I've somehow missed out on knowing anything about American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit until this year, when a chance social media post referenced something she said.
I remember the time well. Bush, Blair and Howard all pushed the line that the Iraqis had 'weapons of mass destruction' (which it turned out they didn't), and even hinted that they were harbouring Al Qaeda cells even though their own intelligence told them otherwise. I remember a public briefing from then US Secretary of State Colin Powell showing satellite pictures that he told us solemnly were the 'smoking gun', clear evidence of a chemical weapons factory. The photo showed a ordinary semi-trailer. Apparently, this is what they used for chemical weapons manufacture.
A picture of a truck.
In early 2003 thousands of us marched here in Brisbane to protest the proposed invasion, finishing up in the Botanic Gardens to listen to the speakers. Among them was then Opposition Leader Simon Crean who sat firmly on the fence, urging that Howard should not go to war without a vote in parliament but trying not to mention that once this happened Labor would vote for war. He was heckled mercilessly but we knew we were going to fail. A month later, when the invasion was launched, I was in Sydney for a meeting. We finished a bit early and those of us who cared enough walked down to join a few hundred protestors outside the Sydney Town Hall. It all seemed so futile.
It was this sense of futility that sparked Hope in the Dark. In her 2015 foreword she begins like this.
Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.
It's not just morally wrong to surrender hope, or tactically self-defeating, it's also factually wrong. We are not powerless, even if governments, the military and big business are lined up against us. This is what she wanted to show her readers in 2005, and it was still relevant ten years later, and now.
In the original book she begins with a beautiful reframing of darkness.
On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginal Woolf wrote in her journal, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfilment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.
On the other hand, she talks about 'the Conversation' which people on the left told themselves after Bush won that 2004 election - 'the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was'.
Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories, but hearing people have the Conversation is hearing them tell themselves the story they believe is being told to them. What other stories can be told? How do people recognise that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners? Hope is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding than despair and, in a sense, more frightening. And immeasurably more rewarding.
So she uses this book to tell stories of hope.
For instance, the overwhelming story about the peace movements of 2003 is that we lost. The invasion went ahead, thousands of Iraqis lost their lives, the country was destroyed and Al Qaeda, previously kept out of Iraq by Saddam Hussein, moved into the vacuum, morphed into Islamic State and created mayhem.
This is true, but incomplete. It is likely that the power of activists led the Bush government to abandon plans for the saturation bombing of Baghdad. People turned out to protest who had never marched in any previous cause. The media narrative about protestors shifted from 'unrepresentative minority' to reporting the broad base and diverse sources of the movement. New avenues of international cooperation arose, new networks developed. The US, UK and Australia found themselves internationally isolated as even friendly nations distanced themselves from the invasion.
She asks us to imagine the world as a theatre. It is designed to direct our gaze to the stage, where there is action, movement, drama under the spotlight. But it is just as important, perhaps more so, to understand what is going on offstage. It is there, in the shadows, that the script is written and rewritten, that the props are prepared and moved on and off stage, that the actors are selected and trained for their roles. It is there that we influence what is going on.
We often miss these things in the moment, but we can see them in hindsight. For instance, she points to the fact that only a few decades ago homosexuality was illegal and 'coming out' risked ostracism and arrest. What would have happened if the pride activists of the 1970s and 1980s had given up in despair after their initial defeats? Yet now not only are same sex relationships seen as a fact of life, we have even legalised same sex marriage. How is it that this issue went from the shadows to the mainstream in less than half a century? It was because these activists kept on hoping, building their movement and living their forbidden lives regardless.
Thinking about how things that once seemed impossibly distant came to pass, I am embarrassed to remember how dismissive of the margins I once was, fifteen or so years ago, when I secretly scoffed at the shantytowns built on college campuses as part of the antiapartheid movement. That the were protesting something so remote and entrenched seemed futile. But then the divestment of college funds from corporations doing business with South Africa became a big part of the sanctions movement, and the sanctions movement prodded along the end of apartheid. What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past it seems inevitable.
Through the book she tells many such stories. I wish I could quote them all, but you'll just have to read the book for yourself - stories of unexpected victory, of slow but decisive shifts in thinking, of victories that are incomplete and defeats that turn out to be temporary, of forlorn failed movements which inspire their more powerful successors. We never know, she says, whether we will be successful or even exactly what our successes will look like. We have to be smart, and we have to keep hoping and keep trying.
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Nowhere is more prone to the kind of despair Solnit is trying to counter than the climate movement. When we focus on the brightly lit stage we see the glacial pace of change, the inadequate commitments made at each successive COP, the greenwashing and partial solutions, the way the global fossil fuel industry has infiltrated every part of the process. It is easy to despair. The science tells us we don't have much time, and our daily experience tells us the climate is already changing.
In this environment, it is easy for activists to turn on one another. We see this, for instance, in the activists from Extinction Rebellion and its offshoots declaring the failure of mainstream climate activism and telling us that non-violent civil disobedience is now the only viable option. Then in response, nettled by this blanket dismissal, more moderate activists declare that actions like blocking city streets and throwing soup at artworks just alienate potential supporters. As Solnit says, we are often our own worst enemies.
If, to use her analogy, we accept that what is taking place on stage is the story then we are indeed in a narrative of failure. We could blame one another for being ineffective if we liked. It is true that decades of scientific papers, petitions, letters to politicians, licensed marches and so forth have not brought about an adequate response. But why do we think civil disobedience will do better? After all, it's not like non-violent resistance is a new, as yet untried tactic. People have been chaining themselves to trees and bulldozers for decades.
But who is to say these things haven't worked? Who is to say they aren't still working? After all, both the Climate of the Nation survey and the Yougov poll conducted for the ACF show that a massive majority of Australians want to see stronger climate action. The Liberal-National Party government, despite being under the sway of climate deniers in both coalition parties, still felt obliged to declare a 'net zero by 2050' target. The International Energy Agency, long the preserve of the fossil fuel industry, has recently declared that we can't open any new fossil fuel projects if we want to keep warming below 1.5C. Even our biggest polluters, like BHP, Shell and AGL, have adopted 'net zero' targets.
Of course it's not time to declare victory. Many of these targets are still just greenwash, with no meaningful pathway to their achievement. Governments in Australia and elsewhere are still approving new fossil fuel projects despite the IEA's advice. Our governments and corporations are still moving too slowly, still walking both sides of the street, still acting as if we can simultaneously limit climate change and go on burning stuff.
But nor is it time to declare defeat. We have come along way. We have gone from a few hippies and radicals waving banners and being ignored onto centre stage, to billionnaires, big corporations and politicians singing our songs. We should celebrate this, even as we refuse to let them off the hook. We should understand that we are winning, but have not yet won, and should keep fighting.
Who exactly is winning, and what tactics are breaking through? Is it the scientists writing their papers? Is it the entrepreneurs working out that you can make money out of decarbonisation? Is it the big environmental organisations with their well crafted campaigns and insider tactics? Is it the millions people signing petitions and writing letters? Is it the people blocking the streets and throwing soup at Van Gogh?
I think the truth of the matter is that it's all of these. That's how movements for change work, especially such big and complex changes as decarbonising the world. No one activist group, no single tactic is decisive, but over time all these tiny streams come together into a big flooding river which soaks everything in its path.
How do I know this? I don't , exactly. But I believe that it is possible, and that if I and others like me keep working, this is the reality we can create. But if we accept defeat, wallow in our despair and turn on one another then perhaps we won't after all. And that's not a future I am prepared to accept.
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