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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
Rebecca Solnit
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:33]
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- [00:54]
Nia Sorrenti
That's why you rack welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Nia Sorrenti. At a time of democratic backsliding, climate anxiety and rapid technological change, is there still reason for hope and where progress feels fragile, how can we tell whether society is moving backwards or simply facing resistance to hard won gains? On today's episode, the award winning writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit joins Maithili Rao, journalist, book critic and podcaster to discuss why the past four decades have seen extraordinary social progress and why hope remains an essential ingredient in movements for change. Let's join our host, Maitha Lee Rao, now with more.
- [01:40]
Maithili Rao
You're listening to Intelligence Squared. I'm Maitha Lee Rao. Rebecca Solnit, welcome to the show.
- [01:44]
Rebecca Solnit
My pleasure. Hello.
- [01:46]
Maithili Rao
Hello Rebecca. Before I read the Beginning Comes after the End, I went back and reread Hope in the Dark which was first published in 2004. And I'm one of the readers who actually picked up that book a day decade later at the start of the Trump years when it was re released and had a big surge in popularity. And if I'm honest with you, I'll be honest with you, it struggled to reach me when I read it. Then I was having a hard time with it. I remembered the book was trying to tell me to look beyond the immediate destruction and the avalanche of scary news stories. But it was really hard at the time to look beyond the immediate destruction and the avalanche of scary news stories. So I was worried that I might not connect with the Beginning comes after the End for similar reasons, but actually had a very different response to it. And in a lot of ways it feels like things have only gotten more unsteady in the last 10 or 20 years. Not just in American politics, but in geopolitics. But for that reason, it also feels that for our own sanity and survival, we really have to look beyond the immediate avalanche of news stories and think about political histories and the way you have. How did you start this book? The beginning comes after the end. And what made you feel that Hope in the Dark needed a sequel?
- [03:06]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah, and you know, somewhere in that book I say I often feel like a tortoise at a mayfly party in that I often think in terms of years, decades, you know, multiple decades, which is a scale in which change actually takes place. But I so often find that people don't have those memories. You know, they think feminism didn't change anything, which is staggeringly inaccurate to the profundity of difference in women's status now than in, say, 1960. They don't remember that so many of the rights, the environmental protections, the change laws, the changed culture we have is because people showed up and made the effort. So in a lot of essays I've written, I've tried to give people back that baseline, that sense of things changed, and here's what they looked like before. But I wanted to do a book length version of it because I wanted a bigger toolbox, a more substantial version of what that meant. And it felt like the crises of these times also feel really different if you recognize that what the global right, white nationalist, right, misogynist right is doing is backlash, trying to get back to their version of the good old days, which are the battle days for the global majority of us. So I wanted to look at those accomplishments, at how profoundly things have changed at the right as backlash, and give people that baseline on a world before feminism, gay rights, spatial justice, indigenous uprisings, decolonization, environmental awareness, climate action, the renewables revolution. Because all these things have a recent history that's transformative. And understanding and recognizing that is really important equipment. I saw this book less as I want people to value it as a piece of writing than I want to give people tools for being engaged in the conflicts, struggles, crises of this moment.
- [05:30]
Maithili Rao
I felt that reading it, that it was almost a kind of intellectual, therapeutic intervention is what the book was offering. Like you said, it looks at our current condition, the war and the ecological destruction and climate denialism and misogyny, authoritarianism, all of it, and says, yes, but. And that but is all these victories that we're asked to remember and reframe the picture accordingly. Is this kind of thinking something you've consciously had to train yourself to. Or do you feel like it arises out of your lived experience and understanding history? Is it part of being a turtle? Is it part of your disposition?
- [06:14]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah, it's definitely tortoise mind. And, you know. And Hope in the Dark really summarizes the transformation in my thinking back then. Whether or not you loved the book and, you know, and it was history itself, both the stuff. I had a frontline seat too, as an indigenous rights activist in the early 1990s, as somebody participating in anti nuclear and other struggles, but also just watching things like the end of the Soviet Union and the toppling of the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe, all these indigenous uprisings across the Americas, those apatistas in Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Canada, as well as in the United States, watching feminism continue to change, change the status of women, our rights, the understanding of our wrongs, et cetera. I just took it all in and it really changed my thinking. I'd written a book early in the 1990s called Savage Dreams, about the nuclear wars that weren't supposed to have started, but were going on at the rate of about a nuclear bomb a month exploded in the Nevada desert from 1951 to 1991, and Indian wars that were conventionally seen as having ended in the 19th century, but were still happening, not militarily, not with battlefield violence, but with legal violence, economic violence and cultural violence, the cultural erasure and dispossession and representational genocide of native people. And I really wrote that book at a time when I expected both of those things to be fairly static realities. And of course, we stopped nuclear testing. In a lot of ways, a nuclear arms race stopped being what it had been throughout the Cold War, which itself dispelled. But what I really didn't expect is how successful the indigenous uprisings which began in the early 1990s would be, how transformative they would be. I think most of us who. And it's always complicated talking about white Europeans who are sort of indigenous, if not exactly like Native Americans, will not ask about your ethnicity. You could ask about mine. But I think that most of us that are colonial or indigenous or refugee whatever, think about indigeneity and therefore about nature and the human relationship to it in radically different ways. When I was a young art critic, a young environmental activist, people really talked about nature and culture as these two separate spheres. And human beings lived in culture and not nature. Nature was just the pretty stuff out there, not what we eat and drink and breathe every day, our own bodies and all the Non human organisms within those bodies. And our digestion as elsewhere, was not something we were completely inseparable from. And I've seen all that change. And again, you have to be a tortoise to see, oh, we now think completely differently about the human place in nature and about human nature because of this transformation by and about indigenous people. The idea that human beings are inherently destructive of nature only applies if you think of human beings only as the colonizers and not the colonized, only as the settler colonialists and not the indigenous. Here where I am in North America, once you acknowledge this continent was inhabited for 10,000 years and more, the idea that there was virgin nature and then people came and ruined it is as stupid story erasing who was here. And when it falls apart, you can say human beings are not inherently destructive, not inherently at odds of nature. And you might learn, as I think a lot of us have from indigenous people, that there are other kinds of relationships and attitudes towards nature which in order to address the environmental crises of our time, I think we need to, if not imitate, learn from. And I think a lot of us have. There's been emerging of the new science and the old traditional views of nature that are very powerful in shaping how we go forward from this crisis.
- [10:49]
Maithili Rao
There are a number of examples in the book of these historical stories and not even so ancient histories that you are very engaged with and see as important narrative examples as well as real wins. And the indigenous movement, the Land Back movement seems like one that was particularly close to your heart in California. I wondered if you could just describe a little more the Federated Indians of Grattan Rancheria and what winds you saw them secure and what that movement looked like.
- [11:25]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah, I grew up on the land north of San Francisco of the coast Miwok, who were never discussed, never taught about, never represented in my education in the town I lived in, which had in fact had a huge indigenous presence from that culture. That community just north of us was the land of the Southern Pomo. Same thing prevailed. For example, my aunt had a huge gathering basket woven by somebody from presumably southern Pomo where she lived, but there was just nothing available. California Indians were supposed to have been very primitive and backward, and then they were supposed to have conveniently disappeared. So there was no unfinished moral struggle, no unresolved conflict, no ongoing war. In fact, people had just laid low At a time when being indigenous was to be a low status person, a person treated in a lot of unpleasant ways, etc. Something really changed and a lot of it did change in the 1990s, Greg Sarris, an adopted person who found out later that he was related to the indigenous people he gravitated towards in Sonoma county, just north of where I grew up, wrote the legislation to get federal recognition for an unrecognized group of people which was both Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo. And because it was both, they called themselves the Federated Tribes of Great and Rancheria. He managed, partly because the actor and director Robert Redford had worked with him, turning one of his pieces of fiction into a film. With Robert Redford's help, he got President Clinton to sign the federal legislation to give them federal recognition, which allowed them to gain funding, rights, et cetera, and then to build a casino which suddenly produced a great deal of wealth for them. But at the same time in the 1990s, Walgregg was writing this legislation, gathering his people, and everything was changing on a broader scale. As I said before, the Federated Indians of Grayton Rancheria, who had a land base of one acre that was Great and Rancheria, which he wrote about and which he named this kind of amalgamated tribelet after, now have jurisdiction over 100,000 acres, including point Reyes National Seashore. They co manage. And the opening chapter of my book is about a land back ceremony in October of 2024 where the Federated Tribe of Great and Rancheria was given and helped to acquire 600 acres that had been cattle ranching controlled, owned by white people since the 19th century. 600 acres isn't huge, but I think it's profoundly indicative. It was inconceivable and that tribe did not exist until 2000. The idea that Native people deserved to get land back, that all this was Native land, that we should acknowledge it, that there were wrongs that needed to be righted in our. These are all new ideas. And up and down California, across the United States, from Maine to Hawaii to Alaska, this question of land back, this acknowledgement of Native presence, this recognition that Native people are often the best stewards of natural places, represents something profound changing in the white imagination, the settler colonialist imagination. And it represents a specific change that I think is meaningful for Indigenous rights, for the way all of us imagine humanity and nature itself and a movement. And that I think is tremendously important. And I wrote about feminism, about queer rights, about anti racism, anti colonialism. You can see this as part of anti colonialism, about the rise of environmental awareness, about the climate movement. But I think this is the most unrecognized that something has changed so profoundly in how we think about these things over the last 35 years or so. And so I began with this land back ceremony that I just thought was beautiful and compelling and taking place in where I myself had grown up and was so inconceivable you wouldn't have given land back to people who did not exist, which is how they were treated when I was young, to people who had no federal recognition, to people who were supposed to have disappeared, to people who were seen as primitive, backward, crude. So something specific like landback represents huge cultural changes far beyond the transfer of 600 acres in October of 2024.
- [16:44]
Maithili Rao
I really like that idea of how those concrete victories or symbolic victories also start with imaginative victories of kind of introducing an idea, making it palatable, making it widely understood, making it normal, and how that builds in reading what you were writing about women's rights in the chapters of these books. Right now, that looks like an area of stagnation or backsliding in a lot of ways. But as you know, there's been enormous gains in your lifetime and in mine, which are worth dwelling on and taking note of. You write about the Equal Pay act, the criminalization of marital rape before that suffragette movement, all these things. I'm curious about how you resolve the tension between how enormous these gains are and how fragile these victories remain. Is the missing ingredient again, the sort of knowledge of possibility, the imagination that's made these gains possible remains.
- [17:48]
Rebecca Solnit
I think imagination, values, culture, storytelling remains central, even though those things are often seen as trivial, as humanities educations get treated as superfluous, disposable, et cetera. And I don't think they're that fragile. I think ideas are the genie that, once it's out of the bottle, will refuse to get back into it. And once women have experienced what it's like to have reproductive rights, economic rights, rights within marriage, marriage equality, there's, you know, we don't want to go back, and obviously some people want to push us back, but, you know, so first of all, I think most people don't remember how profoundly unequal, belittled, marginalized, excluded, deprived of rights. Women were both access to public things, equal access to education, equal access to power, equal access under the law and in cultural things, how men and society as a whole treated women, what marriage was. There's this thing I keep quoting because it's the most beautiful example. The American feminist Gloria Steinem was asked in an interview in this kind of intrusive way, so you didn't get married till your 60s. And Gloria said, without missing a Beat, Yes. First I had to reinvent the institution of marriage. Had Steinem gotten married as a young woman in the 1960s, she would have given up her economic and bodily rights. She would have essentially become, under the law and in culture, essentially a possession or subordinate of her husband. Marriage is a radically different institution. And feminists had to even invent the language for sexual harassment, for domestic violence, for stalking, for so many of these things, to create battered women's shelters, create laws outlawing marital rape, which in this country, and I think in yours, wasn't illegal until the 1990s. And to go back and say, oh, husbands have the right to rape their wives. Once you've said yes once by marrying him, it's a permanent yes that covers all uses of your body. And so I don't think women are willing to go back in the same way. I don't think queer people will ever be closeted, forced into being, accepting their status as mentally ill, criminal, degenerate. That was the norm before the gay rights revolution of the 60s, 70s, and on. I don't think we'll think of gender as two airtight boxes in which there's exactly two ways of being, they are opposite, non intersecting, etc. I don't think we'll unlearn all the things we've learned to understand. We were never separate from nature. We depend on it. All the things we do have an impact, and we have a responsibility to take those into effect. The kind of casual destruction, the obliviousness that allowed people to dump wholesale into oceans, et cetera. You know, coal burning. Britain will never turn back. One of the great landmarks in recent history is Britain, where the Industrial Revolution started, which ran almost entirely on coal into the 1980s and beyond, closed its last coal burning plant in 2024. I think these things are under attack, but often by an angry minority, which, thanks to the Internet and various other things, has managed to seize a lot of power without being genuinely popular. And in a lot of ways, although I fear for your next election, and speaking as a big Ed Miliband climate fan and, you know, so I don't think they're that fragile, but I do think they're under attack. And it is interesting because the rite itself is angry, whiny, sees itself as fragile, sees itself as under attack, sees itself itself as history's great loser. They lost that kind of white, male, heterosexist, Christian hegemonic status that they had unquestionably until not that long ago. And they want to reclaim it because one of the things that feels significant in this book of mine is to just point out that what the right is doing is backlash. Yes, they want to change things, all of them. They want to change it back. They want to change it back to the unequal status of women, the sort of enforced heterosexuality, Christian dominance, white dominance, et cetera. They want to recreate the radical inequality of the past and they want to forget everything we know about the environment so they can destroy it without impediment. And, and the reason why they have to try and be authoritarian at the same time is because these are not democratic popular goals. I realized that, and it's sort of a dumb basic realization with Trump, et cetera. Oh, they have to be authoritarian because they're not actually popular. When your ideas are popular, democracy works really well for you. The people are behind you. But these are minority agendas because at its heart, it's all about minority rule. White over non white, male over non male, Christian over non Christian, And in a broader sense, about humans over the rest of life. There's a beautiful thing happening with indigenous leadership across the world, which is the rights of nature as a new field of under the law. That's happened in Peru, Ecuador, Canada, New Zealand, et cetera. And so we see this in one way the story of the last, in some ways 200 years, but particularly the last 70 something years as a broadening of rights and equality in a profound way, which I think is a beautiful and compelling story in reality. And I don't think even though you can legislate against it, you can't make that vision disappear. You can't make people stop seeing the world in the way that a lot of us see the world.
- [24:41]
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- [27:36]
Rebecca Solnit
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- [27:52]
Rebecca Solnit
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- [28:12]
Maithili Rao
I am an American. I was just back in the U.S. in Washington, D.C. and you walk around D.C. and on every block, there are visible reminders of the destruction of the current administration. You can see, you go up to the top of the Washington Monument and you can see where half of the East Wing is gone. It's just rubble and construction trucks now. You can see Trump's face hanging on banners on the doj. You can see the UFC ring and being installed outside the White House. And on and on and on. And I am struck by the tension between the power of imagination and then the destruction of institutions. The imagination may remain. People may really desire certain rights and values that they've come to live with. And as you said, you know, when the genie's out of the bottle and people become accustomed to what progress can look like, nobody wants to give that up. But it is also not so difficult to destroy institutions that make these gains possible. And yeah, I just was wondering how you think about that and reconcile that.
- [29:34]
Rebecca Solnit
It is absolutely horrific and terrifying. And I see the destruction. I take it really seriously. I know that more than 300,000 people have died because Elon Musk destroyed USAID, our international anti hunger and health programs. I see the absolute corruption of everything Trump has been able to corrupt, including the Supreme Court, although all the lower courts, or most of the lower courts have been an incredible bulwark overturning and ruling illegals. Action after action he's done. I've seen the surrender under Speaker Mike Johnson of the lower house of Congress, but I've also seen extraordinary resistance on the ground in Minneapolis and all across the country. I was just hanging out this weekend with a poet, Gabriel Calvo Caressi, who lives in North Carolina, telling me about extraordinary resistance against anti immigration raids there, including by armed rural Southerners chasing them off with their guns, which is pretty fierce. One of the things that's shocking to contemplate is that we have to have a massive reconstruction on at least the, the scale of the failed reconstruction or the reconstruction that was eventually savaged after the US Civil War in the 1870s and after. And this country is so bad at profoundly retrenching, saying, now we will be a different place, now we will do things differently. We have to rebuild all these institutions. And beyond that, I think we have to look at what vulnerabilities allowed this kind of criminality, authoritarianism, illegality, destructiveness arise. I don't think Trump is going to be able to build his ballroom. It's much easier to destroy something than to recreate something. And the fact that the man is living in a partially wrecked structure, and a structure that was wrecked illegally and recklessly, I think is so symbolic. It's obviously not the most important thing going on, but I find it just so horrific and so symbolic. This building that's this half ruin, this demolition, this kind of open wound on the American body politic. But another thing about the US Is we are in some ways a very decentralized federalist country. The states continue to plug along here in New Mexico, where the governor and the legislator recently passed universal free childcare, which is radically progressive legislation that will liberate women in particular, poor women in particular, to be able to get out of poverty, participate in the economy, and some to work. I mostly live in California, where we have universal free school meals for public school children. Although the right, thanks to Trump's illicit Supreme Court appointments, has been able to ban abortion altogether and criminalize it in some states. There are a lot of other states in which we've actually firmed up reproductive rights and the availability of mail order birth control, mail order abortion pills means that actually women in a lot of those red states are getting it, too. And abortions have not actually gone down since the banning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022 or the overturning by the Supreme Court of Roe vs. Wade. So you see these workarounds, these acts of resistance, these decentralizations, and in a lot of ways, the tremendous unpopularity of a lot of these things, which don't mean that there isn't terrible destruction, but it means that the destruction can't touch everything and that there is a lot of resistance and opposition. But, yeah, we are in a terrible mess. And even if Trump dis, you know, Trump is no longer with us, tomorrow we will have so much to do to restore this country, rebuild the. The extraordinary leadership in science, the legitimate civil service that, you know, so many civil servants have been fired, so many corrupted and incompetent people have been hired. We are just in a mess.
- [34:30]
Maithili Rao
One thing I found the book asking me as a reader to do, and that I think you were. It's a very compelling idea, is to not be overwhelmed with the uncertainty of the times we're in. There's a little bit in chapter one that I'll read. You write. You do not have to picture the destination to reach it, or at least to draw closer to it. You just need to choose a direction and keep on walking. Though that metaphor makes it sound as though it already exists, if at a distance, rather than that the process itself creates and covers the distance between the idea and the actuality. How did you kind of really land on this idea of it's essentially the negative capability. Right. Poet John Keats idea, which I think you've written about elsewhere, that seems like such a powerful idea that is threaded through this book and through other books of yours. I wondered if you could just say more about it.
- [35:24]
Rebecca Solnit
You know, I once wrote that Dante had Beatrice, but Orwell had Stalin. I think for political writers, your ideas are often formed in opposition. You see something, and the process of disagreeing is the process of clarification. Something I see constantly and did that prompted hope in the dark as well, is people pretending they know what the future holds, what will happen once you decide that there's an inevitable future. You've ruled out the possibility of. You've ruled out all possibility, because possibility is uncertainty. If something is only possible, it's not inevitable, it's not guaranteed. And so once you've ruled out possibility, you've ruled out participation. And that's how I see people over and over and over. People on my side, people who believe in human rights, who are against this war, that environmental destruction, surrender their power, Surrender the very real power they have to participate and shape the future by pretending the future has already been shaped definitively. And it's such a form of surrender, of defeatism. Sometimes it comes dressed up as optimism. Oh, that can never happen. Oh, everything will be fine. It's come as climate doomerism, it comes as cynicism, it comes as despair. But they're all forms of certainty. That is a false power. We do not know the future. We can learn from the past. And what the past shows us is how deeply unpredictable things were. And I went back for something I wrote a while ago and looked at what everybody, including Margaret Thatcher was saying in 1989, just before all these East Bloc countries liberated themselves. Nobody, I think, including the grassroots nonviolent movements that actually did the liberation, really anticipated how powerfully, profoundly, transformatively
- [37:31]
Maithili Rao
they would
- [37:31]
Rebecca Solnit
topple all these regimes. It was not what people foresaw. And there's a little trick of history that caused the Berlin Wall to fall overnight. A mistake was made, people jumped on it. I think the guards mistakenly opened the East Bloc and suddenly everybody just poured across the wall and the separation was over after 30 something years. People do not see these things. People did not see the Arabs Spring or Occupy Wall street coming the way they did, including the people who organized them. As somebody who's been involved in feminism for 40 years, I've watched feminism continue to bring a deeper, more subtle analysis, to point out new forms of discrimination in the course of trying to, and often succeeding in remedying them. I've seen us rethink queerness and gender. I've seen us rethink nature. So certainty also assumes that the future will look like the present, only more so. You know, when Trump got elected, there are all these goddamn pundits who decided this meant authoritarianism had won forever, and all we would see is an expansion of authoritarianism nationally and internationally. Since then, Vladimir Putin has been deeply weakened as his supposed quick war to conquer Ukraine has stalemated, failed to achieve real victory, caused huge economic sacrifice and sacrifice of human life for Russia. So Putin is weak, and Viktor Orban has just been voted out in a kind of shock election in Hungary. Donald Trump has become wildly unpopular, could not possibly win an election today. The whole Maga project is weakening, and his popularity is dropping below a threshold that it never dropped below before. Change is not linear. It's not just an expansion of what's in the present. Players who were not on stage before will show up and matter. New movements will arise. You talked at the beginning about me talking about the importance of ideas. What I watched and read about and studied over and over is how ideas really begin in the shadows and the margins. There's an old saying attributed to Gandhi. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. You know, when you see ideas, women's suffrage, for example, go from being dismissed, ridiculed, difficult, not achieved, onward. And so, yeah, that's the problem with certainty. It not only assumes it knows what will happen, it operates on a very simple, predictable version of change in which the people on stage will be the people on stage, the forces in power will only be more so, et cetera. And it's really kind of a failure of imagination, a failure to learn from history, a failure to seize the power we have to participate in making a deeply uncertain future. And so I've tried to get people to give up this false power, to accept the responsibility of our real power to participate.
- [41:12]
Maithili Rao
A major theme that also runs through this book, which we've discussed a little bit, but I imagine you have even more to say about, is this idea of interconnectedness and interdependence and collaboration and connection. And it is something that, as you note, shows up in a lot of different places, in economic models, in scientific ideas about biology, about ecology, about the environment, in worldviews, whether it's indigenous or Buddhist. And you write. Whether or not these ideas are true, our desire for them to be true and our noticing that they have relevance and valence in all these arenas is really significant. And I wondered if you could talk a little more about that.
- [41:58]
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- [41:59]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah. One of the joys for me of being a writer is it forces you to look harder, think deeper than you might with casual attention. And I think one of the things that all these movements I've been talking about have in common is that they move us towards a less divided world. A world that's not so divided racially, not so divided by gender bisexuality, by, you know, most of us live in a world that's not so religiously segregated. And I grew up in a mostly white, white, mostly Christian, actually mostly Protestant country. White Protestants were the dominant majority in the country I was born into. Thank God it's, you know, gonna actually be a non white majority country in 20 years. We're well on our way and there's nothing white supremacy can do about it because even with the ICE deportations, they're not gonna deport 100 million people. But also, so, you know, so that world was very segregated in those ways. But also the human and the non human, as I said earlier, were thought of as really separate. Human beings were culture, we were not nature. Nature was some pretty anachronistic, decorative stuff out there. Not the very essence of what we eat and drink. Here I'm drinking tea that is a plant with milk that came from cows and water that came from the Santa Fe Mountain watershed. I'm putting nature in my body right now. But people didn't think that way. And so I see all these transformations of thought moving us towards recognizing a world, making a world that's less segregated by intention and recognizing a world that was always more indivisible than that worldview. That colonizing kind of white supremacist, male supremacist worldview. Heterosexist worldview accepted. And one of the things that's beautiful and exciting is that the oldest worldviews and the newest really align beautifully. By which I mean a lot of indigenous and land based worldviews that say we were never separate from nature, that nature is, is not a chaos we give order to, which is kind of the scientific revolution idea that allows us to conquest, to conquer and remake nature. Assume that we can actually make nature better by controlling it in the way that was very normal to think about in the 60s, or that we can go colonize Mars or whatever. We now understand that nature is actually a Very complex and orderly orchestrated system of symbiotic relationships, of interconnected connection, et cetera, that you mess with at your peril, including the upper atmosphere and the whole climate system, and that we now have become so powerful, we actually need to recognize ourselves as stewards, which is also how a lot of indigenous people thought of their relationship to nature. You know, the newest work, like Zoe Schlager's book the Light Eaters, Suzanne Simard's work, recognizing that a forest is a cooperative society, not a bunch of competing individuals, et cetera, recognize that actually there's sentience not just in the animal kingdom, but in the plant kingdom and among fungi. And so the newest science has been able to recognize this very sophisticated, interconnected world, and it's aligning and often recognizing and respecting, in a way science did not used to, what's sometimes called tech, traditional environmental or traditional ecological knowledge. One of the really exciting things for me in this book is when my friend Ed Carr, a climate and biodiversity scientist working on one of those great international scientific reports, wrote to me in tremendous excitement, because the report was like nothing he'd ever read, seen, or worked on before, in that it recognized, acknowledged, declared, the things we need to do to protect biodiversity, to protect the climate, are not just sort of scientific activities, practical activities, but they must emerge from a change in consciousness and move away from. From this kind of colonizing, capitalist, exploitative, alienated worldview towards something much more akin to indigenous worldviews. So Ed Carr points out that this is a huge shift in what science itself is. It's acknowledging that it exists within ideology, within culture, and that the ideology and culture themselves have been damaging
- [47:04]
Maithili Rao
and at
- [47:05]
Rebecca Solnit
the root of the damage we've done to nature, and that therefore we have to shift the ideology and the culture. This is not just what he says, but what this report says by dozens of scientists from many countries. And that's a revolution that's new in some profound way. But what makes it new, it's recognizing this deep old knowledge as valuable, as important, as aligned. And that also is a convergence between two things that were often seen as deeply separate when traditional cultures were seen as ignorant, primitive, superstitious, etc. One of the wonderful things I've learned paying attention to indigenous peoples is a lot of what was seen as a lot of what was religious ritual, which was often seen as primitive superiority. Superstition were practices that protected, and I hate the word resource, but a resource they prevented over harvesting, over hunting, over exploitation, et cetera. And so you can see that actually people who lived without destroying their environment, often had a kind of wisdom that arose in part from deeply understanding the natural world, but also from a set of values and relationships towards it. So, yeah, there's been this incredible convergence, and I think all these separate things break down all these forms of separation that were so enforced in the world I was born into more than 60 years ago. And seeing that slow change, seeing through the tortoises eyes, we think so differently about the world than we did 60 years ago, I find incredibly exhilarating. It doesn't prophesy a future. But if we're on this kind of juggernaut of change, then you cannot believe we will attain any kind of stasis. You only can believe that we can participate in what kind of change continues, goes forward.
- [49:16]
Maithili Rao
On that question of participation, before we go, you quote in the book the historian Mike Davis, who says, this seems like an age of catastrophe, but. But it's also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs on a small scale, in the units of a community or a family or an individual. What are some of those tools that people can use to take steps, be they small or not so small, to take meaningful action in their lives?
- [49:52]
Rebecca Solnit
I think one of the first steps is to understand how change works, to understand that although people who are officially powerful love to dismiss unofficial power, to suggest that the only way you'll ever get what you want is to be extremely nice and deferential and respectful towards us, when in fact, often what they're doing is obeying the power of civil society when it rises up as movements, you know, as coalitions, as grassroots organizing. So I think joining something is really important, seeing where change is being made, understanding that with the exception of people who are given extraordinary kinds of power, you're a judge, you're an influential writer, you're actually an elected official, or you have a huge amount of money to donate to good causes, then most of us are powerful mostly in coalition, coalition and participation that these things do work, which is why the powerful are often scared of those things, like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Arab Spring, economic justice movements, the climate, activism against fossil fuel, et cetera. And I think you also have to not despair too quickly. That's an important part of the equipment. And again, something I've been writing against since Hope in the Dark is people feeling like either you. You win or you lose immediately. I've seen so many people, certain kinds of people, my people, white people, et cetera, really feel like, well, we showed up on Tuesday and They didn't cave in and give us everything on Wednesday. Therefore, we lost. I heard a beautiful Iranian saying, if it takes 100 blows to chop down a tree, the first 99 were not in vain. And I've been part of movements like trying to stop the KXL oil pipeline from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refineries in the US for 12 years. We were told we could never win. It was the wrong goal. We were doing it wrong. And then we won. And you know, it took 12 years. If you gave up in year one, two, three, seven, whatever, you walked away before the victory. So there's so many pieces of it, of understanding how change works, where power lies, what change looks like. Often it's incremental and slow. Often it's indirect that I want people to have to understand their own power, the power of movement, the power of ideas. Because even movements often begin in ideas. One of the stories I've been reading up on, because I might write about eventually is in 1840, London hosted the World Anti Slavery Congress in the US the Anti Slavery movement, actually one part of it allowed women to participate as speakers, organizers, signers of petitions, et cetera, in ways women never really had before in this Anglo American society. Another part of the anti slavery movement, not so much. But when these women came to London and found out they would not be seated, not be allowed to participate, to speak, that's the beginning of the women's suffrage movement. And it took them 80 years to get the vote in the United States. So stories like that, these sudden turns where these women thought they were fighting for one kind of equality and freedom and found out that they were actually dealing with another kind. You know, history has these zigzag moves. I want people to have all this equipment so that they themselves can keep showing up, can participate, cannot quit prematurely. That was an indirect consequence of the World Antislavery Congress. It took almost 25 years to abolish slavery in the United States. 80 years to get women to vote, although women in some of our Western states got it much sooner. And, you know, so those stories, I think, give us power, whereas often the stories we get from the mainstream, official versions of history, all those statues of white men with so few non white and non male statues in London, in Washington, in New York, et cetera, tell us, you know, tell us other versions of history. So finding the stories is part of it, finding the ideas, seeing the power they have. All those things which I'm rambling about are equipment for people to understand the nature of power. Their own power and to put it to work.
- [54:54]
Maithili Rao
Rebecca, thank you very much.
- [54:55]
Rebecca Solnit
You're welcome. You're welcome.
- [54:57]
Maithili Rao
That was Rebecca Solnit. Her new book is the Beginning Comes after the End. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. I'm Maitha Lee Rao.
- [55:06]
Nia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@innigration squared.com forward/membership and if you'd like to join us at future live events, you can find our full program and buy tickets over@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
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