Rebecca Solnit

I don't spend enough time reading Rebecca Solnit, though I have mentioned her quite a few times here and read some of her work.

Today on dying Twitter she posted this:

We spent a lot of time trying to convince people climate is real and urgent; that has mostly been accomplished. Now we have to convince people that we can do something about it, that we have the solutions, that most people already take climate seriously and support action, that doing what the climate demands could produce an era of abundance, not austerity, that the main obstacles are political, that civil society has overthrown regimes and status quo and changed the world before and can again.

But there is something in the nature of media and maybe storytelling that finds the disaster more exciting than the solution, and the disasters are spectacular and easy to grasp, the solutions more wonky, and the very nature of news is to tell you what happened yesterday. And what happened yesterday might be another flood or heat record broken or fire; what happened over the past twenty years is a stunning slow incremental undramatic transformation of wind, solar, and related energy solutions, and the growth of public engagement.

Our future depends on motivating and mobilizing the public. Stories are crucial in so doing. So I keep working on it.

And we put this [book] together toward that end. And we keep going.

I keep writing. [Washington Post gift link.]

And keep writing.

And keep writing.

Here's to finding the paths forward by facing the future.