[The writer and activist shares her thoughts on the climate
movement’s wins, the key difference between optimism and hope, and
the “clarifying” violence climate activists face.]
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HOPE AMID CLIMATE CHAOS: A CONVERSATION WITH REBECCA SOLNIT  
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Stella Levantesi
February 21, 2023
DeSmog
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_ The writer and activist shares her thoughts on the climate
movement’s wins, the key difference between optimism and hope, and
the “clarifying” violence climate activists face. _

, (Photo: Steve Rhodes

 

From throwing soup against paintings to blocking roads to striking for
the climate to stopping private jets from taking off, activists
worldwide are pushing harder than ever for action to address global
warming. And they are delivering a clear and consistent message: what
has long been accepted as the status quo—expanding fossil fuels,
investing in polluting industries, oil and gas propaganda
[[link removed]],
greenwashing, climate change denial
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governmental delay in climate action—is simply not acceptable
anymore. The climate movement is working incessantly to make this
clear to everyone.

When we talk about any movement, including the push for climate
action, we’re talking about a “zeitgeist, a change in the air,”
writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit writes in her essay
turned book _Hope in the Dark_
[[link removed]], which
focuses on the intersection of activism, social change, and hope.
It’s this last element, hope, that can become “an electrifying
force in the present,” Solnit writes, “a sense that there might be
a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present
moment even before it is found or followed.”

As activists and others work toward this door, they do so with the
belief that there is still time to act and that the climate is worth
fighting for. These same convictions are at the core of Solnit and
storyteller Thelma Young Lutunatabua’s most recent project, Not Too
Late [[link removed]], which offers perspectives,
resources, and “good paths forward” for those who care about the
climate. The pair are also transforming the project into a book
[[link removed]], coming April
2023, with contributions by activists, authors, experts, journalists,
and others from around the globe.

I spoke with Solnit about hope and the future of climate action in the
face of intensifying impacts from global warming, oil and gas industry
propaganda and greenwashing, violence against activists, and inaction
by political leaders. The following conversation has been edited for
length and clarity.

STELLA LEVANTESI:_ _In _Hope in the Dark_ you wrote that hope
requires imagination and clarity, and in your latest essay
[[link removed]] published
by the _Guardian_, you said that every crisis is a storytelling
crisis. The Indian writer Amitav Ghosh also said that the climate
crisis is a cultural crisis and, thus, a crisis of imagination.
​​If we cannot imagine it, tell it, be culturally immersed in it,
how can we face it? How do we reconcile these three dimensions: the
climate crisis, imagination, and hope? And if we succeed in
reconciling them, what can that lead to?

REBECCA SOLNIT: I always feel it’s very important to clear up the
distinction between hope and optimism. For me, optimism is a form of
certainty: everything will be fine; therefore, nothing is required of
us, which is really the same as cynicism and pessimism and despair.
Hope for me is just recognizing that the future is being decided to
some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that
reality.

I think the fundamental role of imagination and hope is just the
ability to imagine a world that’s different from what it is now.
[Writer] Adrienne Maree Brown once said that all organizing is science
fiction because you’re imagining something that doesn’t exist yet.
But of course, it’s like, what is it that you’re imagining? I find
that so many people around me are very good at imagining everything
falling apart, everything getting worse. They’re good at dystopia;
they’re bad at utopia.

There’s a lot of reasons why people find dystopia very credible and
utopia or improvements hard to comprehend. I think some of that comes
from amnesia. If you don’t know how much the world has been changed,
to some extent for the better, how much the climate movement has
achieved, then you don’t really have a picture of how change works
either.

LEVANTESI: We imagine hope as something that has to do with the
future solely, but you’ve underscored it’s not just about the
future. What is the role of memory in hope?

SOLNIT: Various people, including the theologian Walter Brueggemann
and the climate activist and lawyer Julian Aguon, talk about memory as
crucial to hope. And I share their belief. If you don’t understand
the past, you don’t understand that people have faced the end of
their world. Things change powerfully and profoundly over and over
again—change is the one constant—and then you can narrow in and
focus on the fact that grassroots movements, citizens organizations,
NGOs, activists—people who are often considered to be powerless,
irrelevant, marginal—have changed the world over and over again.

LEVANTESI: In _Hope in the Dark_ you’ve emphasized how activism
can bring about change in a nonlinear way, how sometimes it is subtle
and slow but how, within it, we must recognize the importance of
victories. What are the most significant victories of today’s
climate movement?

SOLNIT: I think the biggest one of all happened in the last couple of
years, but it’s a matter of consciousness rather than legislation or
divestment or one of the practical things we aim for: we have captured
the public imagination.

Five years ago, 10 years ago, a lot of people weren’t worried about
the climate. They didn’t care about it, they didn’t think about
it, they didn’t see it as urgent, they weren’t engaged with it,
nor were they supportive of the need to pursue the solutions. That’s
really different now.

There was surely a point where we were more or less starting from
nothing, but we’ve built strong movements; we’ve achieved a lot of
victories. The fossil fuel industry is very aware of our power and is
fighting it with everything they’ve got. A lot of energy transitions
are underway. The Paris [Agreement] is a huge victory. And in our
forthcoming book, _Not Too Late_, [we’re] changing the climate
story from despair to possibility. The divestment movement has gotten
[nearly] $41 trillion divested [[link removed]].

Each thing I talk about has indirect consequences. The [fight against
the Keystone] XL pipeline educated so many of us, including me, about
the Alberta tar sands
[[link removed]] and
the role of pipelines in the fossil fuel industry and the volatility
of pipelines as a pressure point. The divestment movement helped a lot
of people recognize this particular form of complicity; a lot of us
have [recognized] what our money is doing, or what our church’s
money or university’s money or government’s money is doing. We
also portrayed the fossil fuel industry the way we portrayed apartheid
regimes and other things as morally reprehensible.

You’re always making indirect change, even with the most direct
change you pursue—and sometimes direct change doesn’t yield
consequences.

LEVANTESI: Repression from governments and police today against
climate activists in movements such as Just Stop Oil in the U.K. or
“Last Generation” in Italy to some extent parallels the fossil
fuel industry’s lies and the climate deniers and delayers targeting
activists through propaganda and attacks. What does this violence say
to you?

SOLNIT: The first takeaway that I think is really important and often
lost is this proves that they’re scared of us. They think we’re
powerful; they think we’re going to have an impact, because
they’re desperate to stop it. You don’t use violence unless you
are really concerned. Propaganda and lies haven’t been good enough.

Violence, I think, is also very clarifying. That is, in a way, almost
easier to deal with than the other thing that’s happened—decades
of denying, trivializing the climate crisis, all the greenwashing, the
pretending that they are doing what the climate requires. When it
comes to a lot of fossil fuel–related entities and beneficiaries of
the industry, we see delay, distraction, false promises, which are
almost harder to fight than violence.

Environmentalists have been attacked [for a long time]. I once read a
lot of the book reviews of _Silent Spring_, Rachel Carson’s 1962
book, and to see the industry and the mansplainers and the corporate
shills attack her credibility, her right to speak, her sanity, the
facts of the situation, to see how many environmentalists,
particularly in the global south, have been murdered for speaking up
since Chico Mendes and Ken Saro-Wiwa in the ’80s and ’90s is to
know [that] when there’s huge amounts of money and power at stake,
the game can be very dangerous—and it always has been.

LEVANTESI: A common strategy of political leaders, as well as the
fossil fuel industry, is to deny the need for change, sometimes by
delaying it and stating that another world is impossible, but
sometimes, as you call it, by promoting “false hope.” Can you tell
us about how “false hope” works and whether it involves the use of
fear?

SOLNIT: On the one side, I think there’s what I call “naïve
hope,” which is really optimism, the idea that things are going to
be fine, that it will all work out, etc. But “false hope” is
usually cynicism pursuing a corrupt agenda, because these people
don’t actually hope the solutions will work. They hope that you’ll
believe—the public will believe—these solutions will work. They
can’t imagine that the world could just be very, profoundly
different in day-to-day life—how we consume, what our values are.
False hopes to me are just marketing by people who are cynical. And
then you see people believing it.

I was really frustrated when the nuclear fusion came out
[[link removed]] of
Lawrence Livermore [National Laboratory]. To see the mainstream media
jump on it, like, “We’re going to have this amazing new energy
source” not only gave people the false hope that fusion, which has
been “just around the corner” for decades, is now really, truly
just around the corner, but it also framed it as though to address the
climate we need a solution that doesn’t exist. [This] is stupid and
dishonest when we already have the solutions.

LEVANTESI: Change is often framed through sacrifice. This idea that
to stop fossil fuel production and transition to clean energy is to
renounce something, to sacrifice something—what’s behind this? Has
the fossil fuel industry succeeded in forcing the perception that oil
and gas are necessary to the way we live? Are we unable to imagine a
different world? What is it? And how can we overcome it?

SOLNIT: I can’t speak globally, but I know that a lot of
comfortable people in the U.S. perceive most changes as loss. It’s
been fascinating looking at the recent controversies—of course
fueled by the [political] right and the fossil gas
industry—over gas stoves
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They’re downplaying the real health hazards of having methane inside
your home, and they’re also downplaying how well induction cooking
works. And so many people are kind of like, “If we change this
thing, my life will get worse.” A lot of it is propaganda, but there
is also a lot of fear that change is always loss.

I also think the whole climate story, since the Al Gore era, has been
told as a kind of renunciation story, and, in fact, I am working on a
piece [about this] right now. What if we invert that? What if we see
all the ways our lives are poor now—poor in hope, poor in social
solidarity, poor in mental and emotional well-being and confidence in
the future, poor in social connectedness, poor in relationship to
nature. What if we imagine the abundance of doing right the things
we’ve done wrong, of a world in which [nearly] nine million people
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year don’t die from breathing fossil fuel emissions, in which
childhood asthma is not epidemic in the places where fossil fuels are
refined, in which the fossil fuel industry doesn’t corrupt global
politics. What if renunciation was in fact renouncing poison,
corruption, deprivation, uncertainty, a dismal future, miserable
health?

LEVANTESI: One of your chapters in _Hope in the Dark_ is called
“Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart,”
which is something activist and Fossil Free Media’s director Jamie
Henn said to you during a conversation in 2014. Do you feel like
everything’s coming together while everything falls apart today?

SOLNIT: I do. It often feels like we’re in a race. Can the things
that are coming together—which, of course, for me would be the
positive things, the climate movement and the changes we’re trying
to make—outrun the negative things, which are both climate change
and its catastrophes and destruction?

The forces trying to prevent the measures we need to address the
crisis have increased greatly. In 2014, people still talked about
climate change largely as something that was going to happen. Now
it’s so in the present tense and the climate movement has become so
much bigger, more powerful. It’s won a lot when you look at how much
progress there has been around legislation, the buildout of
renewables, and the technological breakthroughs.

A lot of times you look at something, and it doesn’t look better
than last week or sometimes last year. But you look at where we were
10 years or 40 years ago, and you see a lot. The long trajectory is
part of what makes me hopeful.

_This article was co-published with Alta
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_Stella Levantesi is an Italian climate journalist, photographer, and
author. She is the author of the Gaslit
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expertise are climate disinformation, climate litigation, and
corporate responsibility on the climate crisis. Her book “I
bugiardi del clima” (Climate Liars) was published in Italy with
Laterza, and her work has featured in The New Republic and Nature
Italy. You can follow her on Twitter @StellaLevantesi._

_DeSmog was founded in January 2006 to clear the PR pollution that is
clouding the science and solutions to climate change. Our team quickly
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