All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 31, 2024 - Conspirituality
26:17
Relief Project #6: Rebecca Solnit

Happy New Year’s Eve! The sixth installment of Matthew’s Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.  Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 20 books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering  and walking, hope and disaster. Show Notes Rebecca Solnit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
This is your regular timeline cleanser featuring interviews with folks reflecting on hope, resilience, faith, and building community in hard times.
You know, all of the things that conspirituality itself can't do.
These are short personal visits in which I ask my super interesting guests the same five questions about their life wisdom as it is in this moment.
My name is Matthew Remski, and Happy New Year's Eve.
My guest today is Rebecca Solnit, who I don't think really needs any introduction, but I'll just say that she's a writer, historian, and activist, who's the author of 20 books on feminism, Western and Indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, and most recently, the mother of all questions.
Rebecca always makes me think very deeply and very empathetically and I just love her work and I was very grateful to be able to talk with her and so here's our conversation.
Rebecca Solnit, welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Lovely to be with you.
Okay, so here is the first big question.
What terrifies you most in these times?
You know, I spend a lot of time facing climate change, which is horrific, but I don't think I find it terrifying.
The parameters are predictable, even though the worst-case scenarios are so destructive, and even the best-case scenarios include a lot of destruction.
I think what scares me the most these days...
Is what Silicon Valley has done to culture and consciousness, the way it's isolated people, the way it's created all these toxic, weird zones where teenage girls get terrible body images, teenage boys get white supremacy and misogyny, where QAnon and things flourish, all kinds of misinformation.
There's so many ways it distorts what it means to be human and the values of the people running these corporations They're people who are very good at finance and software and very bad, I think, at being human and understanding that Why we want to do our own creative work, why we want to read creative work by other people or see it or watch it, rather than stuff made by machines.
Their whole set of assumptions about who we are, what we need, and what's acceptable are terrifying and often disingenuous because they're actually accepting things they know are destructive.
Because like the fossil fuel industry with climate, they also know it's profitable.
And so I see the insidiousness and the pervasiveness, the way it goes at every level from how we think about ourselves, how we connect or fail to connect with other people to election corruption.
The Burmese genocide against the Rohingya Muslim people was really organized on Facebook Messenger and clearly Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook don't really mind.
You know, there's so much going on that traces back to that.
So many vulnerabilities, so many corruptions, so many alienations, so many distortions.
You've had enough time in your career to adjust to the hyperobject of climate change, but I think it seems like when you encounter the technologies that you're talking about, it's a shorter timeline and things are much more accelerated.
Maybe not.
I've been paying attention to climate change for at least 20 years, no more than 20 years, 25 years, pretty seriously.
And Silicon Valley, I joke that as with the Spanish Civil War, I'm a premature anti-fascist.
That was the term for people who were anti-fascist, who got portrayed as anti-communist for being anti-fascist before World War II. But Silicon Valley, which I've actually been pretty horrified by for a long time, I think was social media and the internet entered a whole new level of distortion, manipulation, alienation, creating all kinds of vulnerabilities, corrupt players.
You know, for example, the Vladimir Putin troll army have exploited with horrific effect.
And so there's something so insidious about it.
In a way, climate change doesn't scare me.
You know, I face it.
I work on it almost every day.
Where Silicon Valley, it's not named as a danger the way climate is.
There isn't a movement against its impact the way climate is.
And just while climate can affect our health, our weather, our homes, our food, everything, there's just a way Silicon Valley invades our psyches.
And so much of what you do with this podcast and your work must be about how the internet has created Insidious ways for people to slurp up bad information and misinformation from bad actors in ways that didn't really exist beforehand.
I was thinking as you were speaking that if Silicon Valley as a phrase could have the impact of climate change at some point, maybe there would be an activist resonance there.
You're quite right that it's not campaigned against as such.
Pieces of it are, like there's been hearings about Facebook and Instagram as they relate to teen suicide, teenage girls' body dysphoria, but it's very hard for people to add up all these things that look really different and see that they're all manifestations of the same kind of technologies and corporations.
In the light of this fragmented world that you're describing, what is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story?
I know you have many.
But if you were to choose one that you return to for reliable wisdom and relief, what would it be?
My job since I wrote Hope in the Dark 21 years ago has been to collect and share those stories and interpret them.
And so I have...
I like to think I have quite an arsenal or collection or bouquet of them.
But one thing that I think is very topical in the wake of Hurricane Helene and the devastation it's wrought on the Southwest US and all the other floods around the world comes from the work I did on Hurricane Katrina, which was partly about revising the versions of human nature people have,
but And there's one story that I think is so indicative of who people are in a disaster, but I think also has a kind of moral to it.
I'll give afterwards.
The day after Hurricane Katrina put 80% of New Orleans underwater, not because of the storm alone.
It was an unnatural disaster in which, as had been predicted, the levees failed that held out the water and 80% of the city went underwater.
While the media and the authorities demonized those stranded, mostly poor, mostly black people, as gangsters, thugs, marauding hordes, looters, etc., there was bumper to bumper traffic of people trying to get into New Orleans with their boat trailers to rescue people.
They got dubbed the Cajun Navy, and there's actually a search and rescue group, I think, working in the current disaster.
But so the Cajun Navy was people with all kinds of pleasure boats, fishing boats, little vessels, people in New Orleans used their pirogues, which are just a type of rowboat and whatever else they had, to try and rescue people.
And they rescued thousands of people, and they often had to elude the authorities and the law to get in there.
And the spirit in which they did that, I think, is such a beautiful and exemplary thing of who we can be and who we need to be in crisis.
Nobody thought they could rescue everybody.
Nobody knew for sure that they could rescue anybody.
So plunging in with that uncertainty about what they could do, but willing to find out what they could do, willing to show up, I think that is so beautiful and so encouraging, both about who we are.
And I tell that story a lot because it says you don't have to fix everything to fix something.
You know, we mostly face things that are not all or nothing, win or lose situations.
We mostly face situations in which there's something valuable we can do and which there's something worth saving, someone worth saving, many someones.
You know, get your boat trailer and head out to the flood.
Yeah, and I think the Helene version of that involves private helicopters at this point, which again adds this element of Real uncertainty because these are not professional rescue people who are going up in private vehicles who don't know exactly where they're going to land or what they're going to be able to do or where they're going to be able to refuel.
I think this point about not knowing what you're going to be able to eventually do to help is so crucial.
It speaks to this next question that I have about the basis for forming community.
And the question is, what's the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships?
And how do you work and how do you see other people work to overcome it?
I have to say, and I'm a writer, I've stayed home for a living for 35 years, and that hasn't been that helpful 36 years now.
In that writing is, you know, solitary at home.
I go out on book tours.
I go talk to people.
I've met a lot of people through the work.
And so it's just hard that socializing isn't built into the routine the way it is for people who have sociable jobs, whether they're a mailman or a doctor or Or anything in between.
I should say male person.
And it does feel, again, to go back to Silicon Valley, what I call the great withdrawal has happened.
We spend more time online in our hunger for human contact and interaction and dopamine hits.
And that's withered away some of the other places where people did that.
And people, I think, are less connected In the other ways, the gregariousness of cafes, the free mingling of strangers, all the groups people used to belong to, from unions to bowling leagues to religious groups, you know, when you go for the rites, whether it's Sunday Mass or, you know, Muslim prayer or whatever...
I think all those things have really been withered away to some extent.
And one of the big lies of Silicon Valley is the virtual is as good as the actual.
I think there's something about being with other people in person and it's almost an animal comfort in being part of the herd and a kind of physicality.
And we all know when you're looking at somebody on Zoom, you're either talking or not talking.
When you're with someone in person, you can be quiet for a while.
You know, just walking together, sometimes your walking synchronizes, and there's a kind of harmony that doesn't need words.
There's a physical comfort in physical contact.
So, you know, I am kind of trying to figure out how to get more community, gregariousness, etc.
I have a lot of fantastic friends, but they're scattered all over the globe and the continent.
And so, but I'm also very aware that this is a really ordinary situation for people right now.
I think not everybody's conscious of it, but I think almost everyone's feeling it.
This wonderful US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, talks about loneliness as the other pandemic.
And I'm about to write about what I call the great withdrawal that tech has generated.
You concentrate so much on walking in your work and the psychogeography that you're allowed to explore through that, and I'm glad that you brought that up here.
And I'm wondering whether that is a kind of bridge for you into this gregarious sort of community life that you'd like to build more of.
Well, one thing I have loved about living in cities, even though lots of me would like a lot more nature in all directions, is that it's human scale, meaning that your own body is adequate to navigate a lot of what you need.
In the climate world, we talk about the 15-minute city, meaning Most of what you need is 15 minutes walk or bike ride away, that you're not so car dependent.
I've lived in San Francisco since I was 18. It's maybe the great pedestrian city of the western U.S. And most of what I do, I can do on foot and public transit.
I use a bike more than I used to, but I do walk a lot.
But it feels different than it used to.
I was just in New York City and before that I was in a wonderful city in Mexico.
Where people were more gregarious, more interactive.
I love New Yorkers because they feel so confident about being out in public.
They're not afraid of each other.
They're not afraid to talk to strangers.
They're not afraid of difference, which is something that I think urban life generates and that is really important to democracy.
A lot of right-wing propaganda encourages you to be afraid of strangers and afraid of people not like you.
Which is why they're always spreading a lot of crazy, inflammatory, untrue stories about crime and danger that really encourage you not to go out, not to trust in strangers.
But I really found being in this Mexican city and then being in New York City for the Climate Week events, people were just showing up more.
They were making eye contact.
They'd make a casual remark to you.
They just acknowledge your existence and make room for you on the subway platform.
Whereas San Francisco feels kind of like a zombie movie.
People are staring at their devices and they feel very withdrawn.
They think human contact is a bad thing to be avoided.
Unmediated human contact, contact with strangers.
That's not universally true.
It's more true of young techies than You know, the old working class people, people of color in the city.
But it is this thing where even something I counted on to wrap this up, which is that walking around was kind of like being in community in a sense.
It doesn't feel the same anymore.
People are not quite there.
A lot of your job involves comforting and guiding your readership through the terror of climate change.
So this next question I think is in your wheelhouse, but it's particular to a personal and more intimate exchange, which is, if you were responsible for comforting and guiding a child who was terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do it and what would you say?
Of course, everything rides on what intellectual level the kid is at.
A five-year-old and a 12-year-old are very different beings.
I produced a book with my collaborator, Thelma Young, about that called Not Too Late and have been trying to convince people First, that I run less into fear than despair, or the fear turns into despair with a lot of young people.
And I say, I respect despair as an emotion, but don't confuse it for an analysis.
You can have lots of feelings, but I think it's really important, whatever age you are, to know that they're feelings.
And fear is also a feeling.
And we can separate the feeling of fear or the feeling of despair from a kind of factual analysis of where we are.
And I think one of the things that's really reassuring, while also being extremely practically useful, is to recognize that the great majority of people care about climate change, they support climate action, they want to see it, and a robust climate movement has achieved a huge amount.
And I often think the thing that mitigates fear, which often comes from a sense of powerlessness, Is to act, which is taking power to join the climate movement in some capacity to find a group, to attend protests, to, you know, recognize that people are doing a lot about this and that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, that people care.
I think all those things are reassuring.
So it really kind of divides up into how to deal with fear as a feeling and how to address the causes of that fear.
There's kind of a weird thing happening right now with climate psychology which sometimes seems to want to address the feelings without addressing the causes and the way I look at it sometimes is if you're very sad because your house is on fire We don't need to deal with the sadness.
We need to deal with the fire.
And we need to try and put the fire out.
If the people and animals you love are not going to burn to death, you're going to feel a lot less sad.
If you find out that you can be a firefighter and hold a hose and help put that fire out, you're going to feel a lot more empowered.
So there's not really a separation between the emotion and the action in this case, I think.
You know, if you're seven, there might not be a lot you can do, but there might be.
I know Greta Thunberg started at 14 or 15, and there's been people quite a bit younger than that who decided to take action and really succeeded.
So, you know, I'd invite them to not feel alone, which is also an important part of it.
Fear, I think, is lonely.
I think you're alluding to this, be strangely attractive and bonding.
And when you talk about strange things going on in climate psychology, I'm very aware of something that Actually scares me with regard to my own children, which is the poetry of climate doomerism, which actually says the fire actually is raging too hot, too violently.
And when Rebecca Solnit and other people tell us to go out and act, they're actually giving us a sense of false hope.
And there's nowhere that that actually goes.
And what I see, to be frank, is Is communities gathering around the kind of, I don't know, the reification of despair in that discourse.
And it seems to go nowhere.
It's very nihilistic.
I think that it is trying to allow people to connect with their feelings, but it's not allowing them to have any sort of agency within that connection.
Which, of course, intensifies the feelings of powerlessness, despair, etc.
This is why I say don't confuse your feelings with facts.
You can feel all those terrible things, but your feelings are not the facts.
The facts are we have solutions, people are working on them, we know what to do.
You know, the doomers are the best friends of the fossil fuel industry because the fossil fuel industry loves us to say there's nothing we can do and therefore we won't do it.
What they hate most is people who are saying, I'm not going to cultivate my personal consumer virtue.
I'm going to go be a good citizen of the earth and go out and fight the industry, support the cause, change the world.
And one of the things that's striking to me, you see a lot of...
Grief, despair, not despair, grief, sadness, rage on the front lines, the most impacted climate communities, but they're not giving up.
There's something I've known for a very long time that's even more intense around climate than the other issues, that people who are most directly impacted tend to not give up because that means like, oh, I guess I'll just give up the land.
I guess I'll just become a refugee.
I guess I'll just let my kids starve.
I guess I'll just let the dictator torture all the people.
You know, giving up has real costs.
Whereas for us comfortable middle class, global north, mostly white people, giving up means we get to lounge around and do nothing and we're actually still safe and physically comfortable.
You know, it's an opt-out and it's a breaking of solidarity with the people most impacted.
But I want to add one really important thing, which is I've spent the last 10 years around climate people a lot.
And I just came back from climate week where I hung out with a lot of climate organizers, met a lot more, listened to a lot of people.
They're not despairing.
They're not passive.
You know, a bunch of them have had kids.
It's really striking to me that you see people who don't know very much saying like, oh, I'm afraid to have kids.
And then there are these people who've given their whole lives over to the climate movement, including My collaborator, Thelma, whose husband, Fenton Lutuna Tabua, is indigenous to Fiji, co-founded the Pacific Climate Warriors, whose motto is, we're not drowning, we're fighting.
And so I just see something very indicative about who gives way to passive despair and who shows up to do what they can.
And again, it goes back to the Cajun Navy.
The people on the front lines are like the Cajun Navy saying, I don't know what we can do.
I know we can't make it like this never happened, but I know we can do something and I'm dedicated to it.
And that's the spirit I want everyone with any resources to have.
And almost every one of us who's not profoundly oppressed as a prisoner or something has some resources to give to this cause.
Rebecca, if your wisest ancestor came to you in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would it be?
Oh my God, I wish I knew because then I'd be my wisest ancestor who I'd love to meet.
And it's also weird.
I'm the granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish refugees on one side and Great granddaughter of Irish Catholic refugees from British colonialism on the other.
I don't know where the wise ones were, but I think they were before these immigrations.
And I don't know, you know, the people who came before, I don't know anything about the people who came before who lived in the old country, as they say.
So I just have to imagine it, get it from the ancestors of sorts we find in books, in others, and try to be a good ancestor myself as an aunt and great aunt and godmother.
You know, I've stumped a number of people with this question who say similar things.
They'll say, well, I don't know.
I don't know who they are.
I don't have much contact with them or they came from difficult places and I'm not sure that that's a great pathway to wisdom always.
And I realized that part of what I am asking myself in this question is, If I could imagine what would have been most well-learned or most well-earned by my great-grandfather, however I would imagine it, whether it's been transmitted down through the generations or not, what would that have been?
What did he learn in his place at his time?
So it is an imaginative question for sure, and some people have answered it from the perspective of literature and mythology as well.
My grandfathers were not around at all.
My grandmothers weren't around much.
The one who was was supposed to be a paranoid schizophrenic and was heavily medicated, but deeply loving.
But I don't know about words of wisdom.
The other one was a devout Catholic, so who knows?
But I think one of the things we do as readers and writers is, in a sense, connect to the stories as a kind of family and a kind of ancestors, the wise people we need.
It can be Ursula K. Le Guin or Myth Tellers or James Baldwin or something.
So that might be why I've been so reliant on books since I learned how to read.
Rebecca Solnit, thank you so much for the stories and thank you so much for your work on the world.
My pleasure.
▲
Export Selection