Solnit

---

uber

===

gmail 3 26 HEATED

Fossil fuel propaganda is evolving

A new analysis of nearly 2,000 fossil fuel ads finds Big Oil has moved from green promises to insisting oil and gas are inevitable. (They're not).

A side effect of the war in Iran is that fossil fuels are falling out of favor. People are starting to realize that sunlight can’t get stuck in the Strait of Hormuz; that EVs can’t have their fuel supply held hostage on a tanker; and that there’s no such thing as a barrel of wind.

It’s probably no coincidence, then, that Big Oil is working overtime to polish its reputation as prices surge and black clouds of poison fill Tehran’s skies. Take this ad from the American Petroleum Institute that aired last week on The New York Times podcast The Daily, during an interview with climate writer and activist Rebecca Solnit.

@ayanaeliza

[

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on Instagram: "A++ greenwashing for…

“Today, America’s natural gas and oil keeps the country moving, growing and building, and makes every day a little easier,” the ad’s narrator says. “But energy demand is growing, and the infrastructure built today will help secure a more affordable, reliable future, with enough energy to go around.”

It’s strange, given the current geopolitical situation, hearing the oil industry tell us that the only way we’re going to have an affordable, safe, and consistent future is to continue to invest in fossil fuels (reminder: even “American” oil is still priced on a volatile global market).

But this type of messaging is not just limited to this political moment, or toThe Daily.A new report from the advocacy group Clean Creatives reveals that the oil industry has systematically reshaped its advertising over the past four years to portray fossil fuels as permanent, indispensable, and necessary for economic stability and national security.

Put another way, fossil fuel companies are no longer trying to convince us they are good-faith partners in the fight to preserve a safe and stable climate.

Now, they are focused on convincing us that the world is only safe and stable if they are in charge.

3 26

Rebecca Solnit Discusses "The Beginning Comes After the End" with Bill McKibben

March 10, 2026 — 4PM PT/7PM ET

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Join Rebecca Solnit, as she discusses,The Beginning Comes After the End, a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change.

Use this link and get 30% off The Beginning Comes After the End directly from Haymarket Books.

KPFA 12 25

No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain by Rebecca Solnit

$110

Solnit explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.

with pod chris hayes? 420

ink chat 3 13 25 coup breakage might open up space for us to write the next chapter

https://the.ink/p/the-stupid-coup?publication_id=70374&post_id=159010393&r=1n6e6&triedRedirect=true

---

Rebecca Solnit - Meditations in an Emergency

essays

---

Rebecca Solnit, "Recollections of My Nonexistence"Rebecca Solnit recounted her journey to becoming a writer and feminist.…

---

https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/21/rebecca-solnit-interview-climate-crisis-activism-hope/

---

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/07/curious-case-elizabeth-warren-and-charter-school-lobbyist-who-wasnt

---

https://www.npr.org/2013/06/15/190446642/telling-stories-about-ourselves-in-the-faraway-nearby

Rebecca Solnit begins her new memoir, The Faraway Nearby, with a question: "What's your story?"

"It's all in the telling," she says. "Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of the world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice."

In her book, Solnit explores her tempestuous relationship with her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's before her death. [loss of and reconnection thru stories] She weaves in being a writer in residence in Iceland and examines the stories of Scheherazade and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

"We think we tell stories," she says, "but often stories tell us."

...

"We often talk about empathy as an emotional virtue, but it's also an imaginative art. Before I can empathize with you, you have to become real to me. I have to listen to you, I have to tell myself your story. I have to imagine what it is like to be you with your illness or your situation or your aspirations or whatever it is. If you don't have empathy, other people might not exist for you."

---

Tom Dispatch [1] / By Rebecca Solnit [2]

Why It's So Difficult to Face the Frightening Climate Change Reality

October 6, 2013

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here [3].

Late last week, in the lobby of a particularly unglamorous downtown San Francisco building, a group of passionate but polite activists met with a bureaucrat who stepped forward to hear what they had to say about the fate of the Earth. The activists wanted to save the world. The particular part of it that might be under their control involved getting the San Francisco Retirement board to divest its half a billion dollars in fossil fuel holdings, one piece of the international divestment movement that arose a year ago.

Sometimes the fate of the Earth boils down to getting one person with modest powers to budge.

The bureaucrat had a hundred reasons why changing course was, well, too much of a change. This public official wanted to operate under ordinary-times rules and the idea that climate change has thrust us into extraordinary times (and that divesting didn’t necessarily entail financial loss or even financial risk) was apparently too much to accept.

The mass media aren’t exactly helping. Last Saturday, for instance, the New York Times gave its story [4] on the International Panel on Climate Change’s six-years-in-the-making report on the catastrophic future that’s already here below-the-fold front-page placement, more or less equal to that given a story [5] on the last episode of Breaking Bad. The end of the second paragraph did include this quote: “In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.” But the headline (“U.N. Climate Panel Endorses Ceiling on Global Emissions”) and the opening paragraph assured you this was dull stuff. Imagine a front page that reported your house was on fire [6] right now, but that some television show was more exciting.

Sometimes I wish media stories were organized in proportion to their impact. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, there is not paper enough on this planet to properly scale up a story to the right size. If you gave it the complete front page to suggest its import, you would then have to print the rest of the news at some sort of nanoscale and include an electron microscope for reading ease.

Hold up your hand. It’s so big it can block out the sun, though you know that the sun is so much bigger. Now look at the news: in column inches and airtime, a minor controversy or celebrity may loom bigger than the planet. The problem is that, though websites and print media may give us the news, they seldom give us the scale of the news or a real sense of the proportional importance of one thing compared to another. And proportion, scale, is the main news we need right now -- maybe always.

As it happens, we’re not very good at looking at the biggest things. They may be bigger than we can see, or move more slowly than we have the patience to watch for or remember or piece together, or they may cause impacts that are themselves complex and dispersed and stretch into the future. Scandals are easier. They are on a distinctly human scale, the scale of lust, greed, and violence. We like those, we understand them, we get mired in them, and mostly they mean little or nothing in the long run (or often even in the short run).

A resident in a town on the northwest coast of Japan told me [7] that the black 70-foot-high wave of water coming at him on March 11, 2011, was so huge that, at first, he didn’t believe his eyes. It was the great Tohoku tsunami, which killed about 20,000 people. A version of such cognitive dissonance occurred in 1982, when NASA initially rejected [8] measurements of the atmosphere above Antarctica because they indicated such a radical loss of ozone that the computer program just threw out the data.

Some things are so big you don’t see them, or you don’t want to think about them, or you almost can’t think about them. Climate change is one of those things. It’s impossible to see the whole, because it’s everything. It’s not just a seven-story-tall black wave about to engulf your town, it’s a complete system thrashing out of control, so that it threatens to become too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too wild, too destructive, too erratic for many plants and animals that depend on reliable annual cycles. It affects the entire surface of the Earth and every living thing, from the highest peaks to the depths of the oceans, from one pole to the other, from the tropics to the tundra, likely for millennia -- and it’s not just coming like that wave, it’s already here.

It’s not only bigger than everything else, it’s bigger than everything else put together. But it’s not a sudden event like a massacre or a flood or a fire, even though it includes floods, fires, heat waves, and wild weather. It’s an incremental shift over decades, over centuries. It’s the definition of the big picture itself, the far-too-big picture. Which is why we have so much news about everything else, or so it seems.

To understand climate change, you need to translate figures into impacts, to think about places you’ll never see and times after you’re gone. You need to imagine sea level rise and understand its impact, to see the cause-and-effect relations between coal-fired power plants, fossil-fuel emissions, and the fate of the Earth. You need to model data in fairly sophisticated ways. You need to think like a scientist.

Given the demands of the task and the muddle of the mainstream media, it's remarkable that so many people get it, and that they do so despite massive, heavily funded petroleum industry propaganda campaigns [9] is maybe a victory, if not enough of one.

Four months ago, two bombers in Boston murdered three people and injured hundreds in a way spectacularly calculated to attract media attention, and the media obeyed with alacrity. Climate change probably fueled [10] the colossal floods around Boulder, Colorado, that killed seven people in mid-September, but amid the copious coverage, it was barely mentioned in the media. Similarly, in Mexico, 115 people died in unprecedented floods [11] in the Acapulco area (no significant mention of climate change), while floods reportedly [12] are halving Pakistan’s economic growth (no significant mention), and 166 bodies were found in the wake of the latest Indian floods [13] (no significant mention).

Climate change is taking hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa every year in complex ways whose causes and effects are difficult to follow. Forest fires, very likely enhanced [14] by climate change, took the lives of 19 firefighters facing Arizona blazes amid record heat waves in July. Again, climate change generally wasn’t the headline on that story.

(For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say definitely, this one is climate change. It’s like trying to say which cancers in a contaminated area were caused by the contamination; you can’t, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is connected.)

Not quite a year ago, a climate-change-related hurricane drowned people when superstorm Sandy [15] hit a place that doesn’t usually experience major hurricane impact, let alone storm surges [16]that submerge amusement parks, the New York City subway system, and the Jersey shore. In that disaster, 148 people died directly, nearly that many indirectly, losses far greater than from any terrorist incident in this country other than that great anomaly, 9/11. The weather has now become man-made violence, though no one thinks of it as terrorism, in part because there’s no smoking gun or bomb -- unless you have the eyes to see and the data to look at, in which case the smokestacks of coal plants start to look gun-like and the hands of energy company CEOs [17]and well-paid-off [18] legislators begin to morph into those of bombers.

Even the civil war in Syria may be a climate-change war of sorts: over the past several years, the country has been hit by its worst drought in modern times. Climate and Security analyst Francesco Femia says [19], “Around 75 percent of [Syrian] farmers suffered total crop failure, so they moved into the cities. Farmers in the northeast lost 80 percent of their livestock, so they had to leave and find livelihoods elsewhere. They all moved into urban areas -- urban areas that were already experiencing economic insecurity due to an influx of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. But this massive displacement mostly wasn’t reported. So it wasn’t factoring into various security analyses. People assumed Syria was relatively stable compared to Egypt.”

Column Inches, Glacial Miles

We like to think about morality and sex and the lives of people we’ve gotten to know in some fashion.[// greek gods?] We know how to do it. It’s on a distinctly human scale. It’s disturbing in a reassuring way. We fret about it and feel secure in doing so. Now, everything’s changed, and our imaginations need to keep pace with that change. What is human scale anyway? These days, after all, we split atoms and tinker with genes and can melt an ice sheet. We were designed to think about human-scale phenomena, and now that very phrase is almost as meaningless as old terms like “glacial,” which used to mean slow-moving and slow to change.

Nowadays glaciers are melting rapidly or disappearing entirely, and some -- those in Greenland [20], for example -- have gushing rivers of ice water eating through their base. If the whole vast Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it could raise global sea levels by 23 feet.

We tend to think about climate change as one or two or five things: polar ice, glaciers melting, sea-level rise, heat waves, maybe droughts. Now, however, we need to start adding everything else into the mix: the migration of tropical diseases, the proliferation of insect pests, crop failures and declining crop yields leading to widespread hunger and famine, desertification and flooded zones and water failures leading to mass population shifts, resource wars, and so many other things that have to do with the widest systems of life on Earth, affecting health, the global economy, food systems, water systems, and energy systems.

It is almost impossibly scary and painful to contemplate the radical decline [21] and potential death of the oceans that cover 70% of the Earth’s surface and thedramatic decrease [22] of plankton [23], which do more than any other type of organism to sequester carbon and produce oxygen -- a giant forest in microscopic form breathing in what we produce, breathing out what we need, keeping the whole system going. If you want to read something really terrifying, take a look at the rise of the Age of Jellyfish in this review [24] of Lisa-Ann Gershwin’s book Stung!: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean. Maybe read it even if you don’t.

Only remember that like so much about climate change we used to imagine as a grim future, that future is increasingly here and now. In this case, in the form of millions or maybe billions of tons of jellyfish proliferating globally and devouring plankton, fish eggs, small fish, and bigger creatures in the sea we love, we know, we count on, we feed on, and now even clogging [25] the water-intake pipes of nuclear power plants. In the form of seashells dissolving in acidic waters [26] from the Pacific Northwest to the Antarctic Ocean. In the form of billions of pine-bark beetles massacring [27] the forests of the American West, from Arizona to Alaska, one bite at a time.

It’s huge. I think about it, and I read about it, following blogs [28] at Weather Underground, various climate websites [29], the emails of environmental groups, the tweets of people at 350.org, and bits and pieces of news on the subject that straggle into the mainstream and alternative media. Then I lose sight of it. I think about everything and anything else; I get caught up in old human-scale news that fits into my frameworks so much more easily. And then I remember, and regain my sense of proportion, or disproportion.

The Great Wall, Brick by Brick

The changes required to address climate change are colossal, but they are made up of increments and steps and stages that are more than possible. Many are already underway, both as positive changes (adaptation of renewable energy, increased energy efficiency, new laws, policies, and principles) and as halts to destruction (for example, all the coal-fired plants that have not been built [30] in recent years and the Tar Sands pipeline that, but for popular resistance [31], would already be sending its sludge from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico). The problem is planetary in scale, but there is room to mitigate the worst-case scenarios, and that room is full of activists at work. Much of that work consists of small-scale changes.

As Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune put it [6] last week, “Here's the single most important thing you need to know about the IPCC report: It's not too late. We still have time to do something about climate disruption. The best estimate from the best science is that we can limit warming from human-caused carbon pollution to less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit -- if we act now. Bottom line: Our house is on fire. Rather than argue about how fast it's burning, we need to start throwing buckets of water.”

There are buckets and bucket brigades. For example, the movement to get universities, cities, churches, and other entities to divest [32] their holdings of the top 200 fossil-fuel stocks could have major consequences. If it works, it will be achieved through dedicated groups on this campus or in that city competing in a difficult sport: budging bureaucrats. It’s already succeeded in some key places, from the city of Seattle to the national United Church of Christ, andhundreds of campaigns [33] are underway across the United States and in some other countries.

My heroes are now people who can remain engaged with climate change’s complex and daunting facts and still believe that we have some leeway to determine what happens. They insist on looking directly at the black wall of water, and they focus on what we can do about the peril we face, and then they do it. They do their best to understand scale and science, and their dedication and clarity comes from connecting their hearts to their minds.

I hear people who are either uninformed or who are justifying disengagement say that it’s too late and what we do won’t matter, but it does matter, because a rise in the global temperature of two degrees Celsius [34] is going to be very, very different from, say, five degrees Celsius [35] for almost everything living on Earth now and for millennia to come. And there are still many things that can be done, both to help us adapt to the radical change on the way and to limit the degree of change to which we’ll have to adapt. Because it's already risen .8 degrees and that's been a disaster -- many, many disasters.

I spent time over the last several months with the stalwarts carrying on a campaign to get San Francisco to divest from its energy stocks. In the beginning, it seemed easy enough. City Supervisor John Avalos introduced a nonbinding resolution to the Board of Supervisors, and to everyone’s surprise it passed unanimously in April on a voice vote. But the board turned out only to have the power to recommend that the San Francisco Retirement Board do the real work of divesting its vast holdings of fossil-fuel stocks. The retirement board was a tougher nut to crack.

Its main job, after all, is to ensure a safe and profitable pension fund and in that sense, energy companies have, in the past, been good investments. To continue on such a path is to be “smart about the market.” The market, in the meantime, is working hard at not imagining the financial impact of climate change.

The failure of major food sources, including fishing stocks and agricultural crops, and the resultant mass hunger and instability -- see Syria -- is going to impact the market. Retirees in the beautiful Bay Area are going feel it if the global economy crashes, the region fills with climate refugees, the spectacularly productive state agricultural system runs dry or roasts, and the oceans rise on our scenic coasts. It’s a matter of scale. Your investments are not independent of nature, even if fossil-fuel companies remain, for a time, profitable while helping destroying the world as humanity has known it.

Some reliable sources now argue that fossil-fuel stocks are not good investments [36], that they’re volatile for a number of reasons and due to crash [37]. The IPCC report makes it clear that we need to leave most of the planet's fossil fuel reserves in the ground in the coming decades, that the choice is either to fry the planet or freeze the assets of the carbon companies. Activists are now doing their best to undermine the value of the big carbon-energy corporations, and governments clued in to the new IPCC report will likely join them in trying tokeep the oil, gas, and coal in the ground -- the fossil fuel that is also much of the worth of these corporations on paper. If we're lucky, we'll make them crash. So divesting can be fiscally sound, and there is a very strong case that it can be done without economic impact. But the crucial thing here isn’t the financial logistics of divestment; it’s the necessity of grasping the scale of things, understanding the colossal nature of the problem and the need to address it, in part, by pressuring one small group or one institution in one place.

To grasp this involves a feat of imagination and, I think, a leap of faith: a kind of conviction about what matters, about living according to principle, about understanding what is too big to be seen with your own eyes, about correlating data on a range of scales. A lot of people I know do it. If we are to pull back from the brink of catastrophe, it will be because of their vision and their faith. You might want to thank them now, and while your words are nice, so are donations. Or you might want to join them.

That there is a widespread divestment movement right now is due to the work of a few people who put forth the plan less than a year ago at 350.org [38]. The president has already mentioned it [39], and hundreds of colleges are now in the midst of or considering the process of divesting, with cities, churches, and other institutions joining the movement. It takes a peculiar kind of genius to see the monster and to see that it might begin to be pushed back by small actions -- by, in fact, actions on a distinctly human scale that could still triumph over the increasingly inhuman scale of our era.

Hold up your hand. It looks puny in relation to the sun, but the other half of the equation of scale is seeing that something as small as that hand, as your own powers, as your own efforts, can matter. The cathedral is made stone by stone, and the book is written word by word.

If there is to be an effort to respond to climate change, it will need to make epic differences in economics, in ecologies, in the largest and most powerful systems around us. Though the goals may be heroic, they will be achieved mostly through an endless accumulation of small gestures.

Those gestures are in your hands, and everyone’s. Or they could be if we learned to see the true scale of things, including how big we can be together.

See more stories tagged with:

climate change [40],

global warming [41],

earth [42],

climate [43]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/why-its-so-difficult-face-frightening-climate-change-reality

Links:

[1] http://www.tomdispatch.com/

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rebecca-solnit

[3] http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=1e41682ade

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/science/global-climate-change-report.html

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/business/media/breaking-bad-race-to-the-end.html

[6] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=340585.0&dlv_id=293799

[7] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n09/rebecca-solnit/diary

[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/science/earth/joseph-farman-82-is-dead-discovered-ozone-hole.html

[9] http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/09/12/new-greenpeace-report-on-climate-denial-machine/

[10] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/09/climate-colorado-floods-causation

[11] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/23/us-mexico-floods-idUSBRE98K0DJ20130923

[12] http://www.trust.org/item/20130909134725-rm708/

[13] http://www.skynews.com.au/topstories/article.aspx?id=904031

[14] http://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-climate-context-behind-the-deadly-arizona-wildfire-16175

[15] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175613/rebecca_solnit_the_fourth_horseman

[16] http://www.c2es.org/science-impacts/extreme-weather/climate-change-hurricane-sandy

[17] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175703/engelhardt_terracide_and_the_terrarists

[18] http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E01

[19] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/10/drought-helped-caused-syrias-war-will-climate-change-bring-more-like-it/

[20] http://www.livescience.com/38244-greenland-melt-speeds-ice-flow.html

[21] http://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/ocean-acidification-today-and-future

[22] http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2013/September/ocean-plankton

[23] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130908135752.htm

[24] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/

[25] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/01/jellyfish-clog-swedish-nuclear-reactor-shutdown

[26] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/6259404/Arctic-Ocean-acid-will-dissolve-shells-of-sea-creatures-within-10-years.html

[27] http://e360.yale.edu/feature/whats_killing_the_great_forests_of_the_american_west/2252/

[28] http://www.wunderground.com/blog/

[29] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/issue/

[30] http://content.sierraclub.org/coal/victories

[31] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175648/michael_klare_will_the_keystone

[32] http://gofossilfree.org/about/

[33] http://campaigns.gofossilfree.org/

[34] http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/ipcc-report-finds-temperatures-on-track-to-rise-by-more-than-two-degrees-20130927-2ujhw.html

[35] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2012/03/climate-change-global-warming-temperature-rise-model-predict/1#.UkgPbCQVmHk

[36] http://grist.org/climate-policy/2011-12-20-markets-and-climate-change-a-case-of-cognitive-dissonance/

[37] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/apr/19/carbon-bubble-financial-crash-crisis

[38] http://350.org/

[39] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/25/2213341/invest-divest-obama-goes-full-climate-hawk-in-speech-unveiling-plan-to-cut-carbon-pollution/

[40] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change

[41] http://www.alternet.org/tags/global-warming

[42] http://www.alternet.org/tags/earth-1

[43] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-0

[44] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

---

TO BREAK THE STORY, YOU MUST BREAK THE STATUS QUO

REBECCA SOLNIT ON WHY JOURNALISTS NEED TO CAUSE TROUBLE

May 26, 2016 By Rebecca Solnit

This essay is adapted from the 2016 commencement address for the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, Solnit’s alma mater.

Break the story is a line journalists use to mean getting a scoop, being the first to tell something, but for me the term has deeper resonance. When you report on any event, no matter how large or small—a presidential election, a school board meeting—you are supposed to come back with a story about what just happened. But of course we swim in stories like fish swim in water; we breathe them in, we breathe them out. The art of being fully conscious in personal life means seeing the stories and becoming their teller, rather than letting them be the unseen forces that tell you what to do. Being a public storyteller requires the same skills with larger consequences and responsibilities, because your story becomes part of that water, undermines or reinforces the existing stories. Your job is to report on the story on the surface, the contained story, the one that happened yesterday. It’s also to see and make visible and sometimes to break open or break apart the ambient stories, the stories that are already written, and to understand the relationship between the two.

There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those dominant narratives or paradigms or memes or metaphors we live by or frameworks. However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and too often the bars of someone else’s cage. They are too often stories that should be broken, or are already broken and ruined and ruinous and way past their expiration date. They sit atop mountains of unexamined assumptions. Why does the media obediently hype terrorism so much, which kills so few people in the United States, and mostly trivialize domestic violence, which terrorizes millions of U.S. women over extended periods and kills about 1200 a year? How do you break the story about what really threatens us and kills us?

One thing to keep in mind is the lifecycle and food chain of stories. The new stories, the stories that break the story, tend to emerge from the margins and the edges. Gandhi didn’t actually say, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” but that’s how activism generally works. And when activism wins, it’s because, at least in part, the story has become the new narrative, the story the mainstream accepts. Journalism plays a crucial role in this. You can see Black Lives Matter changing the story in our time by shedding light on the epidemic of police killings and the way those killings of young people of color exclude whole communities from their rights, including the right to be protected, not menaced, by public officials. You see how this story originated with activists, caught fire on social media, got picked up by the news media giving extensive coverage to stories that might otherwise have been a little note in the back pages rather than hotly debated national news. We know their names now: Eric Garner, Mario Woods, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice. The story has been carried from the edges to the center, and enough people who are not affected directly have gotten on board with those who are. And in my own city, San Francisco, a hunger strike has called more attention to police killings of brown as well as black people, namely Alex Nieto, Amilcar Lopez-Perez, Luis Gongora, and on May 19th, Jessica Williams. Thanks to public outrage a police chief lost his job the day the unarmed Williams was shot dead.

Part of the job of a great journalist, a great storyteller, is to examine the stories that underlie the story that you’re assigned, maybe to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story. Breaking is a creative act as much as making in this kind of writing. Lots of writers have mooned around saying that the world is made out of stories as though this is a lovely thing, but it’s only as lovely as the stories. There are stories that demonize female anger and black anger and revere white male rage. There are stories about the inevitability of capitalism, stories that there are two sides to the reality of climate change, a host of stories that don’t get told because they rock the boat, discomfort the powerful, unsettle the status quo. Those are the stories you are being sent forth to tell this lovely May day, stories that will make you wildly unpopular with some people it’s great to be wildly unpopular with and beloved by others it’s even greater to be beloved by.

Lots of writers have mooned around saying that the world is made out of stories as though this is a lovely thing, but it’s only as lovely as the stories.

Eleven years ago this August, a triple disaster struck New Orleans.The hurricane was the least of it; the failure of infrastructure and decades of bad planning and worse implementation made it an accurately predicted largely manmade disaster, deepened by the failure of the social contract. Poor people were left behind to drown or suffer. Then the mass media showed up to criminalize people trying to survive and obsess about the possibility that someone was stealing a tv set, making it clear that they considered protecting tv sets more important than rescuing dying grandmothers and traumatized toddlers. They fell back on a clutch of cliches that were already well-established when the 1906 earthquake happened here in San Francisco.

By luck of timing, I was fairly well equipped to be skeptical about the narratives of mobs of raping, looting, murdering humans gone savage. I had just completed some research and writing on the 1906 earthquake. Those urban legends weren’t true in 1906 and they weren’t true in 2005, even though the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, CNN and many other media outlets reported on them. “They tend to travel in herds and report the same story,” Adam Hochschild recently said of journalists in the Spanish Civil. Don’t be a herd animal, whatever you do. If there’s a herd over there, someone’s already got the story. Go someplace else and find the story that’s not being told.

I wrote in Harper’s for the tenth anniversary of the manmade catastrophe called Katrina,

A vast population of mostly African-American New Orleanians was trapped on rooftops, elevated freeways, and the Convention Center and Superdome in the sweltering 80% underwater city, demonized by government and mainstream media as too savage and dangerous to rescue or allow to leave the city. Would-be rescuers from outside were turned back by officials, as were people attempting to flee from inside. New Orleans had, at the hand of malevolent authorities, become a prison. Given how the people of Baltimore were demonized for rising up last April, and how chain stores and a predatory check-cashing outlet suddenly became the holiest of holy sites for many Americans, it’s easy to imagine another disaster like it.

The unindicted coconspirator in the dehumanization, imprisonment, and death of so many people, mostly African-Americans, many of them elderly, in New Orleans was and is the mainstream media. They fell back on the usual disaster stories about looting, raping, marauding hordes, eager to demonize Black people as monsters who were enemies rather than as the vulnerable, needy victims of a catastrophe. They invented new stories that turned out to be entirely baseless about people shooting at helicopters and great piles of corpses from imaginary bloodbaths in the Superdome.

To me, those were broken stories, or stories that needed to be broken. I realized, as I kept returning to New Orleans after Katrina, that there had in fact been horrific crimes and the armies of reporters swamping the city had utterly avoided them or been unable to see them: these were the crimes not of the underclass against the status quo, but of the status quo against the underclass. These were police killings and white vigilante crimes. I gathered up sources and contacts, photographs and leads, scraps that had been hidden in plain sight, and gave them over to a truly great investigative journalist, A.C. Thompson, who took the material and ran with it and originated other stories when he got to New Orleans, notably on the police murder of Henry Glover, an unarmed black man shot in the back. That story sent policemen to prison, something that rarely happens. I did some more reporting myself and wrote a book about how people actually behave in disaster, called A Paradise Built in Hell.

At some point in this process, I was leaving a radio station, where I’d been talking about what really happened in Hurricane Katrina. I turned on my own car radio to hear A.C. talking about the same thing on another station. Sitting there I thought: we actually broke that story, turned the official version inside-out and upsidedown. The history people remembered ten years later was not the story the mainstream media used to smear black people and human nature generally in 2005. We didn’t do it alone, of course. Breaking a story is usually a prolonged, collaborative, process. It usually begins with activists, witnesses, whistleblowers, and with victims, the people affected, the people on the front lines. The next step is often carried out people with storytelling powers, media people, who are willing to listen. No journalist is the first person to know anything, if they’re reporting on what happened to another person, though you might be the first person to listen. It’s always someone else’s story first, and it never stops being their story too, no matter how well you tell it, how widely you spread it. That responsibility to the subject, the audience, and the historical record is part of why I’m glad I studied at a journalism school and not a writing program that proposes nonfiction is a novel in which you don’t have to invent the characters or the plot.[1]

This year one of the great journalists of our time died, Ben Bagdikian. He broke the story on the tremendous threat to democracy media monopolies posed, back when I was his student at the Graduate School of Journalism. Long before that, he was the journalist that Daniel Ellsberg trusted to receive the Pentagon Papers that exposed four presidents’ lies about the war in Vietnam and broke the story about the war. I was lucky to be in his class on ethics, where he taught us, “You can’t be objective but you can be fair.” Objective is a fiction that there is some neutral ground, some political no man’s land you can hang out in, you and the mainstream media. Even what you deem worthy to report, who you quote is a political decision. We tend to treat people on the fringe as ideologues and those in the center as neutral, as though the decision to not own a car is political and the decision to own one is not, as though to support a war is neutral and to oppose it is not. There is no apolitical, no sidelines, no neutral ground; we’re all engaged.

“Advocacy journalism” is often used as an incriminating term, but almost any good exposé is that. If you’re exposing a president’s lies, as Bagdikian and Ellsberg did, you probably think presidents shouldn’t lie; if you’re exposing a corporation’s contamination of the water table—by fracking, say—you’re probably not in favor of poisoning. It’s surprising how many people will defend poisoning people, animals, and places, usually by denying that poison is poisonous; this makes being against poisoning a controversial position at times. Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald had a position on whether the National Security Administration should amass vast quantities of data on us all, aided and abetted by Silicon Valley corporations we are all entangled with, but they put the data out there in ways that let us decide ourselves about whistleblower Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations.

The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. It is a tendency of journalism to focus on what changed yesterday rather than ask what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo. A policeman shoots a black man; what do you need to know beyond the specifics of the incident—to know about how often this happens or how it affects communities in the long term or what the usual justifications are? This is why you need to know your history even if you’re a journalist rather than a historian. You need to know the patterns to see how people are fitting the jumble of facts into familiar patterns: selecting, misreading, distorting, excluding, embroidering.

Some of the stories we need to break are not exceptional events, they’re the ugly wallpaper to our everyday lives. For example, there’s a widespread belief that women lie about being raped, not a few women, not an anomalous women, but women in general. This framework comes from the assumption that reliability and credibility are as natural to men as mendacity and vindictiveness are to women. In other words, that feminists just made up all this unfairness and violence stuff, because otherwise we have to question a really big story whose nickname is patriarchy.

I have looked into the question of lies and rapes, and you know who lies about rape incessantly? Rapists. Which is an insanely obvious a thing to say, except that no one ever says it. It’s an unbroken story. They lie about it routinely, constantly, reliably, with rare exceptions. There’s a journalistic aphorism that man bites dog is news, while dog bites man is not, but what if we never ever reported on dog bites, what if people denied that dogs bite or even have teeth or were dogs at all? Thus Rolling Stone’s horrifically misreported story about an alleged rape at University of Virginia was recycled as evidence of general female mendacity, while the fact that the school had so severe a sexual assault problem it was under federal investigation fell by the sidelines. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights noted in 2015 that between 2008—2012, the school failed to take appropriate action in 22 reported cases of sexual misconduct, 21 of which “alleged sexual assault, some including rape and gang rape.” There are, of course, no numbers on unreported cases in what the OCR called a hostile and unresponsive environment for victims. Victims often describe the process of reporting a rape as a second round of violation, trauma, and degradation.

Nevertheless, many people assume and assert that there are a lot of false rape accusations. In fact, cases in which women have untruthfully claimed a particular man raped them are rare. The most reliable studies suggest that about 2% to 6% of rape reports are false, which means that 94-98% are real. Even that statistic doesn’t mean that that single-digit percentage represents false rape accusations, because the category covers various circumstances beyond someone claiming that a specific person did something he didn’t. It’s also worth noting that even true accusations of rape rarely result in convictions. I reported in Men Explain Things to Me, “A 2000 US Department of Justice report cite these estimates for the United States: 322,230 annual rapes, resulting in 55,424 reports to police, 26,271 arrests, and 7007 convictions—or slightly more than 2% of rapes counted and 12% of rapes reported to police resulted in jail sentences.” There are many reasons for the low conviction rate; unbroken stories are one.

I have looked into the question of lies and rapes, and you know who lies about rape incessantly? Rapists. Which is an insanely obvious a thing to say, except that no one ever says it. It’s an unbroken story.

:{:{}:

Every bad story is a prison; breaking the story breaks someone out of prison. It’s liberation work. It matters. It changes the world. Percy Bysse Shelley famously noted that poets are the true legislators of the world; journalists are the storybreakers whose work often changes the belief systems that then drive legislative and institutional change. It’s powerful, honorable, profoundly necessary work when it’s done with passion and independence and guts. What made Spotlight such a great movie was not that it showed how a team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe broke a story about widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic church. It was that it also showed how the Globe had long turned away from breaking the story because it meant shattering comfortable relationships and beliefs.

I think of the mainstream media as having not so much a rightwing or leftwing bias but a status-quo bias,a tendency to believe people in authority, to trust institutions and corporations and the rich and powerful and pretty much any self-satisfied white man in a suit, to let people who have been proven to tell lies tell more lies that get reported without questioning, to move forward on cultural assumptions that are readily disproven, and to devalue nearly all outsiders, whether they’re discredited or mocked or just ignored. Thus the smoothing over of the transformation of our economy into something far more inequitable over the past third of a century; thus the many major media outlets who went along with the pretence that Iraq had something to do with Al Qaeda and 9/11; thus the long craven pretense that fossil-fuel-corporation-funded climate denial represented a legitimate position to be given equal time to the consensus of the great majority of qualified scientists.

For journalists and for human beings generally, the elephant in the room has been there for a long time. It’s not even the elephant: the elephant in the room is the room itself, the biosphere in which all life currently known to exist in the universe is enclosed, and on which it all depends, the biosphere now devastated by climate change, with far more change to come. The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war, and that was something that might happen, not something that is happening. Climate change is here, and it changing everything. It is bigger than anything else, because it is everything, for the imaginable future.

Inhabited parts of the earth will become uninhabitable; crop failures are rising, and they creates famine, climate refugees, and conflict (climate played a role in the Syrian civil war); the Greenland ice sheet is melting at a gallop; the West Antarctic ice sheet is also melting far faster than the models a few years ago predicted; sea level will rise so dramatically by the end of this century every world atlas ever made will be obsolete and we will have entirely new coastlines in the lowlying places; New York City is likely to be doomed in the long run, as is a lot of Bangladesh, Egypt, and Vietnam, along with southern Florida and other parts of the Atlantic seaboard; the oceans are turning into acid baths; the coral reefs that serve as nurseries for fish that feed a significant portion of the earth’s human beings are dying rapidly; extinction is accelerating; and turbulent weather like we’ve never seen is going to be the new normal, producing catatrophes like this month’s mega-fire in Alberta, the biggest disaster in Canadian history (one that has been, incidentally, appallingly underreported in the United States).

All this news has a hard time competing with whatever fleeting human drama best sows righteous indignation and harvests clicks. This is partly the failure of human nature, but partly the failure of the media to put things in perspective and to report on the scale and menace—and on the shrinking option to minimize rather than maximize climate change’s impact. The stories that we are destroying our home—mostly by slowmoving, indirect, complex means—are largely overlooked and underplayed. Since it’s an ongoing process instead of something that erupted yesterday, it’s hard to get coverage at all, even when it’s coverage of what is normal news: scandals, lies, and money, as with the concealment of knowledge of climate change by Exxon and other fossil fuel corporations decades before the rest of us knew. The magnificent global climate movement and the remarkably swift and effective energy transitions underway are described in fragments when they’re discussed at all.

Future generations are going to curse most of us for distracting ourselves with trivialities as the planet burned. Journalists are in a pivotal place when it comes to the possibilities and the responsibilities in this crisis. We makers and breakers of stories are tremendously powerful.

So please, break the story.

Of course some do a superb job of teaching nonfiction, but not all do. And that’s another story.

---

Being unable to tell your story is a living death. The right to speak is a form of wealth that is being redistributed. No wonder powerful men are furious

:{:{}:

Silence is golden, or so I was told when I was young. Later, everything changed. Silence equals death, the queer activists fighting the neglect and repression around Aids shouted in the streets. Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the erased, the unheard. It surrounds the scattered islands made up of those allowed to speak and of what can be said and who listens.

:{:{}:

Silence occurs in many ways for many reasons;each of us has his or her own sea of unspoken words. English is full of overlapping words, but for the purposes of this essay, regard silence as what is imposed, and quiet as what is sought. The tranquillity of a quiet place, of quieting one’s own mind, of a retreat from words and bustle is acoustically the same as the silence of intimidation or repression, but psychically and politically something entirely different. What is unsaid because serenity and introspection are sought and what is not said because the threats are high or the barriers are great are as different as swimming is from drowning. Quiet is to noise as silence is to communication.

:{:{}:

The quiet of the listener makes room for the speech of others, like the quiet of the reader taking in words on the page, like the white of the paper taking ink. “We are volcanoes,” Ursula Le Guin once remarked. “When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” The new voices that are undersea volcanoes erupt in what was mistaken for open water, and new islands are born; it’s a furious business and a startling one. The world changes. Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanised or excluded from one’s humanity. And the history of silence is central to women’s history.

:{:{}:

Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit. Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can’t so easily be blown down in the wind. Stories and conversations are like those roots.

:{:{}:

Being unable to tell your story is a living death, and sometimes a literal one. If no one listens when you say your ex-husband is trying to kill you, if no one believes you when you say you are in pain, if no one hears you when you say help, if you don’t dare say help, if you have been trained not to bother people by saying help. If you are considered to be out of line when you speak up in a meeting, are not admitted into an institution of power, are subject to irrelevant criticism whose subtext is that women should not be here or heard.

:{:{}:

Stories save your life. And stories are your life. We are our stories; stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison. We make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others – stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.

:{:{}:

Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our voices, and of what a voice means: the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent; to live and participate, to interpret and narrate.

:{:{}:

Sometimes just being able to speak, to be heard, to be believed, are crucial parts of membership in a society

A husband hits his wife to silence her. A date rapist or acquaintance rapist refuses to let the “no” of his victim mean what it should, that she alone has jurisdiction over her body. Rape culture asserts that women’s testimony is worthless, untrustworthy. Anti-abortion activists also seek to silence the self-determination of women. A murderer silences forever.

:{:{}:

These are assertions that the victim has no rights, no value – is not an equal.

:{:{}:

Other silencings take place in smaller ways: the people harassed and badgered into silence online, talked over and cut out in conversation, belittled, humiliated, dismissed.

:{:{}:

Having a voice is crucial. It’s not all there is to human rights, but it’s central to them, and so you can consider the history of women’s rights and lack of rights as a history of silence and breaking silence. Speech, words, voices sometimes change things in themselves when they bring about inclusion, recognition: the rehumanisation that undoes dehumanisation. Sometimes they are only the preconditions to changing rules, laws, regimes to bring about justice and liberty.

:{:{}:

Sometimes just being able to speak, to be heard, to be believed, are crucial parts of membership in a family, a community, a society. Sometimes our voices break those things apart; sometimes those things are prisons.

:{:{}:

And then when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable. Those not impacted can fail to see or feel the impact of segregation or police brutality or domestic violence; stories bring home the trouble and make it unavoidable.

:{:{}:

By voice, I don’t mean only literal voice – the sound produced by the vocal cords in the ears of others – but the ability to speak up, to participate, to experience oneself and be experienced as a free person with rights. This includes the right not to speak, whether it’s the right against being tortured to confess, as political prisoners are, or not to be expected to service strangers who approach you, as some men do to young women, demanding attention and flattery and punishing their absence.

:{:{}:

Who has been unheard? The sea is vast, and the surface of the ocean is unmappable. We know who has, mostly, been heard on the official subjects; who held office, commanded armies, served as judges and juries, wrote books, and ran empires over past several centuries. We know how it has changed somewhat, thanks to the countless revolutions of the 20th century and after – against colonialism, racism, misogyny, against the innumerable enforced silences homophobia imposed, and so much more. We know that in the US, class was levelled out to some extent in the 20th century and then reinforced towards the end, through income inequality and the withering away of social mobility and the rise of a new extreme elite. Poverty silences.

:{:{}:

Silence is what allowed predators to rampage through the decades unchecked. It’s as though the voices of these prominent public men devoured the voices of others into nothingness, a narrative cannibalism. They rendered them voiceless to refuse and afflicted with unbelievable stories. Unbelievable means those with power did not want to know, to hear, to believe, did not want them to have voices. People died from being unheard.

:{:{}:

If the right to speak, if having credibility, if being heard is a kind of wealth, that wealth is now being redistributed. There has long been an elite with audibility and credibility, and an underclass of the voiceless.

:{:{}:

What’s next for the women’s movement?

As the wealth is redistributed, the stunned incomprehension of the elites erupts over and over again, a fury and disbelief that this woman or child dared to speak up, that people deigned to believe her, that her voice counts for something, that her truth may end a powerful man’s reign. These voices, heard, upend power relations.

:{:{}:

A hotel cleaner launched the beginning of the end of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s career. Women have ended the careers of stars in many fields – or rather those stars have destroyed themselves by acts they engaged in, believing that they had the impunity that comes with their victims’ powerlessness. Many had impunity for years, some for lifetimes; many have now found they no longer do.

:{:{}:

Who is heard and who is not defines the status quo. Those who embody it, often at the cost of extraordinary silences with themselves, move to the centre; those who embody what is not heard, or what violates those who rise on silence, are cast out.

:{:{}:

By redefining whose voice is valued, we redefine our society and its values.

:{:{}:

• This essay is an extract from Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Mother of All Questions

---