Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope. octavia butler

Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

wishing I could be transformed into a tree until peace came again.”

how to make room for the small and subjective inside something big and historic.

where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.

you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing other things that may seem entirely unrelated, and how necessary this may be.

What, asks the parable, is the right thing to do at that moment, and the answer is to savor the berry. It’s a story suggesting that we are always mortal and might die sooner than we think: there are often tigers, there are sometimes strawberries.

to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in moments of delight, even rapture, and he wrote about them often,

records of something almost antithetical to the subjects of a political writer: places in which nothing was seriously wrong and no conflicts raged.

To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up.

my garden is very productive outside of the logic of productivity—it makes a lot of stuff that’s edible and nourishing and all that, but it’s also ‘productive’ in ways you wouldn’t think necessarily to measure.”

a way to leave the work behind so you can come back to it fresh or find unexpected points of entry into it.

Orwell in going rural was, among other things, returning to the source of metaphor, aphorism, and simile.

joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new things,

in the Carboniferous, vast amounts of carbon dioxide taken out of the air by plants did not return. The cycle was broken. As dead plant matter, the carbon went into the swamps and water-soaked earth and became peat. The peat over eons compressed, dried out, and became coal.

“One way of looking at trees is that they are captured light.

Even the most solid of beings, the giant sequoias, are really light and air.”

In the age of the coal forests, plants pulled so much insulating carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that the era ended in a climate crash—an ice age.

Think of the Carboniferous as a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago.

oil and gas that are likewise the product of ancient plants, likewise sequestered carbon, likewise catastrophically changing the carbon dioxide levels of the earth. By dumping the residue of the distant past into the sky we are heating the globe and breaking the elegant orchestration of organic and inorganic systems, of the seasons and growing cycles, the weather and migrations and blooms and fruitings, of the currents of air and ocean.

we have outpaced the capacity of plants to recapture the carbon. “All that is solid melts into air,”

mechanical self-transcendence, and also a way to make and become monsters.

The country had replaced coal with oil and gas,

the death of coal as a fuel and an industry is predicted to be complete in the United Kingdom by 2025. It will be the death of a kind of death.

the Great Smog of 1952, which shut down the city for four days with fumes so dense that vehicles and pedestrians couldn’t navigate the streets and even theaters and other indoor spaces lost visibility.

formula a little like some of the poison gases of the First World War,

800,000 Europeans and 8.8 million worldwide die annually from air pollution, mostly from burning fossil fuels, and a 2021 study went further to charge fossil fuel emissions with one in five deaths worldwide in 2018, and one in three in eastern Asia that year.

London smog he inhaled during his sojourns there in the 1930s and 1940s must have contributed to the abysmal condition of his lungs and early death.

it’s destroyed immense expanses of land and contaminated water on all the continents on Earth except Antarctica.

has been a war against the earth and the atmosphere.

whole classes of chemicals and plastics had yet to be deployed.

the black rivers of the industrial north, and unregulated pollution of air and water, with few exceptions, was the norm into the postwar era.

Even so, it was far more intact and sustainable than the world we inhabit today. It looks like Eden from 2021.

350 ppm settled upon by climate scientist James Hansen as the upper limit for a stable Earth.

1936: it was as different imaginatively as it was ecologically.

the world was big enough and resilient enough to absorb our harm, that the damage was always going to be local, that whatever we did to the parts would not undermine the whole, that there would always be more.

Wow

to see the garden as a reaction against where he had just been.

collaboration with the world of and work of plants, the establishment and tending of a few more carbon-sequestering, oxygen-producing organisms, the desire to be agrarian, settled, to bet on a future in which the roses and trees would bloom for years and the latter would bear fruit in decades to come

Tina Modotti, Roses, Mexico, 1924.

Tina Modotti

1924 photograph Roses, Mexico

like a portrait of a child, an adult, and two youths, these four flowers in three stages of life.

gravity has gently pressed the arrangement of petals of the two intermediate flowers into something closer to an oval than a circle.

pale roses are both entirely recognizable and shown in an unfamiliar way, and they are individuals, at different stages of their lives,

a youthful complexion was once described as “blooming.”

Fresh is another word that indicates youth, newness, but also mortality or transience. Something that will never fade or die was never fresh.

a flower is also a promise.

Around the same time that Modotti and, in California, Imogen Cunningham were photographing flowers close-up, Georgia O’Keeffe had begun making enormous paintings of single flowers

In Mexico, roses have a particular significance