TODAY IS ALSO THE DAY OF CREATION
Rebecca Solnit
In Celebration of Imperfection
I want to start at the beginning. Genesis is wrong. Paradise is a trap. Perfection is a miserable standard by which everything falls short. Purity, it is a pleasure to say, is for puritans, and the perfect is the enemy of the good, and, maybe, to invoke the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, the enemy of what he called the good-enough mother. “Pure water has no fish” is one Buddhist slogan, and another is “like a pure lotus in muddy waters.” The lotus needs the mud.
The world was never perfect, and if it was never perfect we never fell from grace. I learned that thirty years ago when I had the transformative good fortune to hear and read Native American and Californian creation myths, in which there’s sometimes more than one god, or the god or
gods are tricksters, or they’re arguing, or they’re just winging it. They’re Raven in the Northwest, they’re Coyote across the west, they’re the Cahuilla twin gods who argue about what sort of a world they should make, they’re scientists in the lab, artists in the studio, cooks in the kitchen of life.
I suspect that if you see the world as an ongoing improvisation you don’t believe in paradise or in the expulsion from paradise into a fallen world and don’t set up changeless perfection as the yardstick by which to measure all other things and find they fall short. That’s why the epigraph of my 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West comes from Ursula K. LeGuin, who wrote “And he never was in Eden, because coyotes live in the New World. Driven forth by the angel with the flaming sword, Eve and Adam lifted their sad heads and saw Coyote, grinning.” And why I ended my 2004 book Hope in the Dark with “Today is also the day of creation.”
This matters because a lot of people who are convinced they are not Christian, and a sur-
prising number who are actually hostile to the religion, continue to tell stories in terms of paradise and the fall from grace, perfection and ruination. It became a principal framework of the conservation movement, which often described nature with the same madonna/whore terminology used for women. In that cosmology, there were only two kinds of landscapes: virgin and untouched were terms often used for the former, and for the latter violated, despoiled, ruined.
The vision of conservation was based on denial of the indigenous presence in the North American landscape, on the idea that these landscapes were “untouched” until discovered by white men. There were three kinds of disaster built into that. The first was for the natural world itself: denying the presence of human beings in these places meant failing to understand the role of indigenous hunting, gathering, and tending, and of fire as a tool of land management. This led to a century of institutional mismanagement of western lands, notably through fire suppression, which, along with climate change, has a lot to do with the terrible wildfires across the
American West in recent years.
The second was for Native people written out of the story, when their homelands were imagined as first discovered by white explorers and as places where humans did not belong. This representational genocide dovetailed with the more directly brutal dispossession and destruction of Native cultures.
The third thing harmed by these lies was the white imagination, which into the 1990s mostly saw nature in the binaries pure/ruined and often talked about nature and culture as two separate and equal phenomena, emphasis on separate. This contributed to seeing human beings as inherently destructive and in conflict with nature. Conservation itself was based on an idea of separateness, of preserving pieces, rather than protecting the whole. As nuclear fallout, pesticides and other poisons, and then climate change made it clear that no place is truly separate, the ideology evolved into environmentalism, but environmentalists continued to believe in untouched nature.
I was young when those Native Californian
creation stories came my way, and they did much to break me out of the worldview I grew up with. In the white society I grew up in, Native Americans were spoken of almost entirely in the past tense, often asserted to be extinct, vanished, or otherwise possessed some sort of archaic culture that had been superseded. National parks, museums, and other public institutions, along with public signage and textbooks, either wrote them out of the story altogether or locked them up in the past tense.
Of course, Native people for the most part never vanished except in the white imagination, and that vanishing was necessary for the story of discovery, the faith in progress, the belief the land was ours for the taking, and the story of the nature/culture binary. Those stories are unraveling now, and better stories are taking their place, other stories with other tellers and other protagonists. A great resurgence of Native voices and visions came in 1992 as the pushback against the celebration of the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and as a great rewriting of the history of this continent.
I was blessed to receive from this, not an expulsion from paradise but from the misery that is perfection. Still, I see versions of them all around me.
“Conservation itself was based on an idea of separateness, of preserving pieces, rather than protecting the whole.”
In Praise of Imperfection and Impuritanism
For climate, I see this perfectionism manifesting in many ways. One, mostly among centrists and conservatives, is in the idea that stability and the status quo are so essential that we can refuse change, as if getting in the lifeboats was some wild and crazy idea and we should just stick with the ship. But the ship is burning and sinking; the era when we were securely aboard it is coming to a close.
Some see the swift transition away from extracting and burning fossil fuels as the radical change that maybe we should not dare or cannot afford, rather than recognizing the continued burning of fossil fuels is itself a driver of catastrophic change. It’s as if, facing that ship on fire, they insist the dangerous disruption would be putting it out or getting in the lifeboats.
Others are dismissive of existing and possible solutions in favor of perfect solutions that do not exist or cannot work. But we do not have to wait for some kind of magical new lifeboat.
Very serviceable lifeboats are here already. Their names are renewable energy and the electrification of everything–along with good redesign of how we live.
All solutions are imperfect, and so the perfectionists often reject them all and castigate those pursuing them as compromised, sold out, impure. This is a framework best loved by people who are not convinced they are responsible for making solutions realities.
Another form of perfectionism seems to result in the belief that if we can’t save everything, we can’t do anything, that it’s all or nothing, heaven or hell. What I always hark back to is the Cajun Navy and other smallcraft rescuers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the broken levees that flooded New Orleans. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people launched their boats knowing they could not save everyone and maybe they wouldn’t save anyone, while risking their own safety in those filthy waters full of unseen snags. But they plunged into possible danger and definite uncertainty and saved many
thousands, one or three or eleven at a time. There’s usually a lot of room between everything and nothing, just as there is between easy and impossible.
The Power of Memory
If people believe the world is or was or should be static and stable, it’s because they lack the historical memory that lets them take in the immense amount of change over the past decade, half century, and century. The long view lets you see change, and seeing past changes helps you recognize ongoing change. It’s true that humancaused climate chaos causes rapid deterioration of the natural world. That, in turn, requires us to change ourselves in practical and metaphysical ways, a process that begins with believing that more constructive change is possible. One of the things the long view reminds us is that we did not, until recently, have viable alternatives to fossil fuel. We have in this millennium had an energy revolution, except that should not be in the past tense. We are not at the end but the beginning of this revolution. It already has capacities assumed not long ago to be impossible. The costs of renewable electricity keep plummeting far below predictions; the efficiency and implementation of solar and
wind turbines keeps increasing. Scientists and engineers are making better turbines, solar cells, better batteries out of better materials, figuring out power-storage and transmission systems, and less climate-impactful versions of cement. Other experts are rethinking agriculture and food systems, and the design of homes and communities.
We need to change how we live, and that means not just electrical power but the power of imagination. Ideas and values brought us to this crisis, and we need ideas and values that are themselves lifeboats away from extractivism, capitalism, colonialism, institutionalized inequality, and other aspects of what I call the ideology of isolation. We need the most philosophical change and the most practical change together, and they reinforce each other.
We have to believe in our capacity for constructive change as we contemplate this destructive change. That is, we must hope–and here hope is not optimistic confidence in what the future holds or emotional well-being in the present, but a commitment to what might be
possible in the future and to live by principle, no matter how grim the situation may look, no matter how devastated we may feel. Hope is compatible with sorrow and grief, but maybe not with forgetting.
I am more and more convinced that hope is tied to memory and hopelessness to amnesia. There are specific histories of grassroots power and visionary force that changed the world, but the long view also just takes in the mutability of all things, that change is a constant. It becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and that short-term view breeds defeatism. Too, many changes that end with politicians and the powerful begin with visionaries and grassroots activism in the margins and shadows.
As Julian Aguon, a climate activist and lawyer indigenous to Guam, recently put it, indigenous peoples are those who “have a unique capacity to resist despair through connection to collective memory and who just might be our best hope to build a new world rooted in reciprocity and mutual respect–for the Earth and for each other.
The world we need. The world of our dreams.”
The Zapatistas say it yet another way: “The mountain told us to take up arms so we would have a voice. It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us to forget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect our past so we would have a future.” When resistance to the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival was followed by the 1994 Zapatista insurrection in southern Mexico, I had an intimation that these people consigned to the past would be crucial to establishing a viable future. That has come to pass, both through direct leadership in the climate movement and the spread of indigenous ideas and ethics.
“We need to change how we live, and that means not just electrical power but the power of imagination, and how we imagine.”
The Survival of Beauty and the Beauty of Survival
One current version of who we are is itself is a sort of fall-from-grace/expulsion from the garden story, in which each of us is fragile or rather brittle, not made for difficulty and adversity, so that they will break us, and we will remain broken. Here too the framework proposes the alternative to the perfect or untouched is the ruined. It’s true that some have been or will be permanently undermined by physical or psychic harm or illness, but also true that many who suffered continued nevertheless.
The sheer number of women I know who have survived rape, domestic violence, or attemped murder and are now doing remarkable and brilliant things and often living joyous and vivid lives taught me that. The resilience and even post-traumatic growth of most of us matters, and so do the other ways you can tell the story. The Buddhist worldview, so unlike the Biblical story of the Fall, begins with the premise that that suffering is universal, and it’s what you can
do about it that is interesting. And those committed to the path laid out by the Mahayana tradition don’t seek escape from the wheel of birth and death and the suffering that is part of the package, but to pursue the Bodhisattva way–to keep being reincarnated in order to keep working toward the liberation of all beings.
A commenter on Winnicott’s work on goodenough mothers says: “Children need their mother (or primary caretaker) to fail them in tolerable ways on a regular basis so they can learn to live in an imperfect world.” That can strengthen us to face a world that is not going to meet all our needs and desires. I love the interpretation of Genesis in which eating the apple was a good thing and Eve, whose name in some translations from the Hebrew means mother of life, was revered for bringing us into our full humanity and awareness.
I love imperfection, improvisation, indirect consequences, coalitions built across differences, post-traumatic growth, tenacity, and resolve. I love the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which a broken ceramic vessel is reassembled with
gold-laden glue that gives it golden veins so that it is whole again but looks both very broken and very beautiful. That process says the cup or vase will never be what it was before the damage, but it can be something magnificent afterward without hiding its history, its imperfection.
In light of the climate crisis, it perhaps also says that we and our world can never be what we were, but we can still be, and still be beautiful, a powerful model for post-traumatic growth. Our world has been shattered, and we are now trying to reassemble a version of it that works for as many people, species, systems and places as we can. It will not be the earlier version, and there has been and will be profound loss. But there’s also room to make profound improvements, starting by addressing what brought about that loss.
Abundance and Interconnection
The climate crisis is an imagination crisis and a storytelling crisis. I don’t believe we will do the things we need to because in some rational way the results will be better. To be motivated to do what we must, I think we have to recognize the presence, power, and value of symbiosis, interconnection, interdependence, mutuality, and reciprocity. We must also recognize the abundance that could be ahead. The conversation about austerity that is too often the climate conversation assumes that “we” need to give things up, but Oxfam notes that the poorest 50 percent of humanity have half the climate impact of the richest 1 percent. They already live in austerity, with almost no luxuries or impact to renounce. But what if we acknowledge all the ways even we the affluent live in poverty now, poverty of hope, poverty of meaning, poverty of connection to each other and the natural world, poverty of justice, the poverty that comes with fossil fuel that poisons our politics worldwide and poisons our
air so profoundly that it kills eight million of us annually through inhalation alone and poisons water, land, and the bodies of the living.
Capitalism and consumerism would like us to seek abundance as sheer quantity of stuff–material objects and commodified experiences, things that we can own. From the marketer’s point of view, the ideal consumer is lonely, disconnected, glum, cynical, incurious and all too willing to try to meet other kinds of needs–for love, meaning, purpose, dignity—with the things money can buy.
What if we thought of abundance as an abundance of hope, as social connection and friendship and love, as the richness of relationships to other humans but also to places and creatures and forests and the sea and the turning of the seasons, as moral beauty rather than the moral injury we cover up with moral numbing, as what we own together or don’t own at all? As security not in the sense of military defense but confidence in our own lives and communities and the future?
Privatization, so often talked about as it
applies to things like transportation and education, also applies to our hearts and minds, because before you can privatize shared infrastructure or even get people to forget the ecological interconnectedness of all life, you have to convince people all their interests are private, not public, individual, not collective. But the autonomous individual exists for just about as long as he can hold his breath, leaving aside that he was born of and cared for by other people at the outset of his life. We take in the sky with every inhale, the waters with every drink, the land with every bite. We are made of them and cannot exist apart from them; likewise, we live surrounded by goods made by other human beings, as vast and immaterial as language, as specific as the chair in which you may be reading this.
Otherwise
What climate tells us, first of all, is that everything is connected. We took gargantuan quantities of carbon out of the ground where it had been sequestered by plants for tens and hundreds of millions of years. By swiftly burning this stuff sequestered over those eons, we put it back into the atmosphere, where it changed not just the temperature but the whole system. It is now something more chaotic and less predictable than post-ice-age humanity has experienced.
Another kind of change is also underway. Buddhism, indigenous worldviews, and science are converging in a different, better, more functional vision of this world of systems and networks and relationships, this world of verbs and not just nouns, and maybe not just verbs but linked phrases and poems and never-ending stories and ongoing conversations between beings and even between life and inorganic substances and forces. It’s been striking how human nature itself has in recent decades been
rethought and redefined as something more communal, altruistic, empathic than the old Hobbesian man locked in a social Darwinist struggle.
We see what we are ready to see, and we are beginning to see a more cooperative world from the origin of our cells in the joining of two disparate microorganisms as traced by the biologist Lynn Margulis to our gut microbiome to the underground cooperative networks of trees and fungi as explored by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. “Life did not take over the world by combat but by networking,” Margulis said.
In 2012, a philosopher and two biologists published a paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology titled “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” They declare, “Symbiosis is becoming a core principle of contemporary biology.... The discovery of symbiosis throughout the animal kingdom is fundamentally transforming the classical conception of an insular individuality into one in which interactive relationships among species blurs
the boundaries of the organism and obscures the notion of essential identity.”
A great deal of recent research on neurology and psychology has suggested that, like our bodies, our minds only thrive as part of a larger whole. We need connection, to each other, to nature, to beauty and awe, and to the sense of meaning that comes from the past, the sense of hope that comes from the future. What would it mean to live this vision? For our imaginations and our ecologies? Could it usher us from the age of destruction into the age of repair? It is common to speak as though what we need is not yet here and we need to start tomorrow; I want to reframe that to say that what we need is here, but not yet widespread enough, not yet changing enough. Too, what we talk about needing in the future is also often something we had in the past and traditional peoples never entirely lost or forgot.
If these ideas are a challenge to western thought, maybe they’re a confirmation of nonwestern thoughts, and there are plenty of nonwestern thinkers in the larger we. In that
larger we, animals, trees, bodies of water have rights and inherent value beyond their use to us. What if we owe these beings respect as well as care? And by owe, I mean they give us something first. The indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer declares that “Reciprocity–returning the gift–is not just good manners; it is how the biophysical world works. Reciprocity is rooted in the understanding that we are not alone, that the Earth is populated by non-human persons, wise and inventive beings deserving of our respect.”
Reciprocity means something very different than responsibility. Responsibility reeks of duty and diligence, those plodding, joyless virtues. Reciprocity acknowledges that for countless generations and mutations, long before our species and its structures evolved into their current form, something has been taking care of us. We live within countless systems of care, exchange, generosity, and they need to be written into the story.
I was recently asked why there isn’t more art about climate change, and the question seems
to imagine that such art would be narrowly, specifically about the facts, causes, impacts of, and maybe solutions to climate change. Some art does this and does it well. But I think that art has an even bigger capacity to help remind us of who we are, to help us love the Earth and the life on it and to see its beauty and order, to value the incalculable, the unpredictable, the immaterial, to imagine the distant past and future. To become the version of ourselves this crisis needs, the people who know we were never separate and that we are very powerful. To know that the future is shaped by what we do in the present. Because like artists we are all creators, starting with the self and the worldview we form as we come of age.
We need stories that remind us how change really works, how campaigns for rights, for humans, and for nature, so often begin in the margins and only end with courts and legislatures, how heroism is not the muscular violence of superhero movies but the tenacity, dedication, strategic intelligence, and moral compass of the real changemakers.
We need to embrace the stories about the nature of power, the nature of change, the nature of nature and human nature that equip us to participate as citizens of particular places and of the planet. Not only stories of the crisis but stories that equip us to meet the crisis, stories that make us the people we need to be (and good critiques of the stories that cage us and slam all the doors on us and sink our ship).
Those stories that give us wings and toolkits and lifeboats exist. I have tried to share a few of them. There are countless more, and more yet to be dreamed up and told. You have some germinating within you, all of you, and others waiting to land on you like spores on the wind, and others you can make by reassembling the fragments with the golden glue of your imaginations and your fears, which in some ways are inseparable from your hopes.
Today is also the day of creation, I said long ago, and I still believe we are making a new world. I believe it can be in crucial ways a better one.
TH E CONSTELLATION PROJECT
terry tempest williams
Writer-in-Residence
Harvard Divinity School
samuel s. myers, md, mph
Director, Planetary Health Alliance
The John Hopkins University
Today Is Also The Day Of Creation rebecca solnit
Design consultants edward & lee riddell With gratitude the betsy & jesse fink foundation
To learn more about The Constellation Project or view and share digital copies please visit: www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/the-constellation-project
©2024 The Constellation Project
We need to embrace the stories about the nature of power, the nature of change, the nature of nature and human nature that equip us to participate as citizens of particular places and of the planet. Not only stories of the crisis but stories that equip us to meet the crisis, stories that make us the people we need to be (and good critiques of the stories that cage us and slam all the doors on us and sink our ship).
Those stories that give us wings and toolkits and lifeboats exist. I have tried to share a few of them. There are countless more, and more yet to be dreamed up and told. You have some germinating within you, all of you, and others waiting to land on you like spores on the wind, and others you can make by reassembling the fragments with the golden glue of your imaginations and your fears, which in some ways are inseparable from your hopes.
Today is also the day of creation, I said long ago, and I still believe we are making a new world. I believe it can be in crucial ways a better one.
THE CONSTELLATION PROJECT
terry tempest williams
Writer-in-Residence
Harvard Divinity School
samuel s. myers, md, mph
Director, Planetary Health Alliance
The John Hopkins University
Today Is Also The Day Of Creation rebecca solnit
Illustrations by sensei kaz tanahashi
Design consultants edward & lee riddell
With gratitude the betsy & jesse fink foundation
To learn more about The Constellation Project or view and share digital copies please visit: www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/the-constellation-project
©2024 The Constellation Project
