YouSaid · the spoken record

Rebecca Solnit

lines on the record: 52
first: 2026-06-28
most recent: 2026-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Tell us other versions of history, so finding the stories is part of it, finding the ideas, seeing the power they have, all those things which I'm rambling about are equipment for people to understand the nature of power, their own power, and to put it to work.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and found out that they were actually dealing with another kind you know history has these zigzag moves I want people to have all this equipment so that they themselves can keep showing up can participate cannot quit prematurely that was an indirect consequence of the world antislavery congress it took almost twenty five years to abolish slavery in the United States eighty years to get women the vote although women in some of our western states got it much sooner and you know so those stories I think give us power whereas often the stories we get from the mainstream official versions of history all those statues of white men with so few non white and non male statues in London, in Washington, in New York, etc. Tell us, you know.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of it allowed women to participate as speakers, organizers, signers of petitions, etc in ways women never really had before in this Anglo American society another part of the anti slavery movement, not so much, but when these women came to London and found out they would not be seated, not be allowed to participate to speak That's the beginning of the women's suffrage movement, and it took them eighty years to get the vote in the United States, so stories like that, these sudden turns where these women thought they were fighting for one kind of equality and freedom,”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were told we could never win. It was the wrong goal. We were doing it wrong. And then we won. And you know it took twelve years if you gave up in year one two three seven whatever, you walked away before the victory. So there's so many pieces of it of understanding how change works where power lies, what change looks like often it's incremental and slow, often it's indirect that I want people to have to understand their own power, the power of movements, the power of ideas, because even movements often begin in ideas. I'm one of the stories I've been reading up on because I might write about eventually is in eighteen forty London hosted the World Antislavery Congress. In the US, the anti-slavery movement actually one”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economic justice movements, the climate activism against fossil fuel, etc. And I think you also have to not despair too quickly. That's an important part of the equipment against something I've been writing against since Hope in the Dark is people feeling like either you You win or you lose immediately. I've seen so many people, certain kinds of people, my people, white people, etc. Really feel like, well, we showed up on Tuesday and they didn't cave in and give us everything on Wednesday. Therefore, we lost. I heard a beautiful Iranian sing, if it takes a hundred blows to chop down a tree the first ninety nine were not in vain. And I've been part of movements like trying to stop the KXL oil pipeline from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refineries in the US for twelve years.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the first steps is to understand how change works to understand that although people who are officially powerful love to dismiss unofficial power to suggest that Only way you'll ever get what you want is to be extremely nice and deferential and respectful towards us when in fact often what they're doing is obeying the power of civil society when it rises up as movements you know as coalitions as grassroots organizing so I think joining something is really important seeing where change is being made understanding that you know with the exception of people who are given extraordinary kinds of power you're a judge you're an influential writer you're actually an elected official or you have a huge amount of money to donate to good causes then most of us are powerful mostly in coalition and participation that these things do work which is why the powerful are often scared of those things like Occupy Wall Street Black Lives Matter the Arab Spring”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That protected and I hate the word resource, but a resource they prevented over harvesting, overhunting, over exploitation, etc. And so you can see that actually people who lived without destroying their environment often had a kind of wisdom that arose in part from deeply understanding the natural world, but also from a set of values and relationships towards it. So yeah, there's been this incredible convergence. And I think all these separate things break down all these forms of separation that were so enforced in the world I was born into more than sixty years ago. And seeing that slow change, seeing through the tortoise's eyes, we think so differently about the world than we did sixty years ago.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the root of the damage we've done to nature, and that therefore we have to shift the ideology and the culture, this is not just what he says, but what this report says by dozens of scientists from many countries. And that's a revolution that's new in some profound way, but what makes it new, it's recognizing this deep old knowledge as valuable, as important, as aligned, and that also is a convergence between two things that we're often seen as deeply separate when traditional cultures were seen as ignorant, primitive, superstitious, etc. One of the wonderful things I've learned paying attention to indigenous peoples is a lot of what was seen as a lot of what was religious ritual, which was often seen as primitive superstition were practiced.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are not just sort of scientific activities, practical activities, but they must emerge from a change in consciousness and move away from this kind of colonizing capitalist exploitative alienated worldview towards something much more akin to indigenous worldviews. So Ed Carr points out that this is a huge shift in what science itself is. It's acknowledging that it exists within ideology, within culture, and that the ideology and culture themselves have been damaging”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“ecological knowledge one of the really exciting things for me in this book is when my friend Ed Carr, a climate and biodiversity scientist working on one of those great international scientific reports wrote to me in tremendous excitement because the report was like nothing he'd ever read, seen or worked on before in that it recognized, acknowledged, declared the things we need to the things we need to do to protect biodiversity, to protect the climate”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and that we now have become so powerful we actually need to recognize ourselves as stewards, which is also how a lot of Indigenous people thought of their relationship to nature. You know, the newest work like Zoe Schlager's book, The Light Eaters, Suzanne Samard's work, recognizing that a forest is a cooperative society, not a bunch of competing individuals, et cetera, recognize that actually their sentience, not just in the animal kingdom, but in the plant kingdom and that, you know, among fungi. And so the newest science has been able to recognize this very sophisticated interconnected world. And it's aligning and often recognizing and respecting in a way science did not used to what's sometimes called tech traditional environmental or traditional.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We now understand that nature's actually a very complex and orderly orchestrated system of symbiotic relationships of interconnection, etc, that you mess with at your peril, including the upper atmosphere and the whole climate system”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recognizing a world that was always more indivisible than that worldview, that colonizing kind of white supremacist, male supremacist worldview, heterosexist worldview accepted. And one of the things that's beautiful and exciting is that the oldest worldviews and the newest really align beautifully by which I mean a lot of indigenous and land-based worldviews that say we were never separate from nature, that nature is not a chaos we give order to, which is kind of the scientific revolution idea that allows us to conquest and remake nature, assume that we can actually make nature better by controlling it. And the way that was very normal to think about in the 60s or that we can go colonize Mars or whatever.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Human beings were culture, we were not nature. Nature was some pretty anachronistic decorative stuff out there, not the very essence of what we eat and drink. You know, here I'm drinking tea that is a plant with milk that came from cows and water that came from the Santa Fe Mountain watershed. You know, I'm putting nature in my body, you know, right now. But people didn't think that way, you know, and so I see all these transformations of thought moving us towards recognizing a world, making a world that's less segregated by intention.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of the joys for me of being a writer is it forces you to look harder, think deeper than you might with casual attention. And I think one of the things that all these movements I've been talking about have in common is that they move us towards a less divided world, a world that's not so divided racially, not so divided by gender, bisexuality, we most of us live in a world that's not so religiously segregated. I grew up in a mostly white, mostly Christian, actually mostly Protestant country, white white Protestants were the dominant majority in the country I was born into, thank God it's, you know, them actually be a non-white majority country in 20 years. We're well on our way and there's nothing white supremacy can do about it. Even with ice deportations, they're not going to deport 100 million people. So that world, you know, was very segregated in those ways, but also the human and the non-human, as I said earlier, were thought of is really segregated.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Predictable version of change in which the people on stage will be the people on stage, the forces in power will only be more so, etc and it's really kind of a failure of imagination, a failure to learn from history, a failure to seize the power we have to participate in making a deeply uncertain future. And so I've tried to get people to give up this false power to accept the responsibility of our real power to participate.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Change is not linear. You know, it's not just an expansion of what's in the present players who were not on stage before will show up and matter, new movements will arise, and you talked at the beginning about me talking about the importance of ideas. What I watched and read about and studied over and over is how ideas really begin in the shadows and the margins. There's an old saying attributed to Gandhi First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. You know, and you see ideas, women's suffrage, for example, go from being dismissed, ridiculed, difficult, not achieved, you know, onward. And so yeah, that's the problem with certainty. It not only assumes it knows what will happen, it operates on a very simple”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, so Putin is weak and Orban, Victor Orban has just been voted out in a kind of shock election in Hungary. Donald Trump has become wildly unpopular, could not possibly win an election today. The whole MAGA project is weakening and his popularity is dropping below a threshold that it never dropped below before.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bring a deeper, more subtle analysis to point out new forms of discrimination in the course of trying and often succeeding in remedying them. I've seen us rethink queerness and gender, I've seen us rethink nature. So certainty also assumes that the future will look like the present only more so. You know, when Trump got elected, there are all these goddamn pundits who decide this meant authoritarianism had won forever, and all we would see is an expansion of authoritarianism, you know, nationally and internationally since then. Vladimir Putin has been deeply weakened as his supposed quick war to conquer Ukraine has stalemated failed to achieve real victory caused huge economic sacrifice and sacrifice of human life for Russia”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would topple all these regimes. It was not what people foresaw, and there's a little trick of history that caused the Berlin Wall to fall overnight. A mistake was made, people jumped on it, I think the guards mistakenly opened the, you know, the East Block, and suddenly everybody just poured across the wall and the separation was over after 30-something years. People do not see these things. People did not see the Arab Spring or occupy Wall Street coming the way they did, including the people who organized them. You know, as somebody's been involved in feminism for 40 years, I've watched feminism continue to”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can never happen, oh everything will be fine, it's come as climate doomerism, it comes as cynicism, it comes as despair, but they're all forms of certainty that is a false power. We do not know the future we can learn from the past and what the past shows us is how deeply unpredictable things were, and I went back for something I wrote a while ago and looked at what everybody, including Margaret Thatcher, was saying In nineteen eighty nine, just before all these East Bloc countries liberated themselves, nobody, I think, including the grassroots nonviolent movements that actually did the liberation really anticipated how powerfully profoundly, transformatively the”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is people pretending they know what the future holds, what will happen once you decide that there's an inevitable future you've ruled out the possibility of all possibility because possibility is uncertainty if something is only possible it's not inevitable it's not guaranteed And so once you've ruled out possibility, you've ruled out participation, and that's how I see people over and over and over, people on my side, people who believe in human rights, who are against this war, that environmental destruction surrender their power, surrender the very real power they have to participate and shape the future by pretending the future has already been shaped definitively. And it's such a form of surrender, of defeatism sometimes it comes dressed up as optimism.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I once wrote that Dante had Beatrice but Orwell had Stalin. I think for political writers your ideas are often formed in opposition you see something in the process of disagreeing is a process of clarification something I see constantly and did that prompted hope in the dark as well”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we are in a terrible mess. And even if Trump is no longer with us tomorrow, we will have so much to do to restore this country, rebuild the extraordinary leadership in science Legitimate civil service that, you know, so many civil servants have been fired, so many corrupted and incompetent people have been hired. We are just in a mess.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of other states in which we've actually firmed up reproductive rights and the availability of male order birth control order abortion pills means that actually women in a lot of those red states are getting it too and abortions have not actually gone down since the banning of rovers this wade in twenty twenty two or the overturning by the Supreme Court of Rovers Wade. So you see these workarounds, these acts of resistance, these decentralizations. And in a lot of ways the tremendous unpopularity of a lot of those things which Don't mean that there isn't terrible destruction, but it means that the destruction can't touch everything. and that there is a lot of resistance and opposition”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The states continue to plug along I am here in New Mexico where the governor and the legislator recently passed universal free childcare which is radically progressive legislation that will liberate women in particular poor women in particular to be able to get out of poverty, participate in the economy and some to work. I mostly live in California where we have universal free school meals for public school children, although the right thanks to Trump's illicit Supreme Court appointments has been able to ban abortion altogether and criminalize it in some states there are”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“illegality, destructiveness arise, I don't think Trump is going to be able to build his ballroom. It's much easier to destroy something than to recreate something, and the fact that the man is living in a partially wrecked structure and a structure that was wrecked illegally and recklessly, I think is so symbolic, it's obviously not the most important thing going on. But I find it just So horrific and so symbolic this building that's, you know, this half ruin, this demolition, this kind of open wound on the American body politic. But another thing about the US is we are in some ways a very decentralized federalist country.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Care who lives in North Carolina telling me about extraordinary resistance against anti immigration raids there, including by armed rural southerners, you know, chasing them off with their guns, which is pretty fierce and so one of the things that shock into contemplate is that we have to have a massive reconstruction on at least the scale of the failed reconstruction or the reconstruction that was eventually savaged after the US Civil War in 1870s and after this country is so bad at profoundly retrenching saying now we will be a different place, now we will do things differently. We have to rebuild all these institutions and beyond that I think we have to look at what vulnerabilities allowed this kind of criminality authoritarian”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is absolutely horrific and terrifying, and I see the destruction I take it really seriously. I know that more than three hundred thousand people have died because Elon Musk destroyed USAID or international anti-hunger and health programs. I see the absolute corruption of everything Trump has been able to corrupt, including the Supreme Court, although all the lower courts or most of the lower courts have been an incredible bulwark overturning and ruling legal action after action he's done. I've seen the surrender under Speaker Mike Johnson of the Lower House of Congress, but I've also seen extraordinary resistance on the ground in Minneapolis and all across the country I was just hanging out this weekend with a poet Gabriel.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some ways two hundred years but particularly the last seventy something years as a broadening of rights and equality in a profound way which I think is a beautiful and compelling story in reality and I don't think even though you can legislate against it you can't make that vision disappear you can't make people stop seeing the world and the way that a lot of us see the world”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, and the reason why they have to try and be authoritarian at the same time is because these are not democratic popular goals. You know, I realize that, you know, and it's sort of a dumb basic realization with Trump, etc. Oh, they have to be authoritarian because they're not actually popular when your ideas are popular, democracy works really well for you. The people are behind you, but these are minority agendas, because at his heart it's all about minority rule, you know, white over non white, male over non male, Christian over non Christian, etc. And in a broader sense about humans over the rest of life, there's a beautiful thing happening with Indigenous leadership across the world, which is the rights of nature as a new field under the law.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Significant in this book of mine is to just point out that what the writer is doing is backlash. Yes, they want to change things, all of them they want to change it back, they want to change it back to the unequal status of women, the sort of enforced heterosexuality, Christian dominance, white dominance, you know, et cetera. They want to recreate the radical inequality of the past and they want to forget everything we know about the environment so they can destroy it without impediment.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in a lot of ways, although I fear for your next election and speaking as a big Ed Miliband climate fan, you know, so I don't think they're that fragile, but I do think they're under attack. And it is interesting because the right itself Is angry, whiny sees itself as fragile, sees itself as under attack, sees itself as history's great loser, they lost that kind of white male heterosexist Christian hegemonic status that they had unquestionably, you know, until not that long ago and they want to reclaim it. And, you know, because One of the things that feels”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we'll unlearn all the things we've learned to understand we were never separate from nature, we depend on it, all the things we do have an impact, and we have a responsibility to take those into effect, the kind of casual destruction, the obliviousness that allowed people to dump wholesale into oceans, etc You know Colburn and Britton will never turn back one of the great landmarks in recent history is Britain where the Industrial Revolution started which ran almost entirely on coal into the nineteen eighties and beyond closed its last coal burning plant in twenty twenty four, so I think these things are under attack But often by an angry minority which thanks to the internet and various other things, has managed to seize a lot of power without being genuinely popular,”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many of these things to create battered women's shelters create laws outlawing marital rape, which in this country, and I think in yours wasn't illegal until the nineteen nineties, and to go back and say, Oh, husbands have the right to rape their wives. Once you've said yes, once by get marrying him, it's a permanent yes that covers all uses of your body. You know, and so I don't think women are willing to go back in the same way. I don't think queer people will ever be closeted, you know, forced into being accepting their status as mentally ill criminal degenerate. That was the norm before the gay rights revolution of the sixty seventies and on I don't think we'll think of gender as two airtight boxes in which there's exactly two ways of being there opposite non-intersecting etc.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was this thing I keep quoting because it's the most beautiful example the American feminist Gloria Steinem was asked in an interview in this kind of intrusive way So you didn't get married till your sixties and Gloria said without missing a beat yes first I had to reinvent the institution of marriage had Steinam gotten married as a young woman in the nineteen sixties she would have given up her economic and bodily rights she would have essentially become under the law and culture essentially a possession or subordinate of her husband marriage is a radically different institution and feminus had to even invent the language for sexual harassment for domestic violence for stalking”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think imagination values culture storytelling remains central even though those things are often seen as trivial as humanity's educations get treated as Superfluous disposable, etc and I don't think they're that fragile. I think ideas are the genie that once it's out of the bottle will refuse to get back into it, and once women have experience what it's like to have reproductive rights, economic rights, rights within marriage, marriage equality, there's, you know, we don't want to go back. And obviously some people want to push us back. But, you know, so first of all, I think most people don't remember how profoundly unequal belittled marginalized excluded, deprived of rights women were both in access to public things, equal access to education, equal access to power, equal access under the law, and in cultural things, how men in society as a whole treated women, what marriage was”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and was so inconceivable, and you wouldn't have given land back to people who did not exist, you know, which is how they were treated when I was young, to people who had no federal recognition to people who were supposed to have disappeared to people who were”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“natural places represents a sunning profound changing in the white imagination the settler colonialist imagination represents a specific change that I think is meaningful for indigenous rights for the way all of us imagine humanity and nature itself And a movement, and that I think is tremendously important, and I wrote about feminism, about queer rights, about anti-racism, anti-colonialism. You can see this as part of anti-colonialism, about the rise of environmental awareness, about the climate movement. But I think this is the most unrecognized that something has changed so profoundly in how we think about these things over the last thirty five years or so. And so I begin with this land back ceremony, that I just thought was beautiful and compelling in taking place in where I myself had grown up.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“owned by white people since the nineteenth century, six hundred acres isn't huge, but I think it's profoundly indicative. It was inconceivable in that tribe did not exist until two thousand the idea that native people deserved to get land back, that all this was native land that we should acknowledge it, that there were wrongs that needed to be righted in our time, these are all new ideas. In up and down California across the United States from Maine to Hawaii to Alaska, this question of land back, this acknowledgement of native presence, this recognition that native people are often the best stewards of”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To gain funding rights, etc., and then to build a casino which suddenly produced a great deal of wealth for them But at the same time in the nineteen nineties Walgreg was writing this legislation gathering his people and everything was changing on a broader scale, as I said before, and so the federated Indians of Great Manchuria who had a land base of one acre that was great in Ranchuria, which he wrote about, and which he named this kind of amalgamated triblet after Now have jurisdiction over 100,000 acres, including Point Ray's National Seashore. They co-manage. And the opening chapter of my book is about a land-back ceremony in October of 2024 where the Federated Tribe of Great and Rancheria was given help to acquire six hundred acres that had been cattle ranching.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be a low status person, a person treated in a lot of unpleasant ways, etc. Something really changed and a lot of it did change in the 1990s. Greg Saras, an adopted person who found out later that he was related to the indigenous people he gravitated towards in Sonoma County, just north of where I grew up, wrote the legislation to get federal recognition for an unrecognized group of people which was both Coast Miwak and Southern Pomo, and because it was both they call themselves the Federated Tribes of Great Rancheria, he managed partly because the actor and director Robert Redford had worked with him turning one of his pieces of fiction into a film. So with Robert Redford's help, he got President Clinton to sign the Federal legislation to give them Federal recognition which allowed them”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I grew up on the land north of San Francisco of the Coast Mewalk, who were never discussed, never taught about, never represented. In my education in the town I lived in which had in fact had a huge indigenous presence from that culture, that community just north of us was the land of the southern Pomo, same thing prevailed, for example, my aunt had a huge gathering basket woven by somebody from presumably southern Pomo where she lived. But there was just nothing available California Indians were supposed to have been very primitive and backward and then they were supposed to have conveniently disappeared so there was no unfinished moral struggle, no unresolved conflict, no on going war. In fact, people had just laid low at a time when Being indigenous”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If not imitate, learn from, and I think a lot of us have. There's been a merging of the new science and the old traditional views of nature that are very powerful in shaping how we go forward from this crisis”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By and about indigenous people, the idea that human beings are inherently destructive of nature only applies if you think of human beings only as the colonizers and not the colonized only as the settler coloneless and indigenous here were I am in North America once you acknowledge this continent was inhabited for ten thousand years and more the idea that there was virgin nature and then people came and ruined it is as stupid story erasing who was here and when it falls apart you can say human beings are not inherently destructive not inherently at odds of nature and you might you might learn as I think a lot of us have from indigenous people that there are other kinds of relationships and attitudes towards nature which in order to address the environmental crises of our time I think we need to”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How transformative they would be, I think most of us who are and it's always complicated talking about white Europeans who are sort of indigenous if not exactly like Native Americans. I will not ask about your ethnicity. You could ask about mine. But I think that most of us settler colonial or indigenous or refugee, whatever, think about indigeneity and therefore about nature and the human relationship to it and radically different ways. When I was a young art critic, a young”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I really wrote that book at a time when I expected both of those things to be fairly static realities and of course we stopped nuclear testing in a lot of ways in nuclear arms race, stopped being what it had been throughout the Cold War, which itself dispelled, but what I really didn't expect is how successful the indigenous uprisings which begin in the early nineteen nineties would be”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I just took it all in and it really changed my thinking. I'd written a book early in the nineteen nineties called Savage Dreams about the nuclear wars that weren't supposed to have started but were going on at the rate of about a nuclear bomb a month exploded in the Nevada desert from 1951 to 1991. And Indian wars that were conventionally seen as having ended in the 19th century but were still happening. Not militarily, not with sort of battlefield violence, but with legal violence, economic violence, and cultural violence the cultural erasure and dispossession and representational genocide of native people.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's definitely tortoise mind, and you know, and hope in the dark really summarizes the transformation in my thinking back then whether or not you loved the book. And, you know, and it was history itself, both the stuff I had a frontline seat to as an indigenous rights activist in the early 1990s, as somebody participating in anti-nuclear and other struggles, but also just watching things like the end of the Soviet Union and the toppling of the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe. All these indigenous uprisings across the Americas, those Apatistas, in Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Canada as well as in the United States, watching feminism continue to change the status of women or rights, the understanding of our wrongs, etc.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's transformative and understanding and recognizing that is really important equipment. I saw this book less as I want people to value it as a piece of writing than I want to give people tools for being engaged in the conflict struggles, crises of this moment.”
2026-06-28 · Intelligence Squared · Reasons for Hope in Turbulent Times, with Rebecca Solnit · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT