Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

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Ariana Brocious: But this idea that people really come together and find like a truer sense of being in these situations, I think is one that is very hope filling when you think about what future... Most likely, uh, you know, even if we do accomplish what we're hoping in terms of keeping climate impacts lesser, we're still going to have them, we're going to continue to have them, and we're going to have to find that resilience. What have you changed your mind about, and why? Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, which, um, the whole, and we had an entire culture, it wasn't just individual juries or whatever, we had an entire culture that in every way, including blaming Eve, et cetera, portrayed women as subjective, delusional, unreliable, vindictive little hussies, et cetera, and men as somehow having a monopoly on objective truth. And that's impacted climate scientists, that's impacted women politicians, that's impacted women. And it's also kinds of professional spheres. And it's also impacted women saying he's trying to kill me who aren't believed until they turn up dead. And so, because I often, you know, I did not coin the term mansplaining, although I'm often credited with it. So far as I can tell, the essay published in 2008, the title essay, Men Explain Things, to me, inspired it. And I have an entire file at home, I call the Mansplaining Olympic Tryouts. Um, with more than a hundred spectacular examples. The original essay I wrote is about. A nuclear physicist in Livermore telling me, laughing, that one of his neighbors recently ran out of the house naked screaming her husband was trying to kill her. And I looked at him. I said, how do you know he wasn't trying to kill her? And it was terrifying to realize his beliefs were so fixed, the one thing that couldn't occur to him with a naked woman in the middle of the night saying he's trying to kill me is that that he might be trying to kill her.

Greg Dalton: Climate can feel dark and difficult to deal with both intellectually and emotionally, and I do think there are good things happening. Progress is being made. So we're going to talk about what's going right. I'm Greg Dalton. Greg Dalton: She does and for decades, the mainstream environmental movement has been mostly white and well off. And because of their limited perspective, solutions hasn’t always gone as far as they needed to. Christiana Figueres: [00:39:34] Well, Tom and Rebecca, thank you so much. This has been so, so delightful. So, ladies, we we could go on forever talking to you and listening to you, especially listening to you because you you sing from the bottom of our heart. So thank you very much for that. Sadly, we do have to come to a close and we have a typical closing that we're not going to use today. We would like to ask you a different question. What out there or in here, either way or both, convinces you that it truly is not too late? Shaped by the clear-eyed wisdom of editors Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and enhanced by illustrations by David Solnit, Not Too Lateis a guide to take us from climate crisis to climate hope. When we talk about any movement, including the push for climate action, we’re talking about a “zeitgeist, a change in the air,” writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit writes in her essay-turned-book Hope in the Dark, which focuses on the intersection of activism, social change, and hope. It’s this last element, hope, that can become “an electrifying force in the present,” Solnit writes, “a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before it is found or followed.”

The Tyee

In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Latefeatures the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oilauthor Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategyauthor adrienne maree brown. Greg Dalton: I've heard of mansplaining and I've practiced it according to my college age daughter. In 2023, Rebecca co edited an anthology called It's Not Too Late, which is a guidebook for changing the climate narrative from despair to possibility. Thank you. We need that. The turning away from individual needs and demands, with wailing red-faced insistence on entitlement and endless satiation might prove intractable. But as the devastation and poison of hatred continue to take their toll, I believe that the greater preponderance of humans will turn away in innate, almost involuntary disgust. Ariana Brocious: Yeah, me too. I came away from my conversation with her feeling a bit more upbeat about where we're at in this moment in the climate crisis and what the future holds and how much power we have to change it. In addition to climate optimism, she is a vibrant voice on women's rights. Her 2014 essay, Men Explain Things to Me, has been credited with coining the term mansplaining, which is a cultural phenomenon that I think many of us are familiar with. And mansplaining in particular can be kind of an easy cultural touch point. But the truth is that her work is resonant on all sorts of subjects. Rebecca Solnit: I feel like there's concentric circles of climate understanding, and then I feel like I'm making a model of Dante's hell, we'll set that aside. think his ring sort of descended, mine might ascend. Maybe this is purgatory. But I feel like the denialists are just refusing the information, and I think a lot of it is because what the natural world is constantly telling us is everything is connected to everything else, and we all have responsibility towards the whole, which is a very anti rugged individualist, anti free marketeer, um, libertarian thing, so it's ideologically offensive to conservatives. But they're so far over there, they kind of don't matter, and um, but climate defeatists who abound often are also not particularly, they don't deny that climate is real. They often deny that solutions are real, that the movement is real, that coverage is real, that people caring is real. So they have their own amount of denial. There's a kind of depression where you just want to sit in the corner or curl up in fetal position or whatever, but these sort of evangelists of giving up, like the energized ones, I don't fully understand it. But I find that a lot of times that very often that their facts are wrong and that their frameworks about how change works and the nature of power is often wrong, too. And then within that, I think there's a lot of people who care, who would like to hope, but who haven't been offered hope. And then what's really interesting, when you get to the organizers, the scientists, the journalists, the people who are really involved, they're scared, but they're not despondent. They know that this is the decisive decade, that it, that future is what we will make it in the present. There are parameters, of course. We can't make it like we never burned those trillions of tons of fossil fuel and put all that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere. But we have tremendous choices in this moment. And the difference between the best case scenario and the worst case scenario is profound. I wrote an essay last year called Despair is a Luxury because for most of us giving up, at some level we secretly know that we can give up and our lives will still be relatively comfortable and safe.

Greg Dalton: Arianna, I really appreciate her response to your slowness question. There's so much emphasis in the climate conversation on speed and scale, speed and scale, we got to go faster, faster, faster. I think sometimes we overdo it. And there's a saying I forgot where I heard it once, it's like, things are urgent, we better slow down. I just spent a week at a Buddhist monastery with a bunch of climate people where we walked and talked and chewed very slowly. It was very powerful. And these are people who know we need to do a lot fast. So sometimes slowness can be really powerful and in some ways we don't really see in our hyper fast culture.

To remember that things were different, and how they were changed, is to be equipped to make change – and to be hopeful, because hope lies in the possibility of things being different. Despair and depression often come from the sense that nothing will change, or that we have no capacity to make that change.

One of the curious things about the climate crisis is that the uninformed are often more grim and fatalistic than the experts in the field – the scientists, organisers and policymakers who are deep in the data and the politics. Too many people like to spread their despair, saying: “It’s too late” and “There’s nothing we can do”. These are excuses for doing nothing, and erase those doing something. That’s not what the experts say. As citizens of the Earth, we have a responsibility to participate. As citizens massed together, we have the power to affect change, and it is only on that scale that enough change can happen. Individual choices can slowly scale up, or sometimes be catalysts, but we’ve run out of time for the slow. It is not the things we refrain from doing, but those things we do passionately, and together, that will count the most. And personal change is not separate from collective change: in a municipality powered by clean energy, for instance, everyone is a clean-energy consumer.

In 2015, Christiana Figueres led 192 nations to a successful global climate treaty in Paris. But when she was first asked to take on the job, she blurted out that it was impossible. She took it on anyway, and the night before the treaty was announced, people around me were still saying it was impossible, and preparing for failure. Then it succeeded – not in finishing the job, but in moving it forward.