In “Not Too Late,” a Vital, Kaleidoscopic View on the Climate Crisis | The Slowdown - Culture, Nature, Future
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The cover of “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility” (2023). (Courtesy Haymarket Books)
The cover of “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility” (2023). (Courtesy Haymarket Books)

If there’s one book I’m going to be shoving into peoples’ hands for years to come, it’s the recently released collection of essays and interviews Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (Haymarket Books)—which is why it’s our pick for The Slowdown’s debut Book of the Month column.

Expertly edited and curated by writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, the co-founders of a new project from which the book takes its title, Not Too Late brings together 20 contributions from a diverse range of key voices in today’s climate conversation, many of them unsung, including the writer and activist adrienne maree brown, the climate scientist Dr. Jacquelyn Gill, and the organizer Yotam Marom. Presenting what may be the most zeitgeisty, potent, and on-point package—a kaleidoscope, really—of writing and thought related to the climate crisis to date, this is a vital and enlivening book that, as it makes glaringly, bracingly clear, arrives at a pivotal moment in the history of humankind and the planet.

Left: Rebecca Solnit. (Photo: Trent Davis Bailey). Right: Thelma Young Lutunatabua. (Courtesy Haymarket Books)
Left: Rebecca Solnit. (Photo: Trent Davis Bailey). Right: Thelma Young Lutunatabua. (Courtesy Haymarket Books)

Not Too Late’s urgent crux is captured in one sentence in particular, from the climate scientist Dr. Joëlle Gergis: “When you realize that the 2020s will be remembered as the decade that determined the fate of humanity, you will tap into an eternal evolutionary force that has transformed the world time and time again.”

Though its pages burst with a profound sense of hope—a subject underlying much of Solnit’s writing, especially the books A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) and Hope in the Dark (2004)—it is not of the rah-rah, “Yes we can!” Obama-era variety. Not Too Late firmly embraces the unignorable, all-too-real grief, loss, pain, and suffering inherent in our present climate reality. As Solnit puts it, “To hope is to recognize that you can protect some of what you love even while grieving what you cannot—and to know that we must act without knowing the outcome of those actions.” In many respects the opposite of David Wallace-Wells’s extremely bleak but also essential climate book The Uninhabitable Earth, from 2019, Not Too Late offers a more optimistic way forward, one full of viable alternatives and, to use a phrase of the climate scholar Farhana Sultana, “revolutionary potentiality.” And it does so without getting too wishy-washy or skirting around the brutal facts of our precarious present—what Lutunatabua, at various turns in the book, describes as a “ticking clock of terror,” a “horrid perpetuating whirlwind,” and a “deep uphill confrontation with entrenched powers that have had the luxury of domination for too long.” In another essay, the climate writer Mary Annaïse Heglar pinpoints the emotional and psychological torment of the climate crisis, quite simply, as “the experience of watching the world fall apart in front of our eyes.”

At a time when conversations seem to be (and in most cases are) more fractured than ever, even amongst those within the climate movement, and with misinformation running rampant online and off, this book is a balm. Rather than thinking about our present situation as one of “resource scarcity,” a fear-mongering phrase, its contributors emphasize the incredible abundance all around us—an abundance of “intersectional solutions” and “values of community, care, and collaboration” (Gloria Walton, the president and CEO of Los Angeles–based Solutions Project); an abundance of kinship, love, and solidarity (Sultana); an abundance of ingenuity and storytelling (the Guam-based lawyer and writer Julian Aguon). In a conversation with Lutunatabua, brown captures this sentiment entirely: “I think if we were to unshackle our imaginations, we would be able to see this is an abundant place that has everything we need.”

If there were a word to sum up this book, it would be abundance. Upon finishing it, I felt fortified and open-hearted, and, despite our stark climate predicament, with a strong sense of empowerment and aliveness and worth. In many respects, Not Too Late could be viewed as a compass, a North Star, a wayfinding device. I will carry it with me and return to it again and again as I navigate the various climate absurdities and calamities that are sure to come in the future.

In perhaps the most moving, impactful piece of writing in the book, Marom unpacks the subject of despair, then ingeniously flips it on its head. Despair, he writes, is at once “a reasonable reaction to the world we live in”; “the kind of thing that comes in waves, creeps under your skin, finds its way into your belly when you’re not paying attention”; “the easy way out”; “bad politics”; and “a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Marom emphasizes, instead, the momentum- and community-building upsides of despair—upsides that have added fuel to the climate conversation, allowing it, in dynamic, roundabout ways, to move from the margins to the mainstream over the past 15 years. At the book’s halfway point, a 28-year timeline titled “An Extremely Incomplete List of Climate Victories” highlights the once seemingly small milestones, from 1978 to 2022, that have resulted in a giant, cataclysmic shift.

Avoiding the kind of off-putting insidery lingo and dry U.N. climate-speak that often wedges its way into books in the climate category, Not Too Late is refreshingly to-the-point and, for the most part, avoids getting too wonky or academic. It is smartly written, with a literary but unstuffy quality to it, made for both the converted and those yet to be.

“Some stories are life rafts or desert springs,” Solnit writes. The beautiful, cutting clarity of Not Too Late proves that some books are, too.

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Maria Cristina Didero. (Photo: Stefan Giftthaler)

The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa

Cover of “The Trayvon Generation” by Elizabeth Alexander

How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences

Installation view of “Plastic: Remaking Our World.” (Photo: Bettina Matthiessen)

In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea

Rendering of Drift’s indoor drone performance, “Social Sacrifice” (2022). (Courtesy Drift and Aorist)

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.

“Between the Mountain and the Sky” by Maggie Doyne

At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of

A ramen bowl by Taku Satoh. (Photo: Hiroshi Tsujitani. Courtesy Nacasa & Partners Inc.)

Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.

Anicka Yi’s “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), on view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. (Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca.)

Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)

Installation view of “David Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic.” (Courtesy Pace Gallery)

Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.

Skyscraper Page website

With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs