Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit joins HDS Writer-in-Residence Terry Tempest Williams in a conversation on the power of storytelling as it relates to climate change. This event took place April 12, 2023, in Memorial Church at Harvard University as part of Harvard Divinity School's Climate Justice Week.
Full transcript:
ALANNA SULLIVAN: Good evening. I am Alanna Sullivan, one of the ministers here. And it is my pleasure and privilege to welcome you to the Memorial Church tonight.
At the Memorial Church, we like to say that no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter where you're from, no matter what you believe, no matter who you love, you are welcome here and we are so grateful for you.
In the heart of Harvard Yard, Memorial Church aims to be a place where as our PC Minister, Matthew Ichihashi Potts says, "People can meet, have important and difficult conversations about what it means to be good, about what it means to live a more moral life, what it means to be in community with others who have different traditions, who come from different backgrounds, and who hold different beliefs."
Harvard Divinity School and the Memorial Church share a long history and deep commitment of living and learning at the intersection of critique and compassion, spirituality and social action, ethics and environmental justice, reflection and activism.
Our community is programmatic theme this academic year has centered on repenting for and responding to the climate crisis. Therefore, we are absolutely honored to play a small part in the Climate Justice Week at HDS this week. And we are excited to explore this theme in a new dimension, through conversation with writer, historian, activist Rebecca Solnit, and HDS Writer-in-Residence Terry Tempest Williams, who will be conversing about the power of storytelling as it relates to climate change.
Terry Tempest Williams joined HDS as Writer-in-Residence at the beginning of the 2017-2018 academic year. She's the author of numerous books, including the environmental justice classic, Refuge-- An Unusual History of Family and Place. And her most recent book is The Hour of Land, a personal topography of America's national parks that was published in June of 2016 to coincide with and honor the Centennial of the National Park Service.
Her writings have also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological conscientiousness and social change. And during her time at HDS, she has spent time leading conversations, contemplating, and writing about the spiritual implications of climate change. So will you please provide a warm welcome to all of our participants in our evening's program.
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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Good evening, friends. My name is Terry Tempest Williams and I'm Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School. And on behalf of the Constellation Project, the Harvard Divinity School, Religion and Public Life, and our student-led Climate Justice Week, we are so grateful for your presence tonight in this historic, beautiful, holy place.
Thank you, Alanna, for setting this beautiful tone for tonight's gathering with the extraordinary writer Rebecca Solnit who joins this community in the name of the spirit held in this sacred space of Memorial Church with a deep bow to words and prayers that are held here over time in the name of religious instruction, inspiration, and justice with just actions for all beings.
Tonight's beautiful music as you came in is the generous offering of Chris Hossfeld, Director of Music and Ritual at the Harvard Divinity School. We've been listening to Partita Number 4 in D Major, Allemande, by Johann Sebastian Bach. Chris, thank you so much you bring so much to all of us here at the Divinity School.
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And after Rebecca's talk, we will hear Beethoven's Bagatelle from Chris, and it will be a beautiful interlude before our conversation. We offer our gratitude to Matt Ichihashi Potts, the PC Minister of the Memorial Church, for partnering with us at Divinity School as a beloved member of our community, and allowing us to inhabit this space as part of Climate Justice Week.
I want to personally acknowledge and thank Jesus Romo Llamas for helping us to organize tonight's event, and Caroline Cataldo and those in the Communications Department who've helped get this word out. And to those at the Religion and Public Life. Diane, Susie, thank you.
And most importantly, Anna del Castillo and Maya Pace for their leadership with student leaders. Aliyah Collins, Ameerah Ahmad, John Clayton Gehman who created this week of reflection and action on behalf of the Earth crisis, climate crisis that we find ourselves in now.
Tonight, we will begin this evening with a five-minute offering by one of our climate organizers, John Clayton Gehman, a first-year master's of theology studies student at HDS with an emphasis on sustainability, racial justice, and healing.
After John speaks, I'm going to formally introduce my friend Rebecca. She will speak for about 30 minutes, and then we'll hear the beautiful piece by Chris, Beethoven. And then we'll have a 20-minute conversation, after which we open it up to you as our congregation, as friends to ask Rebecca questions that you may have about her work, about her talk tonight. And we will have Maya and Eliza who will help facilitate that conversation.
Again, we're so grateful you're here. And may tonight be one of reflection, contemplation, meditation, followed by action. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
JOHN CLAYTON GEHMAN: Good evening, everyone. I'm going to start with a brief reading of a poem by Angelus Silesius. "The rose is without why. She blooms because she blooms. She pays herself no regard. Ask not if she's seen. The rose. She shepherds from the seed, though her tender unknown. She knows no why nor cares that she's seen.
Unbeknownst to her, seed carries the secret of time. The eternal beauty of the ephemeral life. She blooms as she blooms and she pays herself no regard, for all beauty is hidden in plain sight. Still, little does she know the rarity even for her seed to ever grow. She roots in good soil and only good soil, and so her roots become many, while nature shows her the movements all through their seasons. For them, the dear rose grows out her petals.
Then one day, the storm. A lustrous stream, crystal waters trickle by, and still the rose, she lacks reguard or why. The day's shining clarity, now hidden from form, and still the rose, she pays herself no attention, not even in the storm.
The rose hears the thunder and trembles at her might. The lightning shines on even if there is no light. She bows and beholds such a sight, doing so with roots strong and right. She peers into the morn and hears the great cries, the voice of the thunder. Gleaned in the cries of the thunder, the rose follows, a truth to be heard. For it is the kiss of the thunder that reminds her of the storm.
The rose, rooted and steady, moves nowhere. And this, the heart of the storm, sees that she is ready. They caress one another. The two lost lovers. The storm comes for the due time. Surely it's known. With the kiss of the thunder, she awakened to the heart where they must gather.
She wakes to the crystalline heart, a place of eternal and expansiveness teeming with glorious light. The gentle winds of her breath brush her full-bloomed petals. She rocks back and sways, and still herself, she pays no regard.
Sown in the luscious soil, she can never give way. Never not, not even yesterday. She grows in a garden, she's all tucked away. The rose hidden plainly and bright in between the facet of the heart's infinite domain. She will not tire for she has trust in her true form.
The dear rose gasps in her light and blooms full much greater. While 20,000 infinities refract and shine onto her, the love so brilliant and bright, the cessation of color is never an image in sight. For she has never questioned her own and sees so faintly from a distance the glare of her radiant shone.
The light shines and the crystal is brightened. Before latent, though never dormant, the crystalline heart is full. She is laid to rest in the gentle caress of her infinite breath, for they are the subtle thunders rumbling within her-- that, the easeful breath. Each sound holds the promise for anew, for she is the gentle wind that carried her own thunder.
For she understands that this palace so pure is so simply her mere and fleeting breath. With perfect heart in mind, she breathes back to the thunder. She fears not its whipping lash nor its ceaseless rip. She pays herself no regard and is never tempted in fear. The rose breathes the ephemeral life, these fleeting treasures set forth in the beauty of life.
In each known breath, the rose blesses onto her thousandfold kisses the smell of her delight. She carries the spirit for all in name and form, for without them, she would not remember the storm. Hurled back in the winds, the storm is exhausted, and the know-why rose truly knows why. It is the confidence of her form.
She blooms because she blooms, realizing only because she had the true light. Once again, she basked in the orange mellow warmth. The rose lives her life and eventually grows weak. She droops because she droops, and she remembers her roots. She glimpses the dear little seedling that started this infinite loop. Still, she pays herself no attention under the same crystalline sky, for only she bloomed her timeless perfection.
She blows the subtle winds and roars in the silent thunders. They rustle her as eternity neared, though their proximity, even just for a short while, must also sear. And in the final hour, the rose pays herself no regard, facing the beauty of plain sight, for she has at last imagined and remembered the beauty, for it truly was her duty to unveil the birthplace of her eternity.
The little rose, she truly saw it all. And though, all saw her, she never once paid a regard. She sheds her last tear, beauty forever once known, for she knew it was a choice and she never chose. The rose is now dead, but death she knew was merely a choice, and she chose life, the breath always after the voice.
She bloomed because she bloomed. In her short life, she bore witness to the beauty all grown from her little brown root. The beauty never stopped, not even in that crystalline wonder. The rose offered all she had, though she always got more. And in her very weakness, she remembered our eyes.
They were the ones who looked back, those of her cherished mother whom she calls land. The love has loved and the love has chose you. It chose to live and give only for you. The sacred in the ordinary, the dear rose, she blooms simply for you.
She lasted a mere few seconds and now flows as the breath in forever. Now her wilted petals give their final grace, though they gasp at the floor, for it is now different land. The land is now scorched. The waters, once trickling the lustrous, have died on the poor heavy Earth, the one that once cried. Her memories are lost. This, my beloveds, is the apocalypse's cost.
The cries once roared in the heart of the storm, but we ignored the voice to the thunder, and now the winds and the breath no longer move. They are belabored in stress. The natural movements have stopped. And Earth? Well, she can't go much further.
Our time is as ever unclear. With no seasons to move, the rose, she never really bloomed. She never took root for her soil was doomed. In our ego, she never really had a chance. And we had the choice. Now we no longer glimpse her beauty, the ephemeral life. Might we have one last chance to kiss her silent thunder? Until then, she is the rose who comes to mind.
[APPLAUSE]
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Forgive my nervousness, Judy. Sorry. So to be able to introduce both a sister, a friend, and a hero is daunting.
And it is my great pleasure-- and what I want you to know is last night, at our fire salon in the Commons that at the Harvard Divinity School, I don't know how many students-- maybe, 30, 50? Gathered and really were able to have an informal conversation with Rebecca about climate, about love, about activism, and what it means to be human in these very difficult times, and what a theology of hope looks like. So we feel like this is a continuation, and it means so much that we can now share this as a broader community.
Rebecca Solnit is a writer difficult to categorize. She is singular, original, defiant, and loving. Like her singular writings from books to essays to daily Facebook discourses that serve as ethical compass points by which to navigate the complexity of our lives, Rebecca, you are showing all of us a new way of being.
Author of 24 books with evocative titles such as Savage Dreams, River of Shadows, As Eve Said to the Serpent, Wanderlust, Storming the Gates of Paradise, A Paradise Built in Hell, Field Guide to Getting Lost, her, daunting, miraculous, lyrical, joyous Atlas Trilogy's maps of San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City.
Hope in the Dark, her series of essays that have changed all of us, from "Men, Explain Things to Me," to her most recent anthology, It's Not Too Late, which I hope she'll be talking about tonight. It just recently came out.
Solnit is rewriting Fairy Tales for Girls, Cinderella Liberator, and Waking Beauty, to sharing her memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, of how we as women find our voice, to her most recent book and one of my favorites, Orwell's Roses.
Rebecca Solnit is a woman of letters, with an intellect so agile and discursive, subversive and associative, it's all we can do to keep pace with her mind on fire. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings and Marginalia has called Rebecca, quote, "The Unparalleled High Priestess of Nuance and Intelligent Contemplation, unquote."
As her friend for over 25 years, and a sister in the American West where we were mentored by Shoshone elders and Jesuit priests and peace activists at the Nevada test site in the 1980s and '90s, what I admire most about Rebecca is her work ethic. Her fierce devotion to not only telling the truth, but complexifying the stories we tell. She is fearless. And she is ferocious. And I would be lying if I said, even as her friend, I'm not-- there are times where I'm intimidated.
What Rebecca is doing is building a constituency for change. And I feel like that's what we're all doing here at Harvard, at the Divinity School, at this Memorial Chapel. Personally, Rebecca, I'm grateful for you calling out misogyny. Calling it for what it is-- a fear of women's power. "Men, Explain Things to Me--" "Men Explain Things to Me--" or "Men, Explain to Me" is an anthem on the page that translates to all forms of oppression and puts us on notice to speak and to listen with an open heart for all we do not know, but wish to understand.
What I can tell you is our governor in the State of Utah, in a speech he gave regarding great Salt Lake, he opened with, "Forgive me, but I'm going to be 'gov-splaining.'" You have reached truly the-- you're known in Utah.
Every word you write is a collage of interconnecting thoughts as you create a literary ecosystem where each of us can find our niche in the name of community and act within the embrace of our shared humanity. We read you, Rebecca, to remember how powerful we are together.
How much beauty can be found in brokenness. And to not only dare to have hope in the dark, but create a changing world even as it burns through acts of imagination, resistance, and insistence, that the world be remade through love. We welcome you. We honor you. I love you. And please know you have kin here tonight.
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REBECCA SOLNIT: I'm not a Protestant. I feel like a joke up here. A Catholic, a Jew, and a Buddhist walk into a-- whatever this is. But it's lovely to see you all. Thank you so much for coming. And I want to dedicate this talk to the Divinity students who, in Wilke's terms, are living the questions with such wholeheartedness, such curiosity, and such passion to try and figure out, how do we do these things that are asked of us? What are the things that are asked for us? Who do we need to be to meet the demands of an Earth in crisis?
So I want to open this talk. Stories are cages, stories are wings. So what stories can we and do we tell about climate with a quote. The Zapatistas on December 21, 2012 said, "Do you hear? That is the sound of your world crumbling and ours resurging."
And now I want to start at the beginning. Genesis is wrong. Paradise is a trap. Perfection is a miserable standard by which everything falls short and everyone feels miserable. Purity, it is a pleasure to say in these hallowed halls, is for Puritans. And the perfect is the enemy of the good, and maybe, to invoke the psychologist DJ Winnicott, the enemy of the good enough mother.
"Pure water has no fish" is one Buddhist slogan, and another is, "Like a pure lotus arising from muddy waters, the lotus needs the mud. The world was never perfect, and if it was never perfect, we never fell from grace."
Or as the British thinker James Bridle recently put it in a conversation with Krista Tippett, "Life is soupy, mixed up, and tumultuous. Muddying the waters is precisely the point, because it's from such nutritious streams that life grows."
I learned that 30 years ago when I had the transformative good fortune to hear and read Native American creation myths in which there's often more than one god and the gods are often tricksters or they're arguing or they're just winging it. They're ravens, they're coyote, they're twins who argue about what sort of a world they should make. There's scientists in the lab, artists in the studio, cooks in the kitchen of life.
I suspect that if you see the world as an ongoing improvisation, you don't believe in paradise or in the expulsion from paradise into a fallen world. And don't set up changeless perfection as the yardstick by which to measure all other things.
That's why the epigraph to my 1994 book, Savage Dreams, comes from Ursula K Le Guin who wrote, "And he never was in Eden, because coyotes live in the New World. Driven forth by the angel with the flaming sword, even Adam lifted their sad heads and saw coyote grinning." I ended my 2004 book, Hope in the Dark, with, "Today is also the day of creation."
This matters because a lot of people who are convinced that they're not Christian and a surprising number who are furiously hostile to the religion continue to tell stories in terms of paradise and the fall and Paradise Lost. It became a principal framework of the conservation movement, which often paired the idea of a fall from grace with a Madonna whore framework for nature.
In that framework, there were only two kinds of landscapes-- virgin and untouched, before humans; and violated, despoiled, ruined, after humans. That's all there was, and it's not a coincidence that many of these words were used for both places and women.
That era of the environmental and conservation movement was based on denial of the Indigenous presence in the North American landscape, and that denial was three kinds of disaster. The first was for the natural world itself. Denying the participation of human beings in these places meant failing to understand the role of Indigenous hunting, gathering, and tending and of fire as a tool of land management.
This, among other things, led to a century of institutional mismanagement of Western lands, notably through fire suppression, which has a lot to do with a lot of the terrible wildfires in recent years. Of course, they're climate-fueled as well, but fire suppression has been a profoundly disastrous policy.
The second disaster, of course, was for Native people written out of the story. Representational genocide is when you're told you don't exist or are rendered invisible, inaudible, and when the story is pitched to the people who don't believe you are or can be or should be part of the conversation.
This representational genocide helped the more directly brutal dispossession and destruction of Native cultures into the present. Nevertheless, many, perhaps most Native communities and cultures survived and have in recent years reclaimed visibility and audibility, regained rights to land, revitalized Native languages in ceremonies, and taken leadership in the climate movement.
My hotel stapled this. I'm going to just take out the staple, which is giving me some very awkward paper management here. There. OK. The third thing harmed by those lies or misconceptions was the white imagination, which, into the 1990s, mostly saw nature in those binaries-- pure, ruined-- and often talked about nature and culture as two equal and separate phenomena.
This led to an inability to imagine peaceful coexistence with the natural world, to imagine ourselves as other than domineering and destructive. All we could do is wall off some part of it from our destruction.
I was young when these Native California creation stories came my way, and they did much to shape my worldview, or at least break me out of the worldview I grew up in. In the society I grew up in, Native Americans were spoken of almost entirely in the past tense, often asserted to be either extinct, vanished, or otherwise possessed some sort of archaic culture that had been superseded was not relevant, et cetera.
National parks and other public institutions, including many museums, either wrote them out of natural history altogether or situated them firmly in the past and not the present.
So of course, Native people for the most part never vanished except to the white imagination, and their vanishing was necessary for the stories of discovery, progress, the belief the land was ours for this taking, and the story of the nature-culture binary. So a great resurgence of Native voices and visions came as the pushback against the celebration of the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival in the Americas and a great rewriting of the history of this continent.
Immersed in this reassessment as I was back in 1992, I was blessed to receive not an expulsion from paradise, but from the hell of perfection and the cage that this story was, but I see versions of them all around me still.
Like the chassis of a car or the framing of a house or the skeleton of our own bodies, assumptions lurk under the stories we tell, giving them their structure, or limiting the shapes they can take. And one of the biggest, strongest ones that seems to shape or misshape the collective imagination is the idea that there is an option not to change and that changelessness is something we can aspire to or demand or believe in.
That there is some sort of stability we could choose instead of changing everything. That we are ourselves-- I'm sorry, that we are ourselves the agents of change disappears in this despite facts such as that more than half of all the carbon emitted by human activity since 1751 has been emitted since 1990.
People often see the swift transition away from extracting and burning fossil fuels as the radical change that maybe we should not dare, rather than recognizing that the continued burning of fossil fuels is itself a driver of catastrophic change. That is, what we have been doing is not stability, but destabilization.
It says if hosing down the house on fire is seen as the dangerous disruption rather than the fire itself, and that's an argument that lets the house keep burning.
For climate, I see this perfectionism manifesting in many ways. One is the idea that stability and the status quo are options, that we can refuse to change, as if getting in the life-- ooh. As if getting in the lifeboats was some wild and crazy idea and we should just stick with the ship.
But the ship is sinking. The era when we are securely aboard it has come to a close. Another idea is that we need a perfect solution that does not yet exist and can be dismissive of those that do, that we can reject the lifeboats already here and expect and wait for lifeboats that don't exist and maybe never will.
So the lifeboats-- those imaginary or non-existent lifeboats-- carbon capture, fusion energy, et cetera. So obscure the very nice lifeboats we have here already with renewable energy and the electrification of everything, along with good design-- good redesign of how we live.
How we live and, of course, how we imagine is the crucial question. Ideas and values brought us to this crisis, and we need ideas and values that themselves can be the lifeboats away from extractivism, capitalism, the many forms of institutionalized inequality, and other aspects of what I call the ideology of isolation.
The climate is changing and we changed it. Now we can change what we do to limit how much it continues to change or sit back for the worst-case scenario.
This is also a memory problem. I began a recent essay at The Guardian with, "These days, I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly-- as a tortoise at the mayfly party. Mayflies being those insects that, in their mature form, live only for a day, an old byword for brevity of all kinds.
The piece continues, "By that, I mean, I try to see the long trajectory of change behind current events because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture and power, let alone trying to participate in them.
The short view generates incomprehension and intellectuality. It fails to recognize the origins and social movements and grass roots actions of most of the great changes of our era and many eras before. Of how most new ideas originate in the shadows in the margins, among people who are usually disregarded, mocked, or reviled.
And that power, therefore, lies in these places and people as well as in the central and with the officially powerful. Change itself becomes invisible when your time frame is shorter than that change. And the short-term breeds defeatism and despair.
Be a tortoise. Cultivate a long memory, whether it's first-hand memory from your own life or historical perspective. Because what memory shows us is constant change, some of it for the better, some for the worse. And complexity shows us a world that has gotten both much better and much worse simultaneously."
As Julian Aguon, a climate lawyer-- climate activist, and lawyer Indigenous to Guam recently put it, "Indigenous people are those who have a unique capacity to resist despair through connection to collective memory and who just might be our best hope to build a new world rooted in reciprocity and mutual respect for the Earth and each other. The world we need. The world of our dreams," he concludes.
Aguon's emphasis on collective memory tells us what the American theologian Walter Brueggemann has put another way. Memory produced his hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair. I think amnesia creates a sense of stability as a form of stuckness, of the impossibility of change that generates passivity and the inability to recognize the forms of change that I think are forms of hope.
The Zapatistas say it yet another way. "The mountain told us to take up arms so we would have a voice," they declared. "It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us to forget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect our past so we would have a future."
When the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus's arrival helped inspire the 1994 Zapatista rising, I had an intimation that these people consigned to the past were re-emerging to take a leadership role in establishing a possible future.
That has come to pass so powerfully in the 21st century, both through direct leadership and the spread of Indigenous ideas into the settler imagination and ethic, thanks to Jade Begay, one of the contributors along with Julian to our climate book, Not Too Late-- Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility.
I learned belatedly that there's a term for this, Indigenous futurism, which I've started to read up on, and everyone should.
There are markers of this transformation far more than I could ever compile, but one that made an enormous impression on me last year came about when the Save the Redwoods League did something remarkable. That league was founded 105 years ago by wealthy white men who connected conservation, Native plant species, and nature to eugenics and anti-immigration physicians. In other words, to the most vicious racism.
The co-founders included Madison Grant, who headed the American Eugenics Society, was Vice President of the Immigration Restriction League, and is notorious for the pseudoscientific book, The Passing of the Great Race. And here, I might add, that the love of nature is no guarantee of virtue that we often think it is. The Nazis loved their forests, and so did the Save the Redwoods League racists.
But the organization still exists, and in 2021, they gave 523 acres of old-growth redwood-- or rather, title because the redwoods are perhaps unpossessable. But they gave title to 523 acres of old-growth redwood forest to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a coalition of 10 tribal groups on the northwest coast of California, and recognized the place's original name.
The year before, the then-director of the organization wrote a powerful public apology for the organization's history. These are landmarks on the path of change.
And it's been interesting here at Harvard hearing about some of the other apologies in the work and thinking among other things with reparations, the rectification of names, the recognition of past sins that were also in an age of apology, which is an age of memory, among other things, of what really happened that we didn't acknowledge before. And I think there's a recovery of memories part of making a possible future.
Another way perfection is punitive to the point of defeatism is the idea that our solutions must be perfect, and that in order to be perfect ourselves, we must reject solutions that are imperfect. All solutions are imperfect, and so the solution-- all solutions are imperfect, and so the perfectionists often reject them all and castigate those pursuing them as compromised, sold out, impure.
Which is not to say there aren't bad solutions, wrong solutions, corrupt solutions, but I'm talking about-- I think the difference. This is a Framework Best loved by people who are not convinced that they have any responsibility for providing solutions, the armchair critics every movement activist knows so well.
Thus the fact that we need to make a swift transition away from fossil fuel is being undermined by complaints that renewables also require minerals deprived by-- materials derived by mining also occupy space in the landscape.
Climate journalist Michael Thomas notes, however, every year, about 15 billion tons of fossil fuels are mined and extracted. That's about 535 times more mining than a clean energy economy would require in 2040. So renewables require far less extraction, far less space, and they're also how we stop destroying the biosphere. So aggressively, the biosphere, which is pretty much the whole space for all known life in the universe. Known to us anyway.
Of course, there are places that should not be mined, and of course, who decides and how it's done are crucial issues, but we cannot suddenly go preindustrial for 8 billion people. The climate movement comes out of the environmental movement, which comes out of the conservation movement, which has mostly been about saying no, no to development, no to so many things.
And suddenly, we have to say so many yesses to a whole lot if there's going to be an end to the age of fossil fuel, or to paraphrase the Zapatistas, a big no to fossil fuel and many yeses to the alternatives. Yes to getting the raw materials for the renewables, yes to the construction of an entire new power system, and yes to the jobs that they'll provide.
One of the things the tortoise view reminds us is, until recently, we did not have viable alternatives to fossil fuel, so I didn't fully understand until I read a book written in 2000 that reached that conclusion and realized how much things have changed in the last 23 years.
We have in this Millennium had an energy revolution, although that shouldn't be in the past tense. To put it in the past tense makes it sound like we've arrived at as good as it's going to get. But in labs all over the world, engineers and inventors are making better batteries out of better materials, figuring out storage systems and transmission systems, and so much more.
We're not at the end or the beginning of this revolution, which is already so astonishing, can already do things thought not long ago to be impossible. And while also not long ago, thought that renewables would be a virtuous thing we should do, but would be a kind of expensive, renunciation thing. The 91% of the world renewables are the cheapest way to get energy now.
Texas now gets more electricity from wind and coal and Iowa gets almost 60% of its electricity from wind, not because these red states have great climate commitments, but because this is the cheapest way to do it.
And as one report put it this year, in 2010, the UK's power supply was heavily dominated by fossil fuels with coal alone generating almost a third of UK electricity. However, in just over a decade, the United Kingdom's power system has been transformed. Coal now generates just over 2% of the UK's electricity, and the whole country ran on almost nothing but coal not that much earlier. It's an astonishing transformation that would have been thought unimaginable.
One of the things I always like to do is to say 2023 is absolutely unimaginable in so many ways, including renewables from the perspective of 1973. And it gives me confidence to look forward to 2073, to know that it's unimaginable we don't know how to get there all the way, but we know what to do to take the next step and the next step, and more will be clear.
And here, I could quote one of my favorite quotes of all times from EL Doctorow about writing, but it applies to everything in life. He said, "Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but it gets you all the way home."
So 20-- who knows? All the way there, but we know what the next steps are there's another kind of quest for perfection beloved by technocrats and a lot of powerful institution. This idea that we're waiting for an energy solution that will be magical and powerful and big and probably centralized and extremely profitable for people like them. Their kind of power, not the grassroots dispersed kind that renewables can and should mean.
They want a miracle that doesn't exist yet. And a lot of other vested interests like this idea that doesn't exist yet because it means we don't have to start changing things yet. We can sit and wait. There's a kind of madness when the fusion breakthrough, which wasn't really an energy breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore Labs, the nuclear weapons lab, was announced last winter.
By all the mainstream media pretending that, oh my God, maybe we'll have the energy solution we need, as though we didn't already did-- as though we didn't already, it was maddening to watch.
Perhaps changing everyday life in innumerable, smaller ways, a transformation toward modesty and decentralization is too hard for them to imagine. But we must not live inside their failure of imagination. And if we already have the technology we need, then we need to do the hard part, the disruptive part now, and we have to recognize that our problems are primarily political.
Another form of perfection seems to result in the belief that if we can't save everything, we can't do anything, that it's all or nothing. The word "save" itself, as in "save the whales," has always struck me as problematic for what we as activists try to do.
"Save" is maybe the religious language of Christian salvation and the banking language of savings and loans. We do not send the souls of whales to heaven or stuff them into piggy banks. We maintain a world in which whales can continue or we fail to do so and we have to continue our effort. There is no end, no saving. It's a process, not a product.
As we've seen with reproductive rights, victories can be undone, history can reverse course. As for the all or nothing, what I always hark back to is the Cajun Navy and other small-craft rescuers the day after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees and sent 80% of the city of New Orleans underwater.
All these people with boats who had bumper-to-bumper traffic trying to get into the city not knowing what they would find, not knowing if they could save everyone, knowing for certain that they couldn't save everyone, and yet they did.
And so many of them saved so many people-- two people, seven people, 17 people, 100 people. And that's the spirit in which I think we have to go forth. You'll never save everything. You can probably always save something even with a kind word in the worst circumstances in the world. So what small act of solidarity, a little bit of paying attention.
And so the Cajun Navy for me has always exemplified that spirit of not knowing what you can do while knowing that you can do something and knowing also that you can't do everything, that it's never all or nothing.
And this brings us back to the good enough mother and a commenter on it who said, "Children need their mothers or primary caretaker to fail them in tolerable ways on a regular basis so they can learn to live in an imperfect world.
Every time we don't hear them calling us right away, every time we don't give them our undivided attention, every time we feed them a dinner they don't want to eat, every time we make them share when they don't want to, we are getting them ready to function in a society that will frustrate and disappoint them on a regular basis. Perhaps left politics needs to recognize its good enough mothers."
I love imperfection. I love survivors of disappointment. I love post-traumatic growth. I love the version of Genesis in which eating the apple was a good thing and Eve was worshipped for bringing us into our full humanity and awareness.
I love the Japanese art of kintsugi, which I think I just mispronounced, but forgive me. In which a broken ceramic vessel is reassembled with gold-laden glue that gives it golden veins so it looks both very broken and very beautiful. That process as the copper vase will never be what it was before the damage, but that it can be something magnificent afterward that doesn't try to hide its history, its imperfection.
Perhaps it also says that we in our world can never be what they were before, but we can still be and still be beautiful, a powerful model for post-traumatic growth.
I just talked about renewable energy, and I love renewable energy. And these days, caring about climate seems inseparable from the contemplation of countless graphs about solar and wind, some alarming, some reassuring. But it would be a mistake to think that all that needs to change is our energy production.
Because what also needs to change is our imaginations. The climate crisis is an imagination crisis and a storytelling crisis. Our stories about what is poverty, what is wealth, what the climate requires of us, and even who "we" is need changing.
I don't believe we will mechanically do the things that are supposed to make it all work better because in some rational way, we understand this. Has been true since the beginning of public conversations on climate. The rational stuff is good and useful, but it's far from enough.
I think we have to imagine the world in an entirely different way. One in which we see a world full of symbiosis interconnection, interdependence, mutuality, reciprocity, mutual aid. In which our "we" becomes big and broad and deep enough to include oceans, rivers, forests, tundra, prairie, to include other species, to include all of humanity, not just the affluent in the Global North.
And also the people who will be here in 50 and 500 years. The microorganisms within our guts and within the oceans, within the soils that make it all work, that made our atmosphere.
The conversation about austerity that is often the climate conversation assumes that we need to give things up, but of course, the poorest 50% of humanity has less climate impact than the richest 1%. They already live in austerity and they have virtually no luxuries or impact to renounce.
But what if we acknowledge all the ways we live in poverty now, even the affluent among us? Which is probably almost everyone here. Hi. What if we acknowledge all the ways we live in poverty now, even the affluent among us? Poverty of hope, poverty of meaning, poverty of connection to each other and the natural world?
Poverty of justice, the poverty that comes with fossil fuel, that poisons our politics worldwide and poisons our air so profoundly that it kills 8 million of us annually through inhalation of particulates alone and impairs the health of so many others. Poisons, air, water, land, and so many living things.
But what also constitutes abundance is a crucial question even aside from the question of whose abundance. Capitalism and consumerism would like us to think of it as "stuff," material objects and commodified experiences somebody profits off.
The ideal consumer in this system is lonely, disconnected, cynical. All too willing to meet other kinds of needs or forget all these other kinds of needs, these needs for love, for meaning, for purpose, for connection, for moral beauty, for the things money can buy.
And that's a form of privatization. 30 and 20 years ago with the anti-globalization movement, we talked about privatization as exercised by neoliberalism. The privatization of education, of transportation, of other kinds of public services and infrastructure.
But before you could get people to accept that practical privatization, I think you had to privatize our imaginations, convince us that we had nothing in common with each other, that we didn't rise or fall together. That in Margaret Thatcher's infamous words, "There is no such thing as society." And I'm just realizing, a lot of you might be too young to remember Margaret Thatcher, the infamous prime minister of the UK in the 1970s.
But what if we thought of abundance as an abundance of hope? As confidence in the future? As social connections in friendship and love? Of place and other beings and living things and celestial bodies and light as well as each other? As the richness of relationships to other humans? As moral beauty rather than the moral injury we cover up with moral numbing?
As security not in the sense of armies and militarism and guns and defensiveness, but confidence in their own lives and communities and the future. This is, of course, a storytelling problem or a framework challenge requiring more subtle and evocative language for our desires, and maybe a more accurate desire for who we are.
The dominant ideology of capitalism and maybe modernism is what I think of as the ideology of isolation, of privatization. It tells us we have no responsibility to others, only to ourselves or to a few people close to us, maybe our little tribe, but not to the greater whole.
Absolute freedom in the conservative system is the freedom that means you're unhindered by your impact on others, and that's helped along by the denial of that impact when it comes to economic arrangements or environmental impact.
This is why climate change has been such an offense to conservatives. It is the science of everything being connected to everything else, of the consequences of our actions, of interdependence and interrelationship when they want disconnection, the ideology of isolation, the inconsequential reality of our actions.
The very word responsibility, though, bespeaks obligation, burdensomeness, the reluctance to do what has framed as a one-way street. And I think that we need a different language.
So what climate tells us, first of all, is that everything is connected. By burning fossil fuel, we took a truly terrifying and obscene amount of carbon out of the ground where been for millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of years and sent it into that sphere. What changed not just the temperature, but the whole system, which is now something more chaotic, rough, or less predictable than the finely-orchestrated planet we lived on for the many thousands of years since the last Ice Age.
The orchestration is a reminder that the world is better and differently understood as systems than objects. And that we're part of them and that we need them and now they need us to, too, to undo some of what we did and to do better going forward.
In a remarkable way, Buddhism, Indigenous worldviews, and science are converging in a better vision of this world, a vision of systems and networks and relationships. This world of verbs and not just nouns, and maybe not just verbs, but linked phrases and poems, never-ending stories, unfinishable sentences, and ongoing conversations between beings and systems and our non-organic processes.
It's been striking how human nature itself has in recent decades been rethought and redefined as something more communal and altruistic empathic than the old Hobbesian and Social Darwinist man locked in a struggle or a war of each against each.
We see what we're ready to see when we're ready to see it, and we're beginning to see a more cooperative world from the origin of ourselves and the joining of two disparate single-celled organisms, as traced by the biologist Lynn Margulis, to our gut microbiome that makes us all plural systems, to underground cooperative networks of trees and fungi as explored by forests ecologist Suzanne Simard. "Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking," Margulis said.
In 2012, a biologist and-- a philosopher and two biologists published a paper in The Quarterly Review of Biology titled, "A Symbiotic View of Life-- We Have Never Been Individuals." It declares, in part, "In the modern period, mirroring the appearance of the independent citizen, the notion of the autonomous individual agent framed a biology that was organized around the study of particulate interacting living entities.
Only with the emergence of ecology in the second half of the 19th century did organic systems comprised of individuals and cooperative and competitive relationships complement the individual-based conceptions of the life sciences.
Symbiosis is rapidly becoming a core principle of contemporary biology, and it is replacing an essentialist conception of individuality with a conception congruent with the larger systems approach now pushing the life sciences in diverse directions.
These findings lead us in directions that transcend the self/non-self. Subject/object dichotomies that have characterized Western thought. The discovery of symbiosis throughout the animal Kingdom is fundamentally transforming the classical conception of an insular individuality into one in which interactive relationships among species blur the boundaries of the organism and obscures the notion of a central identity," end quote.
A great deal of research has suggested, like our bodies, our minds only thrive as part of a larger whole. We need connection to each other, to nature, to beauty, to awe, to the sense of meaning that comes from the past, the sense of hope that comes from the future.
What would it mean to live this vision for our imaginations and our ecologies? It's common to speak as though what we need is not yet here and we need to start tomorrow. I want to reframe that to say everything we need is here, just not yet widespread enough, not yet changing what is going on where power resides, where too many decisions are still being made.
If these ideas are a challenge to Western thought, there are confirmation of so many non-Western thoughts, and there are plenty of non-Western thinkers and then in the larger "we." At the same time, perhaps because we settlers are now able to hear them, Indigenous stories about reciprocity and care for the whole seem to be circulating more widely.
My-not-too-late co-author, Thelma, Thelma Young Lutunatabua, who married a Fijian climate organizer and is now based there, says-- or writes in our book, "When do we say, 'Enough is enough?' When do we say, 'I feel full?''
A dear Fijian friend, the incomparable Alisi Rabukawaqa Amasawa, has told me the story of when she first learned from her grandmother, the importance of only taking what you need from the local reef. The principles were grounded in care of nature and care of community.
Other people would also need the seafood and the creatures.-- I'm sorry. Other people would also need the seafood, and the creatures need to be able to reproduce as well. So don't overfill your bucket just because you can. It's a very simple lesson and an absolute repudiation of capitalism and extractivism.
To think about the good of the whole in a way in which you don't perceive yourself as separate from that whole, to act in a way that takes care of the whole is a radically different way to think and act. It's less lonely, and maybe selfishness and loneliness are two faces of the same thing.
Separateness brought about by the ideology of isolation. The cause and the consequence of extractivism, and all the rest of the dominant ideology we're trying to shed to change to transmute, to escape the opposite of a paradise we want to be expelled from.
I've heard many stories like Thelma's of rights and customs that inhibit overexploitation of a resource, to put it in practical terms, but also imbue the relationship with meaning and beauty.
The Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer declares that "Reciprocity, returning the gift, is not just good manners, it's how the biophysical world works. Balance in ecological systems arises from negative feedback loops, from cycles of giving and taking.
Reciprocity among parts of the living Earth produces equilibrium in which life as we know it can flourish. When the gift is in motion, it can last forever. Positive feedback loops in which interactions spur one another away from balance produce radical change, often to a point of no return.
Reciprocity is rooted in understanding that we are not alone. That the Earth is populated by nonhuman persons, wise and inventive beings deserving of our respect," end quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Reciprocity means something very different than responsibility. Responsibility tells us simply that we must take care of something else.
Reciprocity acknowledges that even before we began, for countless generations and mutations, long before our species, long before our structures, long before our stories, something has been taking care of us. Many things take care of us. The oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, the places we inhabit, we're all produced by the life that was here before us.
We live within countless systems of care, exchange, generosity. And we need to write them into the story to make our lives lives of reciprocity rather than merely responsibility.
To end, people have started to ask me why there isn't more art about climate change, and I want to shift the question. I'm not sure we need art as opposed to science education and journalism that shows us the facts, though I'm by no means against books, movies, songs, images that address the wild weather, the crimes of the fossil fuel industry, the uncertain future, the emerging solutions, the people making them happen.
I think would be great to dramatize the struggle, the crimes, the criminals, the heroes. And some are doing that now and doing it beautifully. We should all the facts, something of the science, something of the politics, know what's going on, where we live at the local and maybe the global levels.
But I want to ask instead, who do we need to be? What do we need to believe to be the people who can respond to this greatest of all crises and catastrophes? What art and culture and conversation helps us be the people who can rise to the occasion, who can become citizens of a world where we recognize that we were never isolated and disconnected but in the limits of our theologies and imaginations?
I believe that we need, more than anything else, hope and solidarity, or better than solidarity, non-duality, non-separation, recognition of the profound beauty and order of the world around us, which is also, maybe to say, gratitude.
We need stories of how change really works. How the hero of most environmental and social victories is more likely to be a collective, a movement, a team than an individual. And how even a high-profile individual such as Greta Thunberg is someone supported by those who heeded her call and amplified it, both the listeners and the fellow Fridays for Future activists who expanded her campaign to almost all the continents.
How heroism consists not of athleticism and the capacity to inflict violence, but tenacity, commitment, vision, persuasiveness, clarity, intelligence, and underlying all those, love. And paying attention deeply is itself a form of love, of care, of caregiving.
We need to celebrate collective effort, indirect consequences, long-term campaigns. Celebrate the beehives and the tortoises, the murmurations and the dreamers. We need to embrace the better stories about the nature of power, the nature of change, the nature of nature, and of human nature.
Not stories of the crisis but stories that equip us to meet the crisis. Stories that make us, the people we need to be. And we need, of course, as well, good critiques of the stories that cages and slam all the doors and sink more of our ships or scuttles the lifeboats.
Those stories that give us wings and toolkits and lifeboats exist. I've tried to share what I think might be a few of them. There are countless more and more yet to be dreamed up and told.
You have some generating within you, each of you, all of you. Others waiting to land on you like spores on the wind. Others you can make by reassembling the fragments with the golden glue of your own imaginations, with your fears, which, are in some ways, inseparable from your hopes, both of which are about what you care about most deeply.
"Today is also the day of creation," I said long ago. And I say tonight that we're making a new world, and I believe it can be, in crucial ways, a better one. Thank you all so much.
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TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you, Chris.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Thank you.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Rebecca. Thank you. So many things to think about. Your words tonight you talk about who we need to be, what the cultural conversations need to become. Spores on the wind, golden glue, putting the fragments back together. How we're in an ecological crisis, a political crisis. I'm wondering what role spirituality has in this movement. In this time.
REBECCA SOLNIT: I-- hello, church. I think it's everything. Whether or not people call it spirituality and it's your sense of the cosmic order of your values, what matters, what you're committed to, what you draw strength from, et cetera.
I do think part of the left has been anti-religious in ways that often simplify the huge spectrum of religions to, you know what? You've got the kind of dogmatic atheist version that doesn't recognize all the other things that religions can be, including beloved community, and the hardcore leftists who don't recognize that, for example, the Black Church has been a huge force for community organizing and transformation.
But I don't want to-- I don't want it to be a-- make it something obligatory for people who don't-- who've had traumatic experiences at the hands of various churches and faiths, but I think, in a different sense, I want people to find their own depths, and that's a kind of spirituality. Understand the deepest sense of who they are, the deepest sense of how they're connected.
And I think for some people, the kind of awe and inspiration that comes just from fully understanding the natural world through science functions pretty well in those ways for them. So it's hard to answer without feeling prescriptive.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Can you make it personal?
REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah. I'm a bad Buddhist, but a Buddhist. And the daughter of a Catholic-- a secular Jew and a Irish Catholic woman who left the Church as soon as she was old enough to.
So there's this-- they left ideological frameworks behind them but never found new ones, and it created a kind of chaos. It's part of why-- I was telling Terry earlier today, I was so obsessed with Romanesque and Gothic art history and the study of that.
When I first had a class that addressed those things, when I was 16, the airtight coherence of those systems fascinated me rather than no coherent ideology at all when that was so neat like a puzzle, like a Faberge egg completely enclosed. And of course, as a tourist in those arenas, I was not going to be a medieval Christian, which is good news.
But then Buddhism as a-- which I love as a set of disciplines and practices and values and a psychology as much as a theology, has become a really important home for me. And I also love that Buddhism emphasizes not the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha as the triple treasure. The Dharma meaning the teachings, the Sangha meaning the community itself.
So I've become close to Roshi Joan Halifax. I benefited greatly from a dozen years as a regular practitioner at San Francisco Zen Center founded by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi when he came over to the US in the 1950s and found that the Japanese Americans he was supposed to be serving were not very interested in what he had to offer, but these young white kids who had read about zen deeply wanted to practice and they wanted to practice deeply.
And I've been fascinated to see that-- when Thich Nhat Hanh died and I saw how broad and deep the mourning for him was, to recognize that it's not officially people who call themselves Buddhist or have a meditation practice or took the vows or whatever, but that these ideas percolates through the soil of our imaginations.
And one of the things I was talking to your students about last night that I feel almost needs a map more than a history or something because it's so multifaceted is the way these ideas have come to make us such different people than we were 50 years ago.
I think many different aspects of Asian culture have, along with Indigenous culture, have changed a lot of the ways we think for the better and are deeply present.
And so for myself, that grounding, the great liberation of imagination I receive from being part of the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early '90s, working with Indigenous Cahuilla artists Louis de Soto, doing my deep reading and do deep work on how Yosemite was turned from an Indigenous homeland into arguably the first national park by erasing the Native presence, that learning that also-- those two threads have been huge for me and I've benefited hugely from them.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I think that's really important for our students to hear.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah. No, so it is personal.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: And yesterday, I had never heard this phrase from you and it made sense to me in terms of who you are and how we have been impacted by your writing. A theology of hope. At the Divinity School, we talk a lot about grief. A lot of the students are feeling it. I know I feel it.
Yesterday, a student of ours-- an alum, Lesedi Graveline, the first Black woman leading Harvard's Outdoor Program, asked the panelists on racial injustice and environmental justice, what do you do with your grief? How can you help me? Where do we place it?
And so maybe if you could answer this question or just talk about it, and then I have one more and we'll turn it over to the audience. How can you-- can you talk to us about your theology of hope? And also, what Lesedi was asking, what do we do with our grief?
REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah. And let's hope I can hang on to both parts of that question. The theology and hope for me is not optimism, which is things it knows what's going to happen just like pessimism and despair think they know what is going to happen.
When despair becomes-- pretends it's an analysis, and I've started to say I absolutely respect despair as an emotion akin to grief, a sense of loss, sorrow, fear. But it does seem to be mistaken for an analysis and it doesn't serve us well as one.
So hope for me comes from that tortoise view. A deep sense of the past and knowing how change works, seeing the remarkable ways of the world, that we are beneficiaries of the changes that happened before us and during our lifetimes, that that change continues.
Understanding that history is full of surprises. Understanding hope is just a kind of, to use a phrase of Pema Chodron's, being comfortable with uncertainty. Knowing in the uncertainty-- that we're making the future in the present. How what we do will turn out is unforeseeable, but it's nevertheless worth doing.
And then also part of me is just stubborn. As a young woman, a lot of people wanted me to be voiceless, to be defeated, to give up. The fossil fuel industry would like us to feel like we have no power and we can just perfect our little personal climate footprints rather than dismantle the fossil fuel industry.
And there's part of me that's just like, well Carrie Dann, the Western Shoshone elder who was such a leader in her time, who passed away a couple of years ago, used to wear a baseball cap, or a gimme cap as we call them out there, that said, Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down. Your enemies would like you to feel hopeless, powerless, and surrender. Don't give them the satisfaction is part of it for me. So that's the theology of hope.
And then with the emotion, I wrote I think in The Faraway Nearby, we divide emotions into like happy and sad, negative and positive. But I think, in fact, there's another way that I often think about it, that emotions can be deep or shallow. And the fear of sadness, the fear of grief, we often retreat to the shallows so that we-- and often glib versions of so-called happiness, which are kind of stimulation, excitement, comfortableness.
I think comfortableness is deeply overrated for those of us who have relatively comfortable lives, in that nobody is actively trying to kill all the people like us and we're probably not starving.
And so I think the deep emotions take us places. And Roshi Joan Halifax, the Buddhist leader who's based at Upaya Zen Center but is teaching I think at Dogen's own temple in Japan right now, is a huge fan of posttraumatic grief, what she calls standing on the edge, facing difficulty, et cetera. She's not even a Boomer, she was born before the Boomers, she's 80.
And she just has a sense of human nature as deeply tough that I rejoice in, because I think that we're also constantly being told by various forces in the culture now that we're all very fragile, that we're not strong enough to face adversity, difficulty, uncertainty. That we're like glass that needs to be packed in velvet caskets or something.
And I think the evidence-- I wrote a book on how human beings behave in disaster, the very short version is magnificently, generously, and with deep solidarity. Is that we can be very tough and very resilient, but it depends in part on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
And so I also look for the stories that remind us that we're strong, that remind us that people like us have gone through the fire, have faced adversity, that people have survived genocides and holocausts and attempts to rub them out.
And Roshi Joan Halifax in our book, Not Too Late, talks about her sense of what it means to face fear and pain and difficulty. And a young writer who's Jewish, Yotam Marom, talks about what to do when the world is ending. How Jews in the Holocaust, how Native people literally saw the world, there had always been an end.
And remained committed to do what they could not knowing what it was that they could, not knowing what it would mean in a world in which everything was changing beyond their control.
And so I see those examples we have as well to face uncertainty, face difficulty. And your sorrows-- I've dealt with depression. Your sorrows can crush you, but it's not a given that they will. I think that people-- in this part of it-- I think one of the curses of being an American is that we're all supposed to be happy and successful and sexy and all the rest of the damn baggage. We're supposed to be--
And so we feel bad about feeling sad. We feel bad about feeling lonely. There's like a secondary emotion where you're not just like, hey, loneliness is where I'm at, sadness is where I'm at, grief is where I'm at, and that's fine right now. And I think also, part of depression is the feeling that it will last forever, which I think is stronger when you're young.
And one of the great lessons of change, whether you get it from Daoism, Buddhism, science, or history, is that nothing lasts forever, and that's also been a great comfort to me. The first heartbreak feels permanent. The third is like, oh yeah, there's a whole process and it's chaotic and loops back and catches you by surprise, but it's a process. You are not parked, you are in motion.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you. Let's turn it to you. And thank you, Maya and Eliza. And I'll save the last question for after.
SPEAKER: Awesome. We're going to open it up to Q&A. Just a reminder to keep your question brief so that we can get as many voices in this space as possible.
AUDIENCE: I was absolutely fascinated by what you had to say about the subject of perfection.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: As somebody who's always been imperfect, notice what this hand looks like and just having lived in a world where perfection is favored-- I grew up in the suburbs in a place-- they trimmed landscaping from magnifying glass.
And thinking, can we learn from the bristlecone pine who lived 5,000 years by being imperfect, by being scraggly, by being beautiful and her bark peeling off? Instead of from the suburbs where we trim the landscape with a magnifying glass?
REBECCA SOLNIT: You know what you remind me of is an absolutely wonderful story-- I think-- it's a Japanese story about a straight tree and a twisted tree, and the straight tree makes great lumber and is cut down, but the twisted tree lives a whole lot longer.
And it's a wonderful kind of tale in which not being useful, not being perfect is a great survival skill. I think I heard that-- it wasn't exactly a question you brought up, but that's what it reminded me of. So that was not exactly an answer, but a response.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you, Dan. Other questions?
AUDIENCE: Yeah. Can you elaborate on your metaphor around kintsugi?
REBECCA SOLNIT: Can you hold it closer?
AUDIENCE: Can you elaborate on your metaphor around kintsugi that you mentioned in your talk?
REBECCA SOLNIT: My metaphor for what?
AUDIENCE: Kintsugi.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Oh, kintsugi. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: The Japanese ceramic.
REBECCA SOLNIT: I know a lot of people have picked it up recently. Chanel Miller, who wrote a powerful memoir and the cover of whose book has kintsugi on it, she's best known as the survivor of the Stanford Rapist. Used it as a metaphor. Roshi Joan Halifax uses it, et cetera.
But I think that there's a tendency to think that when something is broken, all it will ever be is shards, the kind of brokenness where now you're useless, you're helpless, you can't do anything. Or that somehow you're ugly, you're damaged, and I don't think--
And so kintsugi has become such a powerful metaphor for us because it's something that doesn't pretend-- it's the bowl that doesn't pretend that nobody dropped it, that tries to hide that it was broken. But that almost celebrates its brokenness and says, now I'm something else, and that something else is beautiful in a different way.
And I've used it as a metaphor in my-- God, now I'm like, which book was that? Was that The Faraway Nearby or was that Recollections? I wrote too many books.
But I find it-- I just found it such an encouragement that life will happen to you, you won't be young forever. Sorrow will carve its patterns on your face. If you live, if you love, you will lose, you will have losses. People who have no losses tend to not have any loves.
And yet, it can still be beautiful, you can still be strong, you can still go forward. The bowl can still hold something. The person can still find beauty, find meaning, have strength, be loved, be treasured. So that's what it means to me.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Two more questions and then we'll close.
AUDIENCE: I thought about Paradise Built In Hell a lot over the last three years. And COVID was more of an indoor disaster than what you write about in that book, and I'm wondering if you can speak to what you think we can learn from COVID as a disaster.
REBECCA SOLNIT: The best thing that happened to me in COVID was that I joined a group called the Anti-Sewing Squad founded by a performance artist in LA named Christina Wong who, right at the beginning of the pandemic, offered to make on her Hello Kitty sewing machine face masks for people who needed them and was so overwhelmed with requests, she needed to recruit other people.
That became the-- that's A-U-N-T-I-E, not anti-- the Auntie Sewing Squad with 800 members led by Asian-American women.
In the course of the next 18 months, we made more than a third of a million masks for frontline and vulnerable, neglected, and devalued communities. Formed an incredible community, made new friendships, practiced mutual aid, had incredibly funny conversations.
And I wasn't one of the seamstresses. My official title is Writer Historian Shakedown Auntie, because I raised a lot of money and organized a lot of material aid, particularly for Standing Rock in the Navajo Nation.
And so-- and we saw-- disasters are what people make them. And I think had we had Obama or Biden as president, it would have been a very different pandemic. But one of the things that was striking is that the first thing we're all required to do in the pandemic is to think about the well-being of others. To quarantine, to wear face masks, et cetera.
And even a lot of Western medical practitioners didn't understand the kind of altruistic communitarian sense in which many people in Asian countries wear face masks, which is I'm not doing this to protect me, I'm doing this to protect you.
The science showed that face masks might be-- were not that perfect for protecting you from inhaling viral particles, but they were very good at preventing you from exhaling them. And if we all wore them, they really-- they weren't perfect, but they did a whole lot.
And it was such an interesting ideology of isolation to see the rugged individualism of refusing quarantine masks and ultimately vaccines and how fatal that became for people in red counties. And how the pandemic started in Seattle and New York, but it ended up being worst in these conservative places.
But I saw so many kinds of mutual aid. People in Italy and other European countries singing from their balconies. Just the willingness to do what it took to protect other people. Frontline workers, medical service workers, et cetera showing up to their jobs.
Teachers figuring out how to teach students in ways they'd never done before. My friend Wendy MacNaughton starting her Draw Together every weekday for the first years of the pandemic. She gave a drawing lesson that was also kind of an emotional intelligence lesson online to give something to the kids who are suddenly isolated.
So I saw-- we saw the worst of people, often inculcated by a sort of corrosive leadership, but I saw a lot of the best of it. And it was really extraordinary to see people try and figure out, I'm in a completely different situation than I ever anticipated, what can I do for others in this situation? How do I take care of people? How do I reach out to people? How do I find ways to be connected in ways we've never had to figure out before?
And people did. And it was a disaster. And I wrote the A Paradise Built in Hell, which came out in 2009, because I knew we were entering an age with climate of intensive-- both more disasters and more intense disasters.
And we needed to understand who we are in crisis, and that everything Hollywood movies and bad journalism told us, which kind of peaked with the racist disaster of how the mass media and authorities misrepresented Black New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina, we needed to know this other stuff. And so I wrote the book and it's been satisfying seeing people take it to heart and use it, so thank you.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: One last question and we'll close.
AUDIENCE: Thanks. First, I want to thank both of you for your voices that have just been such wonderful guideposts in this time. You were speaking about this idea of the resistance of individualism and the recognition--
REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: --of our connectedness, and the way-- the role the set stories can take in that. And I just wondered, like what forms those stories take. I mean, there are so many ways in which we tell stories, but are there ways that you see as being most effective at reminding us of this?
REBECCA SOLNIT: I think science actually tells us a lot of wonderful stories about how cyanobacteria put oxygen into the atmosphere and made an air that we could breathe. How trees and the ocean, et cetera sequesters a lot of the carbon we put out there.
We have never been autonomous. We have never been independent. You can't hold your breath for more than five minutes. You can't go for more than a few days without water, more than a few weeks without food. You didn't give birth to yourself, you won't bury yourself. You will not make everything you eat and wear and use. You will not make up yourself the only language that you speak.
And so it's only-- it doesn't really matter-- from almost any position, interconnectedness and interdependence is just recognizing the systems all around us, and it's taken some very powerful confusion, denial, propaganda, et cetera to prop up the John Wayne autonomy version of it.
And so I think there's spiritual versions, emotional versions, genealogy versions. The genealogy of other things, of ideas, of institutions, or biological genealogies, science, et cetera. But I think everything tells us we're interconnected.
And I think we're ready to hear it in a different way. It's been fascinating seeing science tell different stories in the same way that science now tells very different stories about gender than it did not long ago as we recognize that gender is not binary and uncomplicated.
It's complicated and nuanced and a spectrum, and different for different species, and the undersea creatures have an absolutely fascinating circus of many kinds and forms of gender and fish that are male when they're young and female when they're older and hermaphroditism and et cetera.
So I think we have the stories we need, and the ideology of isolation doesn't even make sense scientifically, politically, morally, historically, spiritually, et cetera. And so just letting those stories in and seeing what's rich and exciting about them rather than the fear of dependence, the fear of responsibility that I think drives the ideology of independence.
So I think--
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Rebecca.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Terry has a question.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: The last question-- so many of our students are experimenting with their voices on the page, in the world. They're leaders. You have a voice. You are leading with hope. You haven't always had a voice.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: And maybe you could close with some words of how do we find our voice? Where would you begin? And a closing thought for us. And we're so grateful for your presence here.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Thank you. I was a battered child and I found disappearing was an act of safety. I didn't speak much. I was telling Terry, I went to a Vipassana Buddhist silent retreat for two weeks when I was 13 or 14, and people always asked me, was it hard being silent for two weeks? And I was like, I'd just been silent for 13 years, so whatever.
And women, I was expected to be the audience and not the speaker. And as a young woman, I was-- by young men, when I was a young woman, they would find it offensive that-- where I would be like, I think it's wonderful you wrote something, I want to listen to it. But I also wrote something.
Everything told me in so many ways that I didn't have a voice. We've rectified to some extent-- thank you, feminism-- a culture in which women were treated as incompetent, to bear witness to their own experience, that women were liars, women were delusional, women were crazy, women were vindictive. What they said just happened between them and a man. You should always believe the men since men were beacons of rationality and authority, et cetera.
And lots of people told me they had low expectations for me. I think I found a voice in some ways by being a passionate reader. So I was taking in before I put much out. And then by finding people who actually wanted me to have a voice. Finding friends, those wonderful long conversations young women have with each other were like where it began.
And teachers who thought that I could be a writer, when I started pursuing that, places that would let me publish. And it was very incremental. And in some ways, I think I benefited from incrementalness.
I've seen a lot of arrogant young men who are so convinced they're going to write the great American novel that was going to be so fucking great. They didn't write-- they didn't do all the steps between being a novice writer and writing Moby Dick or-- I don't know what the great-- I think the idea of the great American novel is a white male idea anyway.
And I just-- I wrote 800-word reviews. Then I wrote 1,500-word reviews. And then I did the radical thing and wrote 3,000-word reviews. I wrote for tiny publications and then slightly less tiny publications. I got my first book contract in my late 20s and was terrified because-- how do you write a book until I convinced myself 17 chapters was like 17 3,000-word essays, and I could probably write an essay.
And I think that incrementalism was actually great. And that I really wanted to write and to just do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and that was helpful, too. But I think-- I was also saying to Terry today, I don't wish I was young again.
We treat-- as another stupid story in this culture, we treat being young as though it's like super fun and having a sexy young body and lots of lust definitely has its charms. And that quality of discovery I am all for.
But people in their teens and 20s are doing the hard-- are performing the greatest creative task anybody will ever perform-- they're making this self that they need to be in the world, they're finding the people they need to be with, they're finding their vocation, they're finding their voice. That is incredibly serious and hard work.
And I think we don't acknowledge and respect how hard it is, how important it is, what people need to do it. And so I think that that's something-- that's creative work no matter whether you're going to be a dentist or a janitor or a gardener or a farmer or a delivery person or whatever, you're still figuring out who you are, who your people are.
And so much of finding a voice, nobody has ever actually been voiceless. They've had their-- they've had people shut them down, so they don't dare to speak, so they forget what their own voice is. But mostly what we need isn't so much a voice.
The voice is there. We need people who will listen to it whether we're speaking directly or we'll read it if it's on the page. We'll give it space, we'll respect our capacity to bear witness. Our value as people have something to say who have a perspective onto the world.
So I think so much of it is about-- and it goes back to the Sangha, the Buddhist term for community. I think so much of what young people are doing is finding their people. And I remember when I was young, it was so hard as a kid who grew up pretty violently abused to find people who valued and respected me and not accept people who were destroyers, belittlers, saboteurs, betrayers, et cetera.
So find your-- finding your people and finding your voice might be the same job. And I wish all of you who are young good luck with that. And so much respect with the incredible excitement and difficulty tied together in that task. And I thank you all for listening for what has been a very long session.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you, Rebecca. And thank you, our audience.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Thank you.
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