Thursday, Jun 11

Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better.

All Dear Dot illustrations by Elissa Turnbull.

Dear Reader,

Oh, how we need those people who have both the deep knowledge that enables them to see the future we’re creating if we maintain the path we’re on, and the wisdom to envision and chart a better future (and urge us toward it). I’m talking, of course, about Rebecca Solnit, the climate activist and author of The Beginning Comes After the End, who, for many many years now, has held two truths: that we are damaging our home, and that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Solnit isn’t betting her chips on the tech guys or the political leaders to save us. Nope. She believes in us. “We’re deciding in the present what the future will be,” she told New York Times’ interviewer David Marchese. “But recognizing that the future does not exist really dismantles a lot of defeatism, despair, doomerism, cynicism, [from people who] often pretend to know what the future can and can’t be as a way of pretending to a power they don’t really have while abandoning the power we really do have, which is to make a future that doesn’t exist yet in the present.” 

Doomerism, she argues, comes from a lack of knowledge about the past. Hope and memory, she insists, go hand in hand. Solnit glimpses this better future that she (and Dot!) is so convinced we can create when she witnesses the care with which we tend to each other during times of crisis. 

Give Solnit a listen!

Caringly,

Dot

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For more Bluedot Climate Quick Tips, click here.

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