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Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

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In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown. As citizens of the Earth, we have a responsibility to participate. As citizens massed together, we have the power to affect change, and it is only on that scale that enough change can happen. Individual choices can slowly scale up, or sometimes be catalysts, but we’ve run out of time for the slow. It is not the things we refrain from doing, but those things we do passionately, and together, that will count the most. And personal change is not separate from collective change: in a municipality powered by clean energy, for instance, everyone is a clean-energy consumer. Beware of feelings that aren’t based on facts. I run across a lot of emotional responses to inaccurate analysis of the situation. Sometimes these are responses to nothing more than a vague apprehension that we’re doomed. You’re always making indirect change, even with the most direct change you pursue — and sometimes direct change doesn’t yield consequences.

In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown. Rebecca Solnit: I feel like there's concentric circles of climate understanding, and then I feel like I'm making a model of Dante's hell, we'll set that aside. think his ring sort of descended, mine might ascend. Maybe this is purgatory. But I feel like the denialists are just refusing the information, and I think a lot of it is because what the natural world is constantly telling us is everything is connected to everything else, and we all have responsibility towards the whole, which is a very anti rugged individualist, anti free marketeer, um, libertarian thing, so it's ideologically offensive to conservatives. But they're so far over there, they kind of don't matter, and um, but climate defeatists who abound often are also not particularly, they don't deny that climate is real. They often deny that solutions are real, that the movement is real, that coverage is real, that people caring is real. So they have their own amount of denial. There's a kind of depression where you just want to sit in the corner or curl up in fetal position or whatever, but these sort of evangelists of giving up, like the energized ones, I don't fully understand it. But I find that a lot of times that very often that their facts are wrong and that their frameworks about how change works and the nature of power is often wrong, too. And then within that, I think there's a lot of people who care, who would like to hope, but who haven't been offered hope. And then what's really interesting, when you get to the organizers, the scientists, the journalists, the people who are really involved, they're scared, but they're not despondent. They know that this is the decisive decade, that it, that future is what we will make it in the present. There are parameters, of course. We can't make it like we never burned those trillions of tons of fossil fuel and put all that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere. But we have tremendous choices in this moment. And the difference between the best case scenario and the worst case scenario is profound. I wrote an essay last year called Despair is a Luxury because for most of us giving up, at some level we secretly know that we can give up and our lives will still be relatively comfortable and safe.Christiana Figueres: [00:05:59] Paul, I have a question. What do you really think about his statements?

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, 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.”A rally in support of the Global Climate Strike in Quezon City, Philippines, 2019. Photograph: Rolex dela Peña/EPA 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, et cetera. 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. Ariana Brocious: Yeah, me too. I came away from my conversation with her feeling a bit more upbeat about where we're at in this moment in the climate crisis and what the future holds and how much power we have to change it. In addition to climate optimism, she is a vibrant voice on women's rights. Her 2014 essay, Men Explain Things to Me, has been credited with coining the term mansplaining, which is a cultural phenomenon that I think many of us are familiar with. And mansplaining in particular can be kind of an easy cultural touch point. But the truth is that her work is resonant on all sorts of subjects.

A lot of victories look like nothing. The forest wasn't cut down, the toxic incinerator wasn't built in the inner city neighborhood, so the kids didn't get asthma,” says Solnit. But that does not take away from the fact that they are indeed victories. And there are visible victories: Solar energy projects are being implemented so fast – a gigawatt a day – it’s the equivalent of a large nuclear power plant opening every day.

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And with that ringing invocation, it’s off to the races, as people seek out ways to dismantle things that are actively destructive as well as posit new and better ways of being. The American left, someone once told a friend of mine, is bad at celebrating its victories. (The same may well go for the left in other countries, too.) We have victories. Some of them are very large, and are why your life is the shape it is. The victories are reminders that we are not powerless, and our work is not futile. The future is not yet written, but by reading the past, we see patterns that can help us shape that future. People who proclaim with authority what is or is not going to happen just bolster their own sense of self and sabotage your belief in what is possible. There was, according to conventional wisdom, never going to be marriage equality in Ireland or Spain, or a US president honouring trans visibility day, or Canada ceding 20% of its land mass to indigenous self-governance as Nunavut, or an end to Britain running on coal, or Costa Rica coming close to 100% clean energy. The historical record tells us that the unexpected happens regularly – and by unexpected, I mean unexpected to people who thought they knew what was going to happen. Ariana Brocious: But this idea that people really come together and find like a truer sense of being in these situations, I think is one that is very hope filling when you think about what future... Most likely, uh, you know, even if we do accomplish what we're hoping in terms of keeping climate impacts lesser, we're still going to have them, we're going to continue to have them, and we're going to have to find that resilience. What have you changed your mind about, and why? Tom Rivett-Carnac: [00:07:07] Well, Paul, I mean, a sort of that was a very impressive four minute review of Stuart Kirk concluding discussions about steps on the moon, microelectronics quotes from 20th century economists, ocean acidification and the patriarchy, which was a tour de force, I would say. Cristiana. Is there anything left to add?

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