was born into. It’s like Hope in the dark in trying to give people a deeper, longer perspective of where we are, to get them off track. I wanted them to have stories that really tell us about the power we have. We have to use that power, which some people don’t want to hear because power and responsibility go together.

All generations look back and say “it wasn’t like that in my time”. But things have changed very quickly in recent years. You live in San Francisco, a city that used to represent hippies and flower power. Now it represents technology power and Silicon Valley. What has technology taken away from us?

I live in a place where the world’s first real environmental organization, the Sierra Club, was founded. This always felt like what we really gave to the world until Silicon Valley metastasized and became a global power. It’s been heartbreaking because I used to be proud to be from here and now I’m horrified to see the global destruction they’re wreaking, with AI as the new wave.

Many of the technologies could have been radically different. Search engines and social media should have been managed for the public as a public. Instead, they are profit-driven, in part by harvesting our data, as AI is.

Your book reminded me of climate scientist Tim Lenton’s last book, Positive tipping pointsabout the small things that build up and cause change. That’s the kind of thing you’re talking about here, all these wins people don’t see as wins.

I’ve been told much of my adult life that feminism somehow failed, as if you’ve lost if you haven’t undone two millennia of patriarchy in one generation, rather than that we’re off to a really good start and the work continues. I wrote a piece a few years ago where I said that I feel like a turtle at a fly party because we can see the setbacks, which often make people very sad, but they are setbacks to the changes that were achieved.

I grew up in a world where rivers caught fire, (where) so many things were unregulated. People didn’t even have the language to think about the environment. So I wanted people to just understand the depth of the change.

I’m talking to you from California, where… solar power often produces more than 100 percent of our electricity every day, because we’ve invested heavily in renewable energy. People don’t understand the astonishing scale of the renewables revolution. And so the long view, the turtle at the mayfly party, sees time in a different frame. The mayflies live in the eternal short-term present where they miss this. And I think a lot of hope comes not from the future, but from the past.

I try to give people back their own history in our lives, to invite them to recognize the many positive changes around rights for all, around a kind of great equalization.

We are not at the end of the story; we are in the middle of history. Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess. I am hopeful, but I do not make prophecies because my hope rests on the fact that the future is uncertain because we make it in the present. So I want people to feel, even in the midst of the huge and ugly setbacks that are heartbreaking, that we have changed so much, we have so much power, and we have so many victories.

This is an edited version of an interview with the New Scientist podcast