Rebecca Solnit: ‘The great majority of people want climate action’

Rebecca Solnit is an activist and author of more than 25 books, including the essay collection Men explain things to me. His new book, The beginning comes after the endargues that we have witnessed a revolution in rights and ideas over the past 50 years, through a new recognition of the interdependent relationships between nature and humanity. She spoke to New scientistIt is 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 scholar Thomas Berry, who talked in 1978 about how the Earth was in trouble because we didn’t have a good history. It reminded me of environmentalist David Abram, who said that we cannot restore the Earth without restoring its history. 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 Aboriginal people. Berry’s quote comes at a time when there was still a sense that white settler colonialist culture was not only dominant, but almost all-encompassing, in a way that is no longer the case today.

We live in a radically different world, in which many old stories have resurfaced. One of the most exciting and profound things in my life has been watching Native Americans reclaim their land rights, their language, their pride, and a major role in public discourses about the history of this hemisphere – about the kind of relationship humans can have with nature – and become important leaders, particularly for the climate movement. They changed the way we see the world.

This makes me think that perhaps this whole colonialist and industrial era was just a detour, an arrogant error, the catastrophic consequences of which we are experiencing today with climate chaos and everything else. I think these old stories synthesize with new stories from science in an “everything is connected” way – of interconnection, of process, of symbiosis.

One of the big themes of your book is how we are inseparable from nature and the growing scientific recognition of this fact.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is that many people seem to live in an eternal 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 being separate; animals were considered to have no language, intelligence, emotion and did not use tools. All this was wonderfully demolished by Jane Goodall and her successors.

This new science from several directions actually describes us as inseparable from nature. And no one is more important in this field than Lynn Margulis, the microbiologist whose first major paper in the 1960s was rejected by, I think, 12 editors before it was published. He claimed that eukaryotic cells came from the fusion of two different types of cells. She then looked at other types of symbiosis and saw this as fundamental to complex life, and saw life as coming together and collaborating rather than separating and competing, which was the classic story of Social Darwinism – without blaming Darwin for Social Darwinists.

It’s about understanding that all parts of a system play a role in the entirety of that system, and that you cannot remove any part without damaging the system. It’s really different from the mechanistic notion of how to manage nature, with pesticides and killing all the wildlife in an agricultural space because they compete with cows, sheep or crops, without understanding that coyotes, hawks all have their role to play.

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

That’s true, but something I always want to make clear as a climate activist is that the vast majority of people on the planet, as all surveys, polls and studies show, want climate action and nature to be protected. It’s a minority – who benefit directly or indirectly from the fossil fuel industry – who are stopping us from making the transitions we should be making.

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

It’s a matter of deadline. Human rights have always been considered a tragedy for this generation, but perhaps they will be realized in the next generation. It took American women 80 years to get the right to vote since the campaign began, but we don’t have time with the climate.

you wrote Hope in the dark during the American presidency of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. This book was about activist achievements that could create the change we need. But now President Trump is rolling back that progress. Is your new book a sort of sequel?

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

This book shows how, when you add it all up, everything has changed so profoundly. We live in a world radically different from the one I was born into. It’s like Hope in the dark trying to give people a deeper, longer perspective on where we are, to get them out of the rut. I wanted them to tell stories that really spoke to us about the power we have. We must use this power, which some do not want to hear because power and responsibility go hand in hand.

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 once represented hippies and flower power. Today it represents technological power and Silicon Valley. What has this technology taken from us?

I live in a place where the world’s first true environmental organization, the Sierra Club, was founded. This always seemed to be what we were really giving to the world until Silicon Valley metastasized and became a global power. This tore me apart because I was proud to be from here and now I’m horrified to see the global destruction they are leading with AI being the new wave.

Many technologies could have been radically different. Search engines and social media should have been managed for the public good as public goods. Instead, they are focused on profit, in part through harvesting our data, as AI does.

Your book reminded me of climatologist Tim Lenton’s recent book, Positive tipping pointsabout the little things that add up and cause change. That’s the kind of thing you’re talking about here, all these victories that people don’t consider victories.

I have been told many times throughout my adult life that feminism has failed, as if if we haven’t undone two millennia of patriarchy in a single generation we have lost, instead of saying we have a very good start and the work continues. I wrote an article a few years ago where I said, “I feel like a turtle at a pop-up party because we can see the negative reactions, which often make people very sad, but they are negative reactions against the changes that have been achieved.

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

I’m talking to you about California, where… solar energy often produces more than 100% of our electricity every day, because we have focused on renewable energies. People don’t understand the astonishing scale of the renewable energy revolution. So the long view, the turtle at the mayfly party, sees time in a different frame. Mayflies live in a short-term perpetual present where they miss these things. 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 over the course of our lives, to invite them to recognize the many positive changes around the rights of all, around a kind of great equalization.

We are not at the end of the story; we are in the middle of the story. Where this will take us is anyone’s guess. I’m hopeful, but I’m not prophesying because my hope is based on the fact that the future is uncertain because we’re doing it in the present. So I want people to feel, even in the midst of the huge, ugly backlash that is heartbreaking, that we have changed so much, that we have so much power, and that we have so many victories.

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