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

by Rebecca Solnit

Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it. It means facing difficulties and accepting uncertainty. To hope is to recognize that you can protect some of what you love even while grieving what you cannot—and to know that we must act without knowing the outcome of those actions.

To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.

Meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus writes, “In a climate emergency, courage is not just a choice. It’s strategic. It’s a survival strategy.”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”

Capitalism encourages us to imagine ourselves as consumers rather than citizens; authorities like us to believe we have no power.

Nothing is inevitable, and that’s crucial to remember in this fight. It’s no surprise that so many of the tactics the climate movement is using to tackle fossil-fuel Goliaths are taken straight from playbooks used to bring down dictators.

The question shouldn’t be Will my actions be enough? but Will our actions be enough? This is a communal quest in which everyone can bring their talents, visions, desires, access—and if one person struggles, we can help each other up.

The poet and noted ornithologist J. Drew Lanham aptly said, “Joy is the justice we give ourselves.”

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. —James Baldwin

It’s asking yourself: What can I do next? And always next.

As the writer Toni Cade Bambara once put it, the role of the artist is to “make revolution irresistible.”

We can start fresh, knowing everything we know now. We can be stronger, kinder, braver. How beautiful would that be?

Increasing the population density in the areas most challenged by sea level rise is not only potentially maladaptive, it can also result in increased rents and property prices that limit the ability of vulnerable and marginal communities to build sustainable lives in these coastal cities and towns.

The choice is between the transformations we choose and those forced on us by the climate we have altered.

climate change is a problem of people. We already have the technology we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change in a manner that brings about sustainable development. We have failed to act on it.

Trying to replace extractivist with regenerative economies.

Seeing the fossil-fuel industry as a secure place for workers is false, a myth that really shouldn’t be perpetuated. It has never been safe, has never been healthy.

Perhaps the most important message to come out of the latest IPCC report is this: How bad we let things get is still in our hands. Additional warming will be determined by future emissions.