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. 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. 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 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. 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, 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.". 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 after this short break. Welcome back to my conversation with author and activist Rebecca Solnit. One of her most influential books 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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.
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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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.
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 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 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, 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 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
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 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, 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
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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 Janik with help from Sam Moore. The music was by Todd Sickafoose. Special thanks to Ben Trefny from KALW in San Francisco.