A 21st Century Spirit of Sí, Se Puede

For many decades now, books given to me for Christmas have come to seem like a form of prophesy and a gauge of the health and spirit of the country and even much of the world. Since the mid 1970’s, the prophetic trend of those Christmas books has been apocalyptic, especially about the environment and atmospheric heating and climate change.

This year, my pile of Christmas books took a different prophetic direction. It came as an inspiring shock. Apocalypse was nowhere to be seen. In its place came books motivated by a level-headed realism about climate change as the dominant challenge, not the obliterating curse, of our times.

Three books give a gist of this burgeoning prophetic direction: “Solved: How the World’s Great Cities Are Fixing the Climate Crisis,” by David Miller; “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility,” edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua; and “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet,” by Hannah Ritchie.

In a time of bewildering and demoralizing change and foreboding crisis, these books empower rather than consternate and paralyze. For people like me — and there are many of us — who thrive on realistic assessments of the possible, and who see good fortune as the offspring of effort, anything that energizes in us the willpower embodied in the old battle cry of the United Farm Workers — “Si, se puede” or “Yes, it’s possible,” “Yes, we can” and “Yes, it can be done,” is a great gift indeed.

I don’t know if these three books, and others like them, are destined to become as influential as futurist Alvin Toffler’s catalyzing 1970 book “Future Shock,” or have as great an impact as the Club of Rome’s 1972 groundbreaking “The Limits to Growth,” or have the common sense realism and longevity of the publications of Lester Brown and the World Watch Institute from the ‘60s well into the 21^st century. These new books have arisen out of the survival instincts and experience of pragmatists who have come into their own and who are not about to give up on themselves or on their world. I am buoyed by their existence.

Dr. Hanna Ritchie is a “Youth Climate Champion” of Scotland and a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Programme on Global Development. Her book, “Not the End of the World,” is pretty much the exact opposite of alarming doomsday climate books like David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming,” or even Bjorn Longborg’s “no big deal” book on “free market solutions” to atmospheric warming entitled “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

I tend to be suspicious of any research that completely reverses previous findings. Ritchie’s extensive research, though, doesn’t so much debunk as it reframes. And her program for building a “sustainable planet” is clear-headed about how warming has arisen and what needs to be done to slow it down and eventually stop it. While it’s important for each of us to follow our environmental conscience in our daily lives, she writes “systemic change is the key.” And that means for each of us to radically ramp up our political advocacy and lobbying, as well as what financial support we can muster in advocating the massive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Rebecca Solnit’s and Thelma Young Lutunatabua’s book “Not Too Late” puts together more than 20 essayists from around the planet who focus on what it takes to move from despair to possibility. In her own essay, “Difficult Is Not the Same as Impossible,” Solnit writes, “It is late. We are deep in an emergency. But it is not too late, because the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now. The longer we wait to act, the more limited the options, but scientists tell us there are good options and great urgency to embrace them while we can.”

David Miller in his book “Solved” takes the “climate crisis” out of the realm of grand abstractions and looks at it through the lens of down and dirty urban problem solving and the myriad positive options being explored right now in Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, Oslo, Sydney and more than a hundred other major cities. It shows readers that cities are the not only the hot spots of the world, but laboratories of real-time problem solving that can give us a hopeful guide for our own political and personal environmental struggles.

Hope, Solnit writes, “is not optimism.” Optimism leads to “passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss.” It means taking what happens to the world personally and realistically, and doing what we think is right and what our conscience says we have to do.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Photo by Jose Mesa)