CLOWN REVIEWS BLOG

NOT TOO LATE 
Edited by; Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua

MAY 31, 2023






This book is a great place to start if you’re worried about climate change and you feel like ….. it’s too late! The book takes the form of essays and conversations, the contributors are activists, scientists, organizers and historians, all who’s work and passion is climate justice.

The title is apt and is summed up in this quote from one of the last essays of the book;
"If you're worried that it's too late to do anything about climate change and we should all just give up, I have great news for you: that day is not coming in your lifetime. As long as you have breath in your body, you will have work to do." Mary Annaïse Heglar

This book does run into an issue that I’ve seen in several other books that take this form however, at times it is very general and repetitive. Having many contributors that all agree about the same issue is great but can lead to a lot of overlap.


These are some of the essays that stuck with me; 

• To Hell With Drowning - Julian Agunon
  
• From the Hunger Strike With Love - Nikayla Jefferson
  
• The Asteroid and the Fern - Jacquelin Gill (this one was very intense for me and made me feel at once completely grounded and resolute in my fight for climate justice while also having a near total existential panic and made me contend with a sense of nihilism, I was also in a strange mental space when I read it so maybe this wouldn’t be your experience)
• Imagination is a Muscle - a conversation with adrienne maree brown and the editors
  

At this point I have read a handful of books sort of like this and something that I appreciated in this book was hearing from Pacific Islander organizers and activists. These are some of the most frontline communities when it comes to suffering horrific affects of the climate catastrophe (like the literal loss of their homelands) and their voices are too frequently left out of these conversations.

This book also included two fictional essays written from the perspective of people living in a future where humanity fought the fossil fuel industry and turned the tides of climate catastrophe. I found these essays a bit forced and I didn’t love them as pieces of writing but the fact that they exist matters to me. The narrative that we must and will succumb to the wills and evils wrought by the fossil fuel industry is deep. This “crisis of story telling” will take so much undoing to allow people to imagine a world without violet resource extraction. It will take more storytelling and rewriting to show people that this world, this future is not one of lack & of incredible sacrifice but instead one of plenty, abundance of the beautiful things and of the things necessary for life, clean air, water, good food, community ect. ! For this reason I’m really glad these essays are included and I hope they inspire more people to write of this future.



Accessibility: Fairly accessible, I know the Brooklyn Public library has a copy, its also avalible for purchase online for between $6-$15, if you dont fee like reading the book you can also visit the website it simply provides resources for how anyone can learn more and get involved in the flight for climate justice. Also if you live near me I can lend you my copy

Would I recommend: Definetly if you care about this issue and want to learn more, probably wouldn’t reccomend it to someone who is in this world already though

Who should you enjoy this with: Enjoy this book with a friend or family member who also cares about this issue, start a book club, join an activist org then write a really good complex novel about a beautiful future free from fossil fuels 

This was me: ︎︎︎




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