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. Her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, argues that we have seen a revolution in rights and ideas over the past 50 years, thanks to a new recognition of the interdependent relationships in nature and humanity. She spoke 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 scholar Thomas Berry, who spoke in 1978 about how Earth was in trouble because we don’t have a good story. That reminded me of the ecologist David Abram, who said we can’t restore Earth without re-storying 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’re old for a lot of Indigenous people. Berry’s quote came at a moment when it still felt like white-settler colonialist culture was not just dominant, but almost all-encompassing, in a way that it doesn’t anymore.

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

That lets me think, maybe this whole colonialist, industrialist era was a detour, an arrogant mistake, whose catastrophic consequences we’re living through now with climate chaos and the rest. I think those old stories are synthesising 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 a lot of people seem to live in an eternal present where they don’t remember how profoundly the world has changed, including changing stories, values, assumptions, the unpacking or dismantling of some old ones.

When I was young, people really talked about nature and culture as separate; animals were seen as not having language, intelligence, emotion, using tools. All that’s been wonderfully demolished by Jane Goodall and her successors.

This new science that has emerged from many directions really describes us as inseparable from nature. And nobody is more pivotal in 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 originated from the merging of two different kinds of cells. She went on to look at other kinds of symbiosis and see that as fundamental to complex life, and to see life as coming together and collaborating rather than coming apart and competing, which was the classic social Darwinist story – not to blame Darwin for social Darwinists.

It’s understanding all parts of a system play a role in the wholeness of that system, and you can’t pull any parts out without damaging the system. That’s really different to the mechanistic notion of how to manage nature, with pesticides and shooting all the wildlife in an agricultural space because they compete with the cows or sheep or crops, and not understanding that the coyotes, the hawks, all have their role to play.

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

It is, but something as a climate activist I always want to make clear is that the great majority of people on Earth, every survey, poll and study has shown, want climate action and nature protected. It’s a minority – either directly or indirectly benefitting from the fossil fuel industry – preventing us from making the transitions we should be making.

At the same time, we are making a lot of transitions through better farming techniques and better renewables. But it’s not fast enough. It’s not good enough.

This is a deadline thing. Human rights have always felt like it’s a tragedy for this generation, but maybe they’ll be achieved in the next generation. It took 80 years for US women to get the vote from when the campaign started, but we don’t have time with climate.

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 might create the change we need. But now we have President Trump rolling back that progress. Is your new book a sort-of sequel?

Hope in the Dark was trying 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 achieve nothing. Whereas so often change is slow, unpredictable and indirect, and maybe 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 is like Hope in the Dark in trying to give people a deeper, longer perspective on where we are, to get them out of the rut. 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 this in my day”. But things have changed really fast in recent years. You live in San Francisco, a city that used to represent hippies and flower power. Now, it represents tech power and Silicon Valley. What has that technology taken from us?

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

A lot of the technologies could have been radically different. Search engines and social media should have been managed for the public good as public commons. Instead, they’re profit-driven, in part by harvesting our data, as AI is.

Your book reminded me of climate scientist Tim Lenton’s recent book, Positive Tipping Points, about the small things that build up and cause change. That’s the sort of thing you are talking about here, all these wins people don’t see as wins.

I’ve been told a lot of my adult life that somehow feminism failed, as though if you haven’t undone two millennia of patriarchy in one generation, you’ve lost, rather than that we have a very good beginning and the work continues. I wrote a piece a few years ago where I said, I feel like a tortoise at a mayfly party because we can see the backlashes, which often make people very sad, but they’re backlashes against 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 just to understand the profundity of the change.

I’m talking to you from California, where… solar energy is often producing more than 100 per cent of our electricity every day, because we’ve gone in big on renewables. People don’t understand the astonishing scale of the renewables revolution. And so the long view, the tortoise at the mayfly party, sees time in a different frame. The mayflies live in perpetual short-term present where they miss this stuff. And I think a lot of hope comes not from the future, but the past.

I’m trying to give people back their own history in our lifetimes, to invite them to recognise the many positive changes around rights for everybody, around a kind of great equalisation.

We’re not at the end of the story; we’re in the middle of the story. Where it goes from here is anybody’s guess. I’m hopeful, but I do not do prophecy because my hope rests on the fact the future is uncertain because we’re making it in the present. So I want people to feel, even in the midst of the huge and hideous backlashes that are heart-rending, that we have changed so much, we have so much power, and we do have so many victories.

This is an edited version of an interview with New Scientist’s podcast