Rebecca Solnit On Why the Future Isn’t as Dark as It Looks

0:01This episode is brought to you by Focus Features. On March 27th, Focus Features invites you to be a part of the most explosive movie of this year's Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, is being called supremely entertaining and the most urgent movie of our time. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, rated PG-13, only in theaters March 27th. it's easy to feel the world is getting worse but we've seen a revolution in rights and ideas over the last 50 years thanks to a new recognition of the interconnected relationships in nature and humanity things are actually much better than you might think that's the argument put forward by rebecca solnit she's a writer and activist author of 25 books from men explain things to me to orwell's roses to hope in the dark and in her new book the beginning comes after the end, notes on the world of change.

0:59That's where she argues about this new recognition of interconnected values. I'm Dr. Rowan Hooper, and for this episode of The World, the Universe and Us, I spoke with Rebecca about her book, and I asked her first about a quote she has in the book from the scholar and writer Thomas Berry from 1978. He says, we're in trouble because we don't have a good story. We are in between stories. And I asked her for those wondering why, Why do we need new stories? What new stories do we need to tell? I think a lot of the new stories are the very old stories. They're new to, you know, white people in industrial capitalism.

1:33They're old for a lot of indigenous people. Thomas Berry said that 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 than the one in which he said that, a world in which a lot of the old stories have resurfaced. One of the most exciting, profound, intellectually inspiring things in my life has been watching in North America, Native Americans reclaim land rights, language, culture, pride, and a major role in public discourses around the history of this hemisphere, around what kind of relationship human beings can have to nature, which of course is about human nature itself, and become important leaders, particularly for the climate movement.

2:34You know, there's a bunch of histories about this Native American history of the last 50 or 60 years, but not much about how much I think they've changed the way the rest of us think about the world, and that is the new story that is the oldest stories. And that lets us think that, well, a few of us think, me think, that maybe this whole Columbus, colonialist, industrialist era was kind of a detour from the old stories, an arrogant mistake whose consequences, It's catastrophic consequences we're living through now with climate chaos and the rest. And so the old stories are something we can return to.

3:26And for people like us, my fellow white friend, these are also the new stories in many ways. But I think that those really old stories are synthesizing with brand new stories coming out of science that correspond beautifully in these everything is connected ways with the old stories, the stories of Buddhism and indigenous stuff that are stories of interconnection, of process, of symbiosis, connect really beautifully to what the newest biological science is telling us. Yeah, I wanted to pick that up straight away because one of the strong themes in the book is about how we're inseparable from nature.

4:09And there is a growing scientific recognition of that. Maybe you can talk a bit more about the science of interconnectedness and maybe Lynn Margulis, who did more than anyone else to show that our cells themselves are symbiotic entities. 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, changing values, changing assumptions, the unpacking or dismantling of some of the old ones. When I was young, people really talked about nature and culture as separate. Human beings is somehow inherently destructive of nature.

4:52And really, human beings is separate from the rest of creation, profoundly distinct from the animal kingdom. Animals were seen as not having language, intelligence, emotion, using tools, all this stuff that's been wonderfully demolished by Jane Goodall and all her successors. And so, yeah, the new science that has emerged from many directions at once really describes us as inseparable from nature. And nobody, I think, 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 finally published. And it argued that eukaryotic cells, did I pronounce that right?

5:39Yeah. Amazing. Were, you know, originated from the merging of two different kinds of cells. And that really complex life emerges not from the kind of division that Darwinism describes, but from a kind of synthesis and symbiosis. and then she went on to look at other kinds of symbiosis and see that as fundamental to complex life and to see life as constantly coming together and collaborating rather than constantly coming apart and competing, which was the kind of classic social Darwinist story in particular, not to blame Darwin for social Darwinists. And that aligns with the focus on interspecies symbiosis of which lichens are everybody's favorite example, but so many other things, the flatworms that have absorbed chlorophyll producing single-celled organisms.

6:40And just understanding ecology itself, that all parts of a system play a role in the wholeness of that system and you can't pull any out without damaging the system, which is really different And then the very mechanistic notion of life that comes partly out of the philosophy of people like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, and also out of this very mechanistic notion of how to manage nature, that pesticides and shooting all the wildlife in an agricultural space as competing with the cows or sheep or crops or whatever, and not understanding that over here, the coyotes, the hawks. all have their role to play in the balance of things.

7:30Despite that growing understanding, and it's been going on for years now, as you say, from Lynn Margulis in the 60s, Jane Goodall around the same time. Rachel Carson. Rachel Carson did a huge amount to show the interconnectedness and the danger of ignoring the interconnectedness in the world. Despite all that, we still have this ever-growing capitalism that's devouring the planet. It's taking a lot to slow that down, isn't it? It is. But something as a climate activist, I always want to make clear is the great majority of people on earth, every survey, poll and study has shown, want to see climate action, want to see nature protected.

8:19It's a minority of people either directly or indirectly benefiting from the fossil fuel industry, who are preventing us from making the transitions that we should be making, the changes that we should be making. At the same time, we are making a lot of them. The renewable energy revolution feels far more astounding than people recognize because we didn't really have renewables adequate to power our technologies at the turn of the century when And it seemed like the UK would run on coal forever, that fossil fuel was inevitable, dominant, and irreplaceable. So those are two pieces of it. And then the third is a lot of it is happening with better farming techniques, better design, the renewable energy transition.

9:11It's not fast enough. It's not good enough. It's certainly not what you or I want to see. and 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. And it took 80 years for women to get the vote in the US from when the campaign started, but we don't have time with climate. And of course, climate change, I think is not only practically offensive to what I call the ideology of isolation, a right-wing worldview that likes the isolated individual, unfettered capitalism, a story of competition between each and each, but finds climate change almost offensive because the first thing climate change tells us is everything is connected.

10:03The stuff we burn for our machines puts carbon in that atmosphere, which insulates the atmosphere, which increases the heat, which breaks down the system and creates the chaos. They want a world where nothing is connected to anything else, whether it's the kind of Margaret Thatcher, there's no such thing as society, blaming of poverty and other suffering on individual moral failings rather than how the systems are designed and should be redesigned, or to deny that ultimately that anything has consequences. It becomes a kind of nihilism when it's asserting this cause has no effect and a kind of science when it's saying this material cause has no material effect, that we can pollute, contaminate, destroy, clear cut, over-exploit without consequences.

10:57And so we're now kind of in the late Baroque stage of the ideology of isolation. I I think Trumpism and Putinism represent different variations on it, but it is negatively destructive because we fully understand these things. Whereas you can sort of excuse it 50 or 100 years ago where they didn't fully understand all this. I mean, this week, the Trump administration overturned the landmark 2009 decision a lot of our climate policy is based on because they just have decided, as authoritarians tend to, that science is a rival system of describing reality that must be defeated and denied. What was it about 20 years ago, you wrote Hope in the Dark.

11:46And that was during the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. And that book was about the progressive movements, all the activist achievements that do good, and that might lead to change, the change that we need. I mean, it feels like I kind of look at that time fondly now. And you talk about what's happening now with Trump and the rollback of, well, the anti-science measures. You know, this book is a kind of sequel to Hope in the Dark. But is that why you've written it now? The beginning comes after the end. I did just realize recently that during democratic regimes, I get to write lyrical books about about personal, poetic things, other times and places.

12:36I know Orwell's Roses, I think, was a Joe Biden book, although it's very much for this time, and God knows, studying George Orwell. It's been very useful equipment for this moment. But I want to step back a bit to say what Hope in the Dark was really about was trying to give people a different sense of the nature of change. Because what I see a lot of activists thinking is, if we have a protest on Tuesday and we don't get what we demanded on Wednesday, then we achieve nothing. Whereas so often change is slow, unpredictable, indirect, and not really understanding the nature of power, how much power stories, culture, grassroots activism have, and has had to radically remake the world.

13:20And even 20 years ago, I couldn't have conceived of this book, which looks at 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. And I was born in 1961 before the women's movement, before Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall's work and Lynn Margulis' work had happened. And I will just like that this is three women in science we're talking about. And so this book really argues that if you listen very closely to what right-wingers are saying, they're saying three things that are actually quite lovely, affirming, and exciting.

14:01You all are very powerful. You have changed the world profoundly. All these things you do, queer rights, feminism, all the other forms of equality and anti-authoritarianism, environmental and climate work are really all the same thing. That's the good news. The bad news is what the rest of what they're saying is we fucking hate it. We want to change it back. You know, put women back barefoot pregnant and in the kitchen, as we say here. You know, have sort of mandatory hetero, you know, patriarchal Christianity, push everyone else back into inferiority to straight white Christian men, you know, attack trans people, Muslims, and everybody else who doesn't fit their little template.

14:53Restore the old hierarchies between men and women, white and non-white, et cetera. What they're really saying is we had a revolution and we've come to be the counter revolution. Literally, I've heard Donald Trump's Make America Great Again since he began muttering it as Make America 1958 again, except when it's Make America 1858 again. But I don't think they will succeed in the long run because power is widely distributed and always has been. And these other stories benefit the majority of us who don't want a white, heteropatriarchal, Christian authoritarianism. and they're not going to make the United States the white country it never was.

15:45And it's going to be a non-white majority country in about 20 years. And there's not really anything they can do about it, no matter how much they persecute brown and black people. That felt a bit scattered, but those are some of the pieces of the book I wanted to write for now. But it is like hope in the dark in trying to give people a deeper, longer, perspective on where we are to kind of get them out of the rut. Because people were really in a rut under George W. Bush too, with the sense that first that this would last forever when Bush was a couple of years away from really losing his mandate and the swing towards progressive power that brought us Barack Obama and a lot of other stuff.

16:34But people also don't remember how terrible that moment was because the current one in the US is so much more terrible. It was an assault on Muslims, on the climate, on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, on science, and civil rights and the rights guaranteed us under the Bill of Rights. It really laid the groundwork for Trumpism. And people were really in despair. So I wanted them to have stories, stories not just because I'm a nice lady that wants to cheer people up but stories that really tell us about the power we really have which saddles people with the responsibility we have to use that power which some people don't really want to hear because power and responsibility go together.

17:20At first glance things look bad, attention spans are shrinking, trusting news reports is harder than ever and far too much of our life's infrastructure is in the hands of just a few multi-billion dollar companies. It's easy to imagine that this techno-enslavement is humanity's destiny. But this week, New Scientist CoLab asks whether we can fight back with socially aware innovation. We talk to experts like psychologist Gloria Mark and AI pioneer Timnit Gebru about how we can reclaim our digital lives on our own terms. Read the feature at newscientist.com slash sxsw this message is sponsored by south by southwest london 2026 where you can join speakers like tim knit and gloria as well as other participants from around the world from the 1st to the 6th of june 2026 you've talked about change there and i think all generations will look back and go you know it wasn't like this in my day things have changed But things have changed really fast in recent years.

18:22And look, you live in San Francisco. To the rest of us, that city used to represent hippies and flower power, and now it represents tech power and Silicon Valley. And so I wondered if you could talk about technology, what technology has taken from us, especially because people will say, well, look, with smartphones, we're more connected than ever. We're more connected in one way and so much less connected in others. The UK and the US both have these kind of mental health crises, and I think sort of spiritual and moral health crises of loneliness and isolation and disconnection. Tech has kind of led us away from all the old ways we used to connect, just all the hanging out face-to-face in person we used to do, whether it was one-on-one or going to church belonging to this sports league or hanging out at the pub or the cafe or just hanging out.

19:25It's allowed a lot of misinformation and disinformation and kind of ugly versions of reality, whether it's porn or conspiracy theories to proliferate anti-vax and anti-science stuff. It's really paved the way for the rise of the far right and all the forms of destruction that come with that. So there's so many kinds of destruction. And I live in a place, the world's first real environmental organization is the Sierra Club founded right here in 1892. Gay liberation, the first out public elected official in the US is Harvey Milk. May he rest in power, his right-hand man, who was a very young man at the time, Cleve Jones, is one of my dear friends.

20:12And we were a place where Seamus Heaney came to liberate his poetry, as Allen Ginsberg did. We always had robber barons and hypercapitalism. We began in the gold rush, which was an ecocide and a genocide. But this other stuff always felt like what we were really giving to the world until Silicon Valley metastasized, supernovaed, and became a global power. And it's been kind of heartbreaking for me 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. And I think a lot of the technologies could have been radically different.

20:55I think 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. And so the desire to manipulate, invade, and control to enrich these horrific centibillionaires drives them. I have written a lot about technology really since the 1990s. I can say all of it negative. I live in an ecology of ideas. And I often say if the left was full of unreasonable optimism and positivity, I would feel it was my job to bring people down to earth. But the left is so, and really the public in general is so often full of a kind of pessimism, sense of powerlessness, lack of knowledge of its own victories in history that I take the opposite position.

21:58And the same with technology. I love that a little queer kid in a small town can find out they're not alone from the internet. I love that people with rare diseases can do research and find support communities together. And I use social media and the internet. I have a smartphone, which I mostly use for calls and taking pictures. But it has been so destructive. And now we can see with the data centers that it even wants to destroy the climate and use up potable water. It's so ugly. And again, it's important, but it's not really central to this book. I wanted to talk about the things, the kind of positive changes over the last 70 years since the Montgomery bus boycott, which I picked as my starting point for a variety of reasons.

22:56Yeah, because it is easy to lose track of those amongst all the things that we're facing, this onslaught that we're facing. In a way, your book reminded me of one last year by the climate scientist Tim Lenton called positive tipping points about all these small things that build up and cause change. I don't know if you've read that. No, I haven't. I'm bookmarking it for later. Yeah. I mean, it's a completely different kind of thing. He's famous for his work on climate tipping points, but what he's saying here is how to generate positive tipping points, societal tipping points to generate the kind of change we need.

23:39And that's the sort of thing you're talking about here, all these wins that we've had that might get swept away, that people don't really think are wins. Yeah, well, you know, you talked about people essentially forgetting, but I don't think a lot of people ever remembered. I've been told a lot of my adult life that somehow feminism failed as though if you haven't completely undone two or three millennia of patriarchy in one generation, you know, you lost rather than that. We have a very good beginning and the work continues. And the degree to which it's transformed how almost everybody thinks about gender and women's role, the number of rights we've gained, the way we've changed major institutions like marriage and universities.

24:28And, you know, a lot of British universities, if I'm not mistaken, essentially kept women in the margins. The Ivy Leagues here did not admit women as undergraduates and women were just not even considered for positions of power, treated as mentally and physically, morally and intellectually inferior in so many ways and just shut out so many things. We hadn't even named sexual harassment yet. I was sexually harassed on the workplace as a young woman before Anita Hill brought attention. Designing Feminist had just named recently, you know, the world is so profoundly changed. I wrote a piece for The Guardian a few years ago where I said, I feel like a tortoise at a mayfly party because most people don't really recollect.

25:22We can see the backlashes, which often make people very sad, but they're backlashes against the changes that were achieved. I know men who grew up when being gay was considered a moral failing, a mental illness, or a criminal act and punished as such, stigmatized as such. I grew up in a world where rivers caught fire, dumping, and so many things were unregulated. People didn't really even have the language to think about the environment. That was something I had to understand downwind, downstream, these interconnections. That was something that came about in the 60s and 70s. So I wanted people just to understand the profundity of the change.

26:08We don't always win, but we live in a profoundly changing world. And people will recognize something when there's a landmark, you know, the Clean Water Act, a Clean Air Act in this country, the Paris Climate Treaty or something like that. But a lot of change is incremental. Sometimes it's very practical. And I just wrote a book about George Orwell a few years ago. and he had gone down into the coal mines in the north of England in 1936 and was really kind of shocked to realize that he lived in a world that ran on coal and never really acknowledged how foul and brutal and destructive it was. I don't think he could have imagined a UK that closed its last coal-burning plant in September of 2024.

26:51So I'm talking to you in a country that no longer runs on coal, from a California that uses 60 % less natural gas than we did a few years ago, because we have the second biggest array of batteries in the world after China to store up the solar energy that is often producing more than 100 % of our electricity here every day, because we've gone in big on renewables. People don't understand the kind of astonishing scale of the renewables revolution, even people who are in that world, the data's often like, how much cheaper are solar panels than last year? How many more have been installed in the last 18 months?

27:35And my friend, Bill McKibben, reminds us we're installing, I forget how many gigawatts, but the equivalent of a coal-fired plant. I think it's every 16 hours now worldwide. And so again, if you look at the last year in solar, it's pretty nice. But if you look at the last 25 years, it's mind-blowing. And so the long view, the tortoise at the mayfly party, sees time in a different frame. The mayflies live in a kind of perpetual short-term present where they miss this stuff. And I think a lot of hope comes not from the future, but the past. And that hope that we have changed things, that understanding of what change looks like, it's not always immediate or direct, it's never predictable, equips us to face the present and keep doing it.

28:25Ultimately, to just understand we live in a world of constant change, not of stability, particularly now, and that if we try and we try with intelligence, we can participate in that change and really make it go in the directions we want to encounter some of the directions we don't you know and we don't always win we don't always win the way we want a lot of change is also incremental as well as slow and unpredictable but it's absolutely worth it if you can actually

28:58Rebecca Solnit:see what change looks like my day kicks off with a refreshing celsius energy drink then straight to the gym pre-k pickup back home to meal prep time for my fire station shift one more celsius gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits i'm ready celsius live fit go grab a cold refreshing celsius at your local retailer or locate now at celsius.com i want to talk a bit about language as well um because that's so important and and particularly or maybe for example the meaning of wilderness because um i think people won't realize that i didn't realize for a long time that the concept was defined essentially by John Muir in the 19th century.

29:44And he and others conceived of Yosemite and other national parks. I think many people will think of those national parks, of these wonderful natural states, and aren't they beautiful? But there's a very dark, another side to that, isn't there? Yeah. And that was part of my formative education. I wrote a book that came out in 1994 in the US called Savage Dreams. And the whole second half looks at how Yosemite National Park, one of the most iconic and visible places on earth, photographed by Ansel Adams, the great 19th century photographers, Edward Muybridge and Carlton Watkins, lots of other modernists besides Adams went there.

30:31It was the formative place for John Muir and the Sierra Club was an indigenous homeland from which there was an attempt to violently evict them, essentially genocide them. And yet they never left. They were erased and forgotten. We can forgive John Muir for being of his time and not of ours. It's a lot harder for me to forgive people in the 20th and 21st century who are in John Muir's time and not ours. John Muir really escaping his Scots father's kind of brutal Christianity and brutal agricultural labor on the family farm, wanted nature to be pure and uplifting and spiritual and detached from practical things like what are we going to eat?

31:20And he was a racist who despised Native Americans really wrote them out of the places they had been for thousands of years, ignored that they were skillful managers of those places with fire, with how they harvested and hunted, engaged in, if not agriculture, horticulture, treated them often as ignorant about places they knew far better than him. National parks were seen as museums of ideal nature, the best nature, the prettiest nature, the nature with the most glamorous scenery, kind of according to European landscape painting traditions, not necessarily the most ecologically valuable. And the whole conservation movement, I think, was an ideology of isolation in its own way.

32:12Let's put a fence around this pretty place and protected while we allow everything else to be ravaged. Nuclear fallout, pesticides came along in the 50s and 60s to tell people that nothing can be separated from everything else. You can't put a fence around this place and make it separate because everything is connected. And so I'd see the environmental movement as really almost antithetical to the conservation movement in that it's an ecological movement trying to work with systems rather than isolate pretty things. But for example, the Wilderness Act of 1964, which is landmark good legislation in the United States, nevertheless says wilderness is a place where man is only a visitor.