Krista Tippett: You have this wonderful sentence that “History is like the weather, not like checkers.” And you talk about — here’s another. “Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends towards justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.” It’s an un-American way of thinking, but it’s an essential way, I think, to inhabit this century in particular.

Rebecca Solnit: There used to be products advertised in comic books and things, “instant results guaranteed or your money back.” If disappointment is your goal, that’s a sure-fire recipe for it. And for example, Occupy Wall Street was pronounced a failure before it had really gotten going. And at one point there were Occupies in New Zealand and Japan and Europe. In California alone there were about 400 Occupies at the peak in late 2011. And they dispersed as these encampments in which people had these extraordinary dialogues. And the impact of those dialogues is hard to measure. But you can look at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as — and then Bill de Blasio of New York, the mayor of New York, as people who are kind of carrying those frameworks into the mainstream and into electoral politics. And you can also look at both national things — the movement against punitive student debt and the —

Tippett: Yeah, you know, I feel like you’re kind of — you’re drawing a map, and it’s a different kind of map than we came out of the 20th century in our heads with, which is about how social change happens. I think maybe the image people go to in a default way is kind of, you know, maybe the Civil Rights Movement simplified — large numbers of people on the street, a charismatic leader, and laws that get passed right in that moment.

So let me ask you this, because one — I very much appreciated your writing about Hurricane Katrina and the world after Hurricane Katrina. And this is one of these places where we’ve told the story in a certain way, and we — and even from the very beginning, the story was narrated and presented in a way that was largely just incredibly demoralizing. If you met someone — say, a Martian — [laughs] who was not here and had never heard of this, how would you start to tell the fullness of that story of Hurricane Katrina, what happened to this city called New Orleans, and how that history is still being made now?

Solnit: I should say that all my work on disaster draws from these wonderful disaster sociologists who do this incredible work documenting what happens in disasters, and have since World War II. I’m kind of their popularizer, and people like Kathleen Tierney and — and they say there’s no such thing as a natural disaster, meaning that in an earthquake, it’s buildings that fall on you. So what are the building codes? Who lives in substandard housing? Who lives on the floodplain? Who gets evacuated? Who gets left behind?

What happened to New Orleans is that the levees failed, about seven-eighths of the city flooded, meaning that a lot of it was from a few feet to 15 feet or more deep in water, and just all systems failed. And some hospitals were able to run on generators. There was a supposedly — there what was called a mandatory evacuation, but people who didn’t have the resources to evacuate were left behind to face what happened. So that’s the set-up for — that creates a disaster.

And in Cuba, when there’s a mandatory evacuation, everybody receives the assistance they need to evacuate, so it’s our kind of laissez-faire, every-man-for-himself system that left what were often portrayed as “the criminal element.” It was a lot of poor women, single moms with kids, a lot of elderly people. And a lot of the guys who got portrayed as gangsters and things were the wonderful rescuers and these really able-bodied young guys who did amazing things.

Then things happen like they basically get sealed off. You can walk out of the central city to dry land, but the sheriff of a suburb called Gretna and his thugs get on the bridge with guns and turn people back at gunpoint. You cannot walk out of New Orleans to dry land, so you’re trapped. You’re a prisoner, essentially.

Tippett: And that was because of the narrative they were working off, in terms of who these people were?

Solnit: Yeah — well, all the clichés that surfaced in the 1906 earthquake, all the crap about human nature, about how we all revert, especially poor people, especially non-white people, how we revert to our savage, social-Darwinist nature were aired. And the mainstream media — and this includes The New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and The Guardian, all the major news outlets, it wasn’t — were the unindicted co-conspirators, I always say. They start publishing all this garbage about how there’s mass killings in the Superdome.

And that was just believed so much that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sends a gigantic tractor trailer refrigerated truck to get what turns out to be six bodies, not the 200 that are supposed to be there. There’s all these stories that people are shooting at helicopters, so you can’t have helicopter rescues. And so they mount a campaign, not to treat suffering human beings and bring them resources, but to reconquer the city. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana said, “We have troops fresh from Iraq, and they have M16s that are locked and loaded, and they know how to use them.” And it’s like, that is not a humanitarian effort. M16s are not how you help that grandmother dying on the roof. And some of those grandmothers died.

And so people were not a victim of a hurricane. They were a victim of vicious stories, of the media’s failures, of the failures of the government on every scale, from the city of New Orleans that left prisoners locked in flooded jails to the federal government. And so that’s political failures, but behind those politics are stories.

And what’s interesting is that a lot of people believe those stories. And we often treat stories like they’re very trivial, like they’re story hour for kids, but people live and die by stories. And people died of vicious stories in New Orleans. And everybody could have been evacuated in 24 hours. Everybody could have been evacuated beforehand.

Tippett: Well, and the stories you also tell that we don’t hear, which were life-giving — that in the immediate aftermath more than 200,000 people invite displaced strangers into their homes through hurricanehousing.org, which I never heard about; that the massive number of people who went to New Orleans, went to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild — that it was like the Freedom Summer in Mississippi magnified a thousand fold. So there’s also that taking place and those lives, one at a time.

Solnit: And there was — from the very minute it all began, there was tremendous altruism. The first round of rescuers were people who were themselves inside the city, who got boats or did other things to rescue people who came together in buildings that weren’t damaged and formed little communities and took care of the vulnerable.

But there are these extraordinary stories, and people really — that impulse to help is so powerful. And they talk — they call it disaster convergence, and it often becomes a problem where you have — you remember after 9/11, people lined up around the block, half of the country, to give blood. People really want to help. I mean, that’s who we are. And New Orleans for years afterwards had all these people — church groups, and I saw amazing Mennonite builders rebuilding houses, and Habitat for Humanity. And I kind of loved it.

It was a whole spectrum, from Catholic charities to the Mennonites to pretty radical anarchists and people working with Common Ground, which was founded by the Black Panthers and young white supporters and became a project that did a lot of different things — and not all of it worked out perfectly, but some of it was amazing, and it became really a part of the conversation. But they founded the first really good clinic for people who needed emergency care, who needed their diabetes medicine or their tetanus shot or their wound disinfected. And that split off into Common Ground clinic, which is still going strong more than ten years later.

And that’s the kind of indirect consequences that I find so interesting to trace, is that here’s something that came out of Katrina that’s still helping people every day.

Tippett: Right. So we talked a little while ago about love and your idea that love has so many other things to do in the world, aside from these silos of loving our families and loving our children. So if I ask you just what story or people come to mind if you think about the word “love” as a practical, muscular, public thing in New Orleans, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, what comes to mind for you?

Solnit: So many things. It’s a really magical place. People have deep connections in New Orleans. I would try to explain that people in New Orleans and Katrina lost things that most of us hadn’t had for generations. A lot of people lived in a neighborhood where they knew hundreds of people. They knew everybody who lived near them. They might have extended family. They might be like Fats Domino, who was born in a house in the Lower Ninth Ward, delivered by his grandmother. People live in their grandparents’ houses. They have these deep roots and wide branches. And they engage in public celebration. They talk to strangers. It’s a deeply Dionysian place, with the Second Line parades, 40-something Sundays a year, not just Carnival, not just Mardi Gras. And it’s a profoundly spiritual place. So all these things are part of the place, and so they’re already really rich.

But a lot of people after Katrina felt like, OK, we really have to engage to keep this place alive. And there’s a real rise in civic engagement, and a number of institutions around justice and policing were reformed. The police were actually taken over by the federal government, because it was the most corrupt and incompetent police department in the United States. They got a semi-decent mayor for a change, after a lot of corruption — particularly from Ray Nagin, who went to jail for it, the mayor during and after Katrina. And people really started to dream big about, OK, here we are on the fastest eroding coastline in the world, in a city that’s partly below sea level, in an era of climate change, increasing storms, and rising waters. How do we adapt?

And people are having this really exciting conversation about rethinking the city and how water works in the city, building systems of survival — and again, this is like all disasters. The storm was horrible, it killed about 1,800 people, it displaced a lot of Black people who were never able to come back and impacted the continuity and mental health of the community. But it did create this engagement and this really creative planning of the future. And New Orleans might have just continued its gentle decline, without Katrina.

Tippett: Right. And it’s kind of an incubator now, isn’t it? Kind of a …

Solnit: Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of the young people, these young idealists who moved there, fell in love with the place and stayed. And it’s complicated; some of them are the white kids who are gentrifying traditionally Black neighborhoods. But they’re also — they’re not all white, and there are people who are bringing a passion for urban planning, community gardens; for thinking about these social and ecological systems. And the place is very energized right now, in new ways, and it has retained quite a lot if not all of the energy it had before.

Tippett: It seems to me that that story of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina becomes just an extreme example of a larger reality you see. And so here’s something you wrote where it’s so beautifully stated — and in fact, each one of us individually, if we stopped to take it apart, has a story of a million events or actions or people without which we would not be. And you wrote, “Trace it far enough, and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence.”

Solnit: And it’s also about the unpredictability of our lives and that ground for hope I talk about — that we don’t know what forces are at work, what — who and what is going to appear, what thing we may not have even noticed or may have discounted that will become a tremendous force in our lives.

People in this culture love certainty so much, and they seem to love certainty more than hope, which is why they often seize on these really kind of bitter, despondent narratives that are — they know exactly what’s going to happen. And that certainty just seems so tragic to me. I want people to tell more complex stories and to acknowledge that sometimes we win and that there are these openings.

But an opening is just an opening. You have to go through it and make something happen. And you don’t always win, but if you try, you don’t always lose.

Tippett: Yeah, you don’t always win, but I think — I come back to your idea that history is like — and, in fact, our lives are like — the weather, not like checkers. So your point, which actually is — I would say is the kind of complexity that I think theology at its best imposes — that you walk through the openings, and perhaps you don’t win that battle, or you don’t see the result you hoped for; perhaps you outright lose, but the complex way you’re wanting to tell the stories of reality and of our lives is that whatever we do, there are always consequences that we don’t control and can’t see and can’t calculate, but they matter. They count.

Solnit: The guy I’m involved with loves to say — and it’s from Foucault, and I’m getting it wrong — that “We know what we do, we know why we do it, but we don’t know what [what] we do does.” And I love that sense that we don’t know consequences. We can learn and surmise, and a lot of what matters is indirect and nonlinear. And it’s like even checkers seems too sophisticated and complex for the metaphor. I use bowling, where people are like, either we knocked all the pins down with this bowling ball or we had a gutter ball and nothing happened.

And it’s like — my wonderful environmentalist friend Chip Ward likes to talk about the “tyranny of the quantifiable,” and I’ve been using that phrase of his for about 15 years. And it is a kind of tyranny. And it does get mystical, where you have to look at what’s not quantifiable. Martin Luther King is assassinated in 1968. A comic book about how civil disobedience works out was distributed during the Civil Rights Movement, gets translated into Arabic and distributed in Egypt and becomes one of the immeasurable forces that help feed the Arab Spring, which is five years old right now. And most of it doesn’t look that good, but they did overthrow a bunch of regimes. And the French Revolution didn’t really look very good five years out, I was saying the other day.

Tippett: Oh, I know. It’s so important that you point that out, and also our revolution. These things are messy, and they take generations. And we forget that, and we’re already calling it as a loss, and it’s absurd, really. It’s absurd.

Solnit: Yeah, and I think that there are really good points to be made that, for example, that overthrowing a dictator is nice, but you need democratic institutions. In Egypt, for example, the military was a power that didn’t go away. And you need to not just have that amazing moment in the streets and that rupture, but you need to have an ongoing engagement with transforming the system and making it accountable.

But what happened mattered, nevertheless, and I think for people, many people in the Middle East, just the sense that it’s not inevitable that we live in authoritarianism; we are not powerless. And I think of Alexander Dubcek, the hero of the Prague Spring of 1968, which was quashed, playing a role in the 1989 revolution
that liberated that country.

Tippett: That’s so true, yeah.

Solnit: And I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face. And what we get given so often are just these kind of clumsy, inadequate tools. They don’t help. They don’t open things up. They don’t shed light. They don’t lead us to interesting places. They don’t let us know how powerful we can be. They don’t help us ask the questions that really matter and that start with rejecting the narratives we’re told and telling our own stories — becoming the storyteller, rather than the person who’s told what to do.

Tippett: I’m very much kind of a comrade in your reverence for something called public life, which I think we’ve narrowly equated with political life, in recent generations, but kind of opening that language up more. You’ve said public life enlarges you, gives you purpose and context. I want to come to this idea that — [laughs] maybe this analogy is more apt than I think. I mean, we’re in the middle of this presidential election year, which is so confusing, messy, and there’s a lot of anger in the room. And — where am I going with this? I don’t want to compare it to a natural disaster. But you said —

[laughter]

I think I am, in my mind.

Solnit: Oh, go — do it. [laughs]

Tippett: But you said in the middle of a natural disaster, there’s this joy that rises up. So on the one hand, we have this spectacle of, I think — let’s just say — I think I can safely say this. A presidential election is — which is not what any of us — how any of us would want it to be, perhaps. But tell me, where are you taking joy in public life right now? And that might have nothing to do with politics.

Solnit: Yeah, I totally agree, we need a broader sense of public life — that it’s a sense of belonging to a place, by which I mean the physical place: the trees, the birds, the weather, the coastline, or …

Tippett: The people.

Solnit: … the hills or the farms, as well as the people and the institutions. And it’s one of the reasons I love New Orleans. People really engage with each other, as in every day, where sometimes, living in the Bay Area, it feels like I’m in a zombie movie. Everybody’s walking around in a trance, staring at their phone, and nobody’s in the private world your phone opens onto.

But it’s funny, the way you describe it, because I think there’s a kind of self-forgetfulness and a sense of having something in common that brings that joy when it comes in disaster. And of course, the presidential election is the exact opposite. It’s partisanship and this sort of deep attachment to “I’m right, and you’re wrong,” and the squabbling …

Tippett: But — so put that aside, because I think that’s not very joyful for you or me. But where are you finding joy in public life right now? Where do you want to look, in terms of the larger narrative of who we are and what we’re capable of and what this moment — you often talk about — you say, “Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting, whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future.” So where are you looking right now with intrigue?

Solnit: The climate movement, which was this kind of embryonic, ineffectual thing ten years ago, and I was in Paris for the climate conference. And it’s global, it’s powerful, it’s brilliant, it’s innovative, and remarkable things are happening, and real transformations. And ten years ago, we didn’t even have the energy options. We didn’t really have good alternatives to fossil fuel the way we do now, as Scotland heads towards 100 percent fossil-free energy generation, as all these remarkable things happen. So we’re really in an energy revolution that’s an evolution of — a revolution of consciousness about how things work and how connected they all are, and this incredible kind of war of the world against the fossil fuel corporations. It’s very effective.

But that’s the pragmatic side. What I also see is these deep connections between people in North America and Africa and the Pacific, the Philippines, Asia — you know, this global movement that’s really coming of age and that has a kind of profound beauty, not in only some of the individuals I’m friends with who are doing great things, but a kind of beauty of creativity, of passion, of real love for the vulnerable populations at stake, for the world — the natural world, for the sense of systems and order — the natural order of weather — the weather patterns, sea levels, things like winter.

Tippett: [laughs] Yeah, things like winter.

Solnit: Yeah. Yeah, winter as it used — winter and spring as it used to be, where the bird migrations happened in coordination with these flowers blooming and these insects hatching, etc. And what we recognize when we address climate change is this infinite complexity that has a beautiful kind of order to it, and it’s falling into disorder. And so the love, the intelligence, the passion, the creativity of that movement is one. And there’s many other things I could say, but right now that’s just so exciting.

And it’s negotiating. It’s negotiating. And this is what hope is about for me. It’s not saying, “Oh, we can pretend that everything’s going to be fine, and we’ll fix it all, and it’ll be as though it never happened.” It’s really saying, the difference between the best-case scenario and the worst case-scenario is where these people in the Philippines survive, where these people in the Arctic are able to keep something of their way of life. And we’re going to do everything we can to fight for the best case rather than the worst case — without illusions, without thinking that we’re going to make it all magically OK and like it never happened. And so that tough-mindedness is also really beautiful, that pragmatic idealism.

Tippett: That tough-minded hope.

Solnit: Exactly.

Tippett: I think you would give it that word.

Solnit: Exactly, and hope is tough. It’s tougher to be uncertain than certain. It’s tougher to take chances than to be safe. And so hope is often seen as weakness, because it’s vulnerable, but it takes strength to enter into that vulnerability of being open to the possibilities. And I’m interested in what gives people that strength and what stories, what questions, what memories, what conversations, what senses of themselves and the world around them.

Tippett: We’ve run — well, we’re just over about a minute. I just want to ask you one last question. It’s a huge question, but just where would you start thinking about this — how is your sense of what it means to be human evolving right now, as you write and as we speak? What contours is that taking on that perhaps you wouldn’t have expected ten years ago or when you were 15 and miserable? [laughs]

Solnit: [laughs] Yeah. I was a really isolated kid, and my brothers teased me when I did girl things, so I wasn’t very good at girl things, so I wasn’t very good at connecting to other girls, and I was just the weird kid with her nose in a book. And so — I have really wonderful people around me, really deep connections, and that’s incredibly satisfying. And you know, it’s all kind of amazing. I think a lot of us wish you could send postcards to your miserable teenaged selves. I always thought that “It Gets Better” campaign for queer kids should be broadened, because it gets better for a lot of us.

My mother, in her ever un-encouraging way, when I won some big prize said, “This is all such a surprise. You were just a mousy little thing.” [laughs] But it is kind of a surprise. And it’s like, to have this ability to participate and really kind of maybe be helpful to other people, to do really meaningful work — it’s all just this kind of astonishment.

[music: “Children of Lemuel” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a regular writer for publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions.