Factually! with Adam Conover - George Orwell's Love of Nature with Rebecca Solnit

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

“Orwellian” has become such an overused adjective that we’ve forgotten what George actually believed and cared about. In her new book, Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit argues that George Orwell's love of gardening reveals striking facets of his character and his work. You can check out Orwell’s Roses at factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. It's so wonderful to have you with me once again as I talk to another incredible expert. We're going to have a great time. I hope you're doing well this early part of December, getting ready for the holidays. You know, I call it cheese and crackers season. That's what it is to me. You know, any time between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, I can eat as much cheese and crackers as I want. And, you know, a lot of the time, by the way, you might know if you've heard this show before, I try to eat vegan.

I'm not a strict vegan, but I do avoid meat and dairy often. Not so much during cheese and cracker season. During cheese and cracker season, I will be eating a shitload of cheese. And so I hope you join me. Maybe you got some cheese and crackers next to you right now. Maybe you got a nice drunken goat. Maybe you got a nice manchego. Maybe you got some nice raincoast crisps. Those are little crackers with the little tree cranberries in them. Really incredible. They're not paying me to say this. I just love raincoast crisps. Raincoast crisps, if you're listening, I would be open to a sponsorship of the show. All right, but let's jump into this week's episode. You know,

a writer's name doesn't become an adjective unless they really earn it, right? Something's Shakespearean if it's filled with tragic drama, high poetry, and horny teenagers wearing ruffs. It's Dickensian if it involves a lad named Pip and his 12,000 page journey to adulthood. And it's Kafkaesque if it's a man-sized cockroach who's struggling to get his thorax through the doorway of Prague's only DMV or something like that. I don't know. I haven't read a lot of Kafka. But there is one writer adjective that seems to be more popular today than any other. And that is Orwellian.

You know, most of us haven't read George Orwell's writing since high school, but we know that for something to be Orwellian, that means it refers to some kind of hyper-powerful, invasive state, big brother, manipulative propaganda, and possibly the perversion of language and history. You know, all that 1984 shit. But since most of us haven't read Orwell since high school, well, that vision might have gotten pretty far away from who he really was and what he really cared about. See, Orwell's work has become so influential that people of very different political stripes can claim him or parts of him as their own. For instance, libertarians might see in his criticisms of the socialism of

his time, and particularly Russia, a rejection of socialism entirely, or in his critiques of totalitarianism, a rejection of state authority altogether. But this is actually not the case. Dude was a socialist. In an essay called Why I Write, Orwell wrote, quote, every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it. End quote. Pretty clear, George, seems like the dude would have voted for Bernie. And we all know Animal Farm, but we probably don't know about the Road to Wigan Pier, in which Orwell investigated the atrocious working conditions of

coal miners in northern England and described how his political thought developed. We know about thought crime and newspeak, but we forget that this dude went to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War and got shot through the neck. Georgie contained multitudes is what I'm saying. And, you know, we also tend to lose sight of the fact that this deep, serious thinker was also something of a pastoralist. He loved nature. You can see it somewhat in 1984, where nature is the only place that the protagonist, Winston Smith, can avoid the boot to the neck of totalitarianism. And as our guest today writes, Orwell believed that engaging in those simple pleasures, communing with nature, was a form of passive resistance to oppression. And with the profound crises we face today, like climate change or the erosion of democracy, that's a message that perhaps we can still learn from.

Well, look, let's get to that guest because we have an incredible guest for you on the show today. I am so thrilled to have her. She is one of my very favorite writers and thinkers, and I've been a fan of hers for years. Her name is Rebecca Solnit, and she's one of the most influential and prolific writers and essayists of our generation. And most recently, she's the author of Orwell's Roses. Please welcome Rebecca Solnit. Rebecca Solnit, thank you so much for being here. It's an honor to have you.

My pleasure. I've been such a fan of your writing for such a long time. You're such a prodigious writer. I just want to say before we get started that I read a piece of yours in Harper's a number of years ago. Let's see, it looks like in 2018 called Preaching to the Choir, which had an immense impact on me as a communicator, because I'm someone who I learn about ideas. I try to share them with people. I really just convey things to the public. And I always had this thing in my head about, oh, it's bad to preach to the choir. You should be speaking to the people who don't already agree with you.

And you wrote so movingly about the value of speaking to people who are on your side, in your tribe, of your group, in order to not just convert them, but deepen their understanding of the issue. And I just wanted to thank you for it because it completely changed my approach to how I do my own work. Thank you. It was such a joy to write that piece because a lot of us who do write, speak, communicate are kind of clobbered all the time by that phrase, preaching to the choir. And you can go after it by looking at what actually happens in church, which is that the choir gets to sing and everyone listens and people schmooze on the church steps and, you know, do charitable projects

or people come to the church because they actually want someone to preach at them. And just, you know, I always love taking apart metaphors and finding out what's actually in them. But also, we're not here to convert our enemies, which mostly doesn't work. We're here to inspire our allies or potential allies to engage, to understand more deeply. And preaching to the choir also suggests there's nothing deeper to tease out. If you agree with me that climate change is bad or racism is bad, we have nothing to discuss. Whereas there's so much to discuss. What causes it?

What are the solutions? What does it mean? How does your experience differ from mine? So, yeah, I am a great celebrator of preaching to the choir, and I suspect it's what we're about to do. Hello, choir. Hello, choir. to do. Hello, choir. Hello, choir. Well, yeah, I mean, what would we be doing if not speaking to a group of people who were interested in the sort of things that we are perhaps going to say? And there's value in that to, you know, to move folks and make them think differently. And, you know,

why would it be bad to speak and have an impact on the people who you are like minded with, who who are already share a lot with you, who you can maybe move to a deeper understanding? And I talk about this a great length. I gave a talk at a conference called XOXO, and that's available on YouTube if people want to learn more about my own personal transformation. But but, yeah, it just made me think, I used to spend so much time focusing. I make YouTube videos. I used to spend so much time focusing on the number of thumbs downs they would get. And I would say, oh, those are people I didn't reach. I made the argument as best I could. And I didn't get the people who said dislike.

And then eventually I was like, hold on a second. There's way more people who clicked like on the video. And those are the people who, there's a lot more of them. And those are people who gained something from it and who had their understanding deepened. So thank you for that. I want to talk about your new book, though, which is called Orwell's Roses. Tell me about it. Why write about Orwell? What drew you to him? It all came about through a wonderful accident. My friend Sam Green is a filmmaker, thought he might do a project about trees. We were talking about trees in the summer of 2017. And I said, well, you know,

Orwell planted fruit trees. We decided to get online and figure out, were they still there? Could Sam go see them? And we figured out where he had been living. Sam wrote to the address. We didn't hear back. I was in the UK on book tour. So I went to this little village of Wallington to find out. And the lovely couple who lives in the cottage Orwell lived in on and off for 10 years, invited me in, told me the fruit trees had been cut down, gave me a cup of tea, all sorts of things happened. And then almost as an aside said, well, the fruit trees were cut down, but you know, the roses he planted are still growing. And I've been led there by the essay where he writes about planting the fruit trees and roses. But I felt in that moment, I'd never

thought hard enough about the roses. What was this man, a socialist, somebody who's thought of as the very pinnacle of serious and dedicated and unfrivolous, what did it mean that he was such an avid planter and tender and lover of roses? And it felt like that opened up such great questions about Orwell, about roses, about pleasure and beauty, and what it means to have a committed life. And so I was off and running. So this is a book in which starts seven sections with variations on the sentence. In the year 1936, a writer planted roses to think about what that might mean, what it can mean, what it can shed light on, what it can invite us to do and be and think about.

It's, you know, it's almost striking just to do the project of thinking about Orwell more deeply because he's become such a caricature that his name is thrown around as a political signifier. So often when you hear the name Orwell or Orwellian and you don't even think of the person and the writer, much less what he actually wrote, much, much less his life. Was that something that you were interested in

breaking down at all? Absolutely. And exactly. Yeah, I knew Orwell's work extremely well. I'd read most of the novels, some of them like Animal Farm in 1984. Many times since I was really young, I knew his essays really well. And I'd never read a biography, but there's this sort of ambient impression of Orwell as this gloomy, pessimistic, negative, austere figure, which I think is partly because we think if you're a really serious, committed person, that's what you need to be. biographies, which sometimes reinforce that, but also read Orwell's diaries and letters, which I hadn't read, unlike the published work, and find out that actually he was a man who took great pleasure in many parts of everyday life, took a lot of time out for fishing, gardening, wandering around the natural world, was a lover of vegetable gardening and flowers and flower gardening. And it raised a larger question because I kind of grew up on the left and around the left. And there's often this sense of to be serious, to be dedicated, you have to be grim and austere and joyless and also go around smiting anybody else

who might be having a nice time and telling them that everything they do except furthering the revolution is frivolous. And so Orwell became an occasion to look at a lot of the assumptions we have, the puritanical assumptions, particularly on the left, but really in the culture at large about what it means to be serious, to have a serious and dedicated life. And so, yeah, it was really fun. And it was really quite exhilarating to find out not only that Orwell was a very different person than the pictures of him, caricatures, as you say, assert, but that the footprints of his pleasure are everywhere in his work.

He writes about flowers and plants a lot. are everywhere in his work. He writes about flowers and plants a lot. He writes about pleasures from a good mug of beer in the ideal pub to naughty postcards and nursery rhymes. Even 1984 is laden with descriptions of pleasure and beauty and love, and they form a really crucial part of the book 1984 wouldn't mean anything without it so orwell in some sense was a pretext for me to make certain arguments but also to look at how beautifully he made those arguments in his life and in his writing and what this other orwell has to offer us in an era very different than his in some ways and in other ways when it comes to lies and fascism totalitarianism and assumptions by the left not different at all yeah well man and i i have read 1984 but i i have to say i remember you know the the descriptions of big

brother and the you know the the what is it the three the, you know, the, what is it, the three-minute hate, the 90-second hate, I forget how long the hate is. But, you know. I think it's a three-minute hate, but I couldn't swear to it. Well, so I remember all of that. I have to say, I don't recall those portions that you mentioned that are about flowers or about pleasures in the book. And it makes me want to go back and read it. What, what purpose did those serve? Do you think like,

what was the, or, or what effect do they have on the work? One of the pleasures of having lived for a while is going back to something you think, you know, decades or years later and finding out there's something more there or something else there.

I'd read 1984 many times, and I think for everybody, particularly when it was a new book, it was the things we weren't familiar with, what it might look like to live in a totalitarian regime, what the machinery of totalitarianism as big brother in the ministry of truth and the memory hole and this constant surveillance might be and you know the terror the torture the repression but what there's two things that are really important to the novel

one of which is that winston smith is trying to rebel against it and the other is how winston does that winston recognizes at some level what Big Brother and the totalitarian regime is trying to prevent is pleasure, joy, love, intimacy, self-awareness, independent thought, connections between people, memory itself, human relations. And so his resistance doesn't consist of overthrowing the regime or doing much that will. Eventually, he tries to sign up to do so, but it turns out to be the trap that will send him to the gulags and to being tortured and brainwashed. But what he does is he has a love affair. He begins the novel by taking out a journal, an old blank book full of beautiful, creamy paper, and luxuriating in the pleasure, both of the physical qualities of the paper and writing

with an ink pen, and the pleasure of thinking his thoughts and maybe communicating them to posterity. There's a wonderful passage in the novel that says, but the final command of the regime was not to trust your eyes and ears. And that's fascinating. We can see that with the Trump administration, with the times Trump told people to believe what he said, even though it contradicted what he said the day before, not to believe their own evidence, not to believe scientists, not to believe historians, not to believe, you know, the so-called lying media. your own eyes and ears requires that you actually do stuff with your eyes and ears, that you go out and have sensory experience, that you judge for yourself, that you have these things. There's a wonderful another phrase in it. The sexual act successfully performed was rebellion, desire is thought crime. Although I'd like to put in a word for the sexual act, unsuccessfully performed. Although I'd like to put in a word for the sexual act, unsuccessfully performed.

But it also suggests that this intimacy, this pleasure, this overwhelm is also a kind of rebellion. And so really he's telling us something very different that, yeah, you have to defeat the regime. Of course, that's really obvious and simple and kind of the ABCs of resistance. But he's telling us also that to be a person capable of resistance, you know, is first of all to be a thoughtful person, a person who cares, a person with values, a person who judges for themselves. And that a lot of this is reinforced by going out there and doing all these things that Winston does, these little pleasures, these sensory experiences, this attempt to preserve history and memory and a kind of rationality that won't be overwhelmed by a regime that literally tells you two plus two is five and peace is war and love is hate and all the other aphorisms of the Ministry of Truth.

So that was a bit long winded, but that was kind of what was striking about going to the novel was the lushness there to dreamy novel. It's a novel in which Winston's pleasures are as clearly delineated as the things that, you know, are aligned against them. as the things that, you know, are aligned against them. And it was really kind of a huge joy and an excitement for me to go back in there and find, this is not the book I thought it was. And of course, the crucial passage for me, that last moment before the thought police break in to take Winston away and destroy him, moment before the thought police break in to take Winston away and destroy him. It's about, you know, it's about the beauty of a stout middle-aged working class woman singing and hanging out diapers and is driven by a metaphor about roses. You know, you can picture lots of leftists telling Orwell and some lady actually wrote into the magazine Tribune, the left-wing magazine he

worked at, to say flowers are bourgeois. And yet it's a rose metaphor that allows him to think through with Winston how this woman is beautiful when he says she has the beauty of the rose hip and not the rose. And that I love so much because I've also been really interested in how we derive all our metaphors from bodily experience, spatial reality, the natural world, animals, farm life, agriculture, plants. And so here's Orwell deploying a flower metaphor to say something really important and powerful about who this woman is, how Winston can perceive her, because Winston has that metaphor, and reinforcing another really central metaphor or another central principle of the book, which is Winston constantly

thinking hope lies with the proles. Winston will be destroyed, but I think the washerwoman is the real case for hope in the book. Wow. of the book, like this emphasis on daily pleasure and that sort of daily moment by moment humanity and human experience as an act of rebellion. How was that? Were those things that he cultivated in his own life? Absolutely. You know, when I began to read his domestic diaries, I realized he was a passionate gardener, which has not played up much in most of the biographies. They acknowledge he did it, but they don't seem to think it's that significant. And of all the places he spent time, Wallington, where he planted those roses,

I came across the ones that prompted this book, gets really short shrift compared to the Spanish Civil War, the Isle of Jura at the end of his life, the terrible boarding schools he was sent to as a child, Burma, where he served in the Imperial Police Force of British colonialism for five years. So, yeah, and Orwell practiced what he preached and he did preach, you know, this immediate experience. And what I think is implicit and sometimes explicit in it is that both that these experiences fortify us in some sense. They make us robust. They make us independent. They teach us to judge for ourselves. And that what works of art give us is also beyond what we're often told with that preaching to the choir thing, that you should hand down heavy handed propaganda that tells everyone that bad things are bad and

good things are good and everybody should try harder. And that's kind of the essence of most, you know, most of that propagandistic art but that maybe art can do something more complex and subtle to build a perceptive self a self that's critical yeah a self that has these more complex values and awarenesses and appreciations then there's also the question of what are we fighting for? Like, yeah, we want bad, you know, bad things are bad and we should defeat them to go back to propaganda lessons. But what are the good things we want to defend?

You know, and there's a wonderful phrase that became so instrumental to the book and such a joy to understand because we all knew it, but I'd never looked at it hard, looked at its history or unpacked it. And that phrase is bread and roses. It was first uttered by a woman suffragist working for a woman winning the vote state by state and before the 19th amendment in this country. She gave a talk and a farm servant seized upon the phrase and made her think harder about it. You know, bread and roses means, yeah, the labor

struggle, the suffragist struggle is definitely for bread, by which they meant the absolute necessities for bodily survival and, you know, food, clothing, shelter, to which we could add education and medical care nowadays. But the roses was this incredibly beautiful and radical insistence that every human being needs and deserves more than necessities or that what constitutes a necessity is actually more subtle than that, that we need beauty, leisure, culture, nature, and pleasure, and that what these things are going to be is different for different people.

You know, in a totalitarian regime, you can give everyone bread, and some of them did a decent job of making, you know, better distribution of resources, making sure everyone has food, clothing and shelter, you know, etc. But the roses require a certain amount of freedom because my roses are not your free, your roses, you might be into ultimate Frisbee and surfing and drinking beer with friends. And I might be into, you know, and drinking beer with friends. And I might be into, you know, tap dancing and the blues and, you know, and flower gardening or mastering the ukulele or, you know, or Spanish guitar. So it's, but it's really this, you know, because Bread and Roses is an organization,

it's a song we all, or most of us know that Mimi Farina and Joan Baez popularized. But what it actually is, is this very radical argument for the complexity of human nature, our right to our complexity and the freedom to pursue what we need unfettered because you have to have a lot of freedom and maybe a lot of privacy to pursue what it is that are the roses in your life which vary from person to person and Orwell is actually making that argument we all know what Orwell is against and that's what everyone focused on in 1984 but in the same book and all through his work he's making this beautiful argument for what he's for, which is freedom and the privacy that Edward Snowden would defend for us all in which to pursue whatever the hell your pleasures and joys and interests and rights are. Yeah.

And he's describing those pleasures over and over. He wrote a lot of essays about his pleasures. of essays about his pleasures and you know and he's both a very serious person and a person who loves nursery rhymes funny songs you know he wrote this wonderful credo in his essay why I write where he says that I'm not able and do not want completely to abandon the worldview that I acquired in childhood so long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid scrap, solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to repress

that side of myself. And I love that because it's such an eclectic list and such a strong assertion of who he is and how that fits in with his political writing and so yeah so and I feel like he's always was issuing us an invitation but filtered the way he was by our own assumptions about who he was and what serious people and leftists and anti-fascists are. We didn't always hear him. I didn't hear him until I met his roses and they shocked me into looking harder at who he was and what he had to say, what he valued. And he's so, he's passionately clear about he's for. And he celebrates it in his writing and he lives it in his life. You know, he's a man who died with a fishing pole in his hospital room because he was a deeply hopeful person.

And some of that hope was to overcome totalitarianism, to liberate the oppressed. But some of it was just to go fishing. So even as he's dying, he's hoping to be flown to a Swiss sanatorium to get better and maybe to nip out and get a bit of fishing in. Wow. My God, there was so much in that answer. What you said about art, so much of it really relates to me because so much of what I do in my own work is propagandistic in a way. It's saying, hey, the world is broken in this way and we must fix it. We must. And I'm shaking the shoulders of the audience.

We have to fix it, right? But so often we leave out, I leave out, why are we fixing it? To make space for something else. Like once the world is fixed, what is it that we are trying to make space for? And it's for all those things that you said, for people to have not just self-determination and freedom, but the space to have those small pleasures. And when I, I don't know, when I think, when I respond most to the exhortations of the left, it's when they're trying to make a space for those things, for just like that sort of like raw humanity in a way. I want to talk about the, you write about the sort of tradition of English pastoralism, if I'm getting it right, that Orwell was a part of and that he participated in. Tell me about that as an aesthetic or an ethic or a movement at the time.

Well, Orwell was a passionate gardener. And of course, the English loved their flowers, as he remarked in his essay, The Lion and the Unicorn. And they love gardens and English gardens from the little cottage garden that anyone with a bit of dirt and some seeds can cultivate to, you know, the huge landscape gardens the aristocrats were building in the 18th century to kind of say the aristocracy was itself natural. And one of the things I really wanted to do in this book is to not sentimentalize flowers and plants and gardens and the natural world. You know, the Nazis loved their forests.

Stalin loved his lemon trees. We often use nature as a cudgel to say this is natural. I am natural. It's natural. You know, eugenics claims to be operating on the side of nature. And we know where that leads. And Orwell is a very complex figure. You know, he was born in India because his father was part of British imperialism, operating as a sub-deputy opium agent.

Forcing the Indian farmers to grow opium was monstrous. Forcing that opium on the Chinese population was monstrous. British colonialism was monstrous. Orwell was also descended from a great-great-grandfather who owned slaves and sugar plantations in Jamaica and who had himself painted in the classical English landscape tradition looking like a gentleman of leisure in a beautiful open landscape. Why could he afford to have Sir Joshua Reynolds paint him?

Why did he look like a gentleman? Why was he standing in that landscape? So many gentlemen and so many paintings in that era were standing in because of what they didn't want to show, what they didn't want to think about, which is those slaves, the slave trade, the monstrous sugar plantations where they kept having to bring over more Africans because they were so brutal, they were killing them off so fast. And so Orwell's literally born into imperialism. He takes a job as a British policeman in Burma when he's just out of school. And he has his own evolution to become an anti-imperialist, to stand up for Burmese and Indian liberation against racism,

against Black people in the U.S., against Indians on the part of the British. And so I wanted us all to see gardens as deeply political spaces in how we interpret them. And one of the joys was to write about a woman I think is one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language, Jamaica Kincaid, who is Black, a descendant of slaves in Antigua, which was a British colony when she was young, and who reminds us that nature is always political, gardens are always political, flowers are always political. So I brought her in as somebody who better than me can address all that and really look at all this stuff of what does it mean when you plant a flower, when you celebrate a tree.

It can mean any number of things. You know, you can be celebrating the forest that sequestered carbon and take up some of the, you know, the carbon we're putting into the atmosphere, or you can be claiming all kinds of Nazi things with naturalizing your racial theories. So I wanted us to remember that gardens are political spaces and Orwell was, you know, a great leftist, but also, as he put it himself, a lower upper middle class Englishman. And, you know, what he was doing had political implications, which he was unpacking in some ways as he tried to escape his own class, be in solidarity with the working class by doing things like grazing his goats upon the common in Wallington, you know, do his own manual labor. and, you know, and also try, you know, mingle with the working class, write about their lives,

you know, write on their behalf. And, you know, so another long-winded answer. No, no, it's a beautiful answer. But I mean, how do you actually, I have a big question about this for you, but I'm going to save it till right after our break. We'll be right back with more Rebecca Solnit. So we're back with Rebecca Solnit. Rebecca, in the first half of the show, you spoke very movingly about Orwell's love of nature, of flowers, of pleasures, and of those as being a rebellion against the state, or against totalitarianism in their small ways. But then you also started to talk about how Orwell's own pastoralism of his time was sort of covering up this deeper machine of death and destruction and slavery.

And I guess that sort of leads me to one of the questions of our age, which is, you know, when we are enjoying those simple pleasures, right, when we're listening to music or, you know, enjoying the sensual feel of a fabric, right, or something like that. But we also have an awareness of the source of where that fabric comes from, right? Or the machinery of capitalism that delivered that music to our ears. Does that interfere with that, you know, the nature of that as being a rebellion against the system, that enjoyment or not. Was it?

Yeah. I think it's really important to know the world that we're part of, which is harder and harder to do. You know, you think of the way everybody's ancestors might have lived 500 years ago. Almost any material in your life you might have produced yourself or you might know who produced it or how it was produced. If you had a sweater, you knew it was made out of wool and you might have, you know, you might have knitted it or your mother might have knitted it. The sheep might be right out there on the hillside and you might have produced your own food or at least you knew where it came from. We live in a world where things come from over the horizon in container ships, often made by people we never bother to imagine in other parts of the world. Orwell had

a remarkable experience just before he planted that garden that included the roses in Wallington in 1936. He took an assignment to go report on the condition of the unemployed, the coal miners, the working class in England's industrial north, when England was hard hit by the same depression that had hit the US. And it really kind of shocked him. He had been moving among the poor, you know, went to do hop picking with itinerant farm workers, got himself put in prison before, but really seeing just the grimness of long, deep, broad poverty in the north of England, which was and is very different than the south, really had an impact.

And as part of what made him into a leftist, he went down into the coal mines and he realized how easy it is not to think about where coal comes from. And this was an era where you probably heated your house on coal. You might have burned it directly in your coal grate fireplace. And yet you didn't have to think about the miners. You didn't have to think about the mines. You didn't have to think about people dying of black lung, you know, crawling in tunnels three feet high all day, dying in explosions. We don't have to think about our iPhones or IKEA furniture or H&M or Gap clothing. And a lot of what activists have been doing is trying to make us envision the rainforest, envision the sweatshop workers. I did my own little tour of duty on that. When I went to pursue something I thought about for a long time, which is the Colombian flower industry.

Ninety percent of the roses sold in the U. the US are grown in huge greenhouses in Colombia, in an industry that's the largest employer of women in that country. And it is pretty monstrous environmentally and in terms of labor rights and working conditions. And it allowed me to ask a question, I think Orwell also asks, can something be aesthetically beautiful if it's ethically ugly? And it can certainly be beautiful to the eyes. You know, these cheap roses you get in the supermarket at Trader Joe's at the florist look like roses, which were one of our very kind of symbols of beauty but the conditions in which they're produced are hideous in so many ways but i think what orwell said is that ethics and aesthetics can be the same thing you can have a beautiful gesture a beautiful set of

principles and he centers his interest in beauty, particularly on language, that beautiful language is language that's honest, that's a fair contract between the reader and the writer that doesn't attempt to deceive, shortchange, to, you know, use euphemisms and circumlocutions to describe atrocities and cheats. And of course, this is the opposite of the language he pays so much attention to, which is both the outright language of propaganda and lies as practiced in the Soviet Union, where two plus two equals five was actually a very common phrase with the idea that, oh, we'll do our five-year plan in four years. But also he saw leftists justifying Stalinism, bureaucrats justifying all the atrocities governments carry out,

using this mushy, vague, fancy sort of language we see all the time, used to justify not doing anything about climate change, et cetera. not doing anything about climate change, etc. You know, so he's very interested in a kind of aesthetic ethic or an ethical aesthetic. And that was one of the things that was really interesting to try to trace in his own work, to think about through his experiences in the coal mines, through my own and looking at how ugly a rose can be when it's grown in monstrous conditions, when it's one of 1.6 million roses flown from Bogota to Miami in 747s. That's how many roses you fit into a 747. It's 1.6 million, which is just kind of bizarre to think about industrial roses. We think of roses as meaning gardens and nature and beauty. You know, there's that whole say it

with flowers, florist slogan. But what the hell are we saying when the flower we're handing our beloved or our mother on Mother's Day was grown in hideous conditions by exploited women with chronic injuries and pesticide contamination and no rights to organize. Can I ask what are those? I mean, you visited those facilities. What are they like? What do they look like? What are they? Yeah. There's these farms of several dozen, two hundreds of acres full of greenhouses that are just plastic sheets over a metal frame, but huge packed. You know, Bogota is at elevation 7,000 feet or so. It's close to the equator. So you have temperate weather, year-round sunlight, ideal conditions to produce roses without cease year-round. cease year round and they're grown for durability and aesthetics grown as buds not the open roses that are kind of what you might be trying to grow in your garden and they used to be

a little bit more haphazard in that a rose worker might do she might cut the roses package them trim them but now they've got them all in these kind of fortis assembly lines where you do one thing all day. You're only a cutter. You're only a trimmer. You're only a packer. So the women get, you know, there's men too, but more women, they get repetitive stress injuries. And then they're just discarded because they have no organizing rights, no health care rights, et cetera. And they hire another teenager who will be worked until she too breaks down. The roses mostly have

no smell. You know, there's all that Shakespearean, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But what the hell is a rose that doesn't smell? You know, they have a lot of bizarre names. smell. You know, they have a lot of bizarre names. Pink Floyd, Privilege are two that come to mind. Eskimo for a white rose. And, you know, and they're just an industry. They're just another industry like making socks or, you know, or pots or anything. There's nothing beautiful about it. The workers have a saying, the lovers get the roses, but we get the thorns because they're still very thorny. They're packed in these very cold rooms because cold keeps the roses fresh. So they cut them, they rush them to the cold rooms where the workers are all wearing rubber boots and coveralls. The place I went to was to use that adjective people love, Orwellian,

in that the workers had coveralls that had these perky slogans on them that clearly were not something they chose to wear, but that their employer forced them to wear as though they agreed with those things. It was like branding a cow. What were the slogans? Oh, there were things like cow you know it was very big brother oh there were things like you know we're all in this together i'm happy to be here kind of stuff you know i coffee i photographed them got translated them they're in the book i can't recall them exactly but they're all these kind of you you know, uplifting bullshit. Yeah.

You know, and they're themselves totally corrupt because, first of all, this is not what the worker would say. And, you know, this is the employers forcing the workers to be these kind of human billboards. So they're basically wearing lies and forced to look at each other as billboards for lies. And that was just so kind of grotesque. And so it made them grotesqueries you might not see if you didn't understand, if you didn't listen to the workers. And I went and met with a labor organizer and Rose workers outside the place because, of course, they couldn't talk about working conditions inside.

And they told me all those things I just said about, you know, and they themselves had repetitive stress injuries. You know, the poverty, they make about $256 a month forced over time, et cetera. So our Mother's Day and Valentine's Day, when we use the most roses in the U.S., is their forced labor, forced to work up to 100 hours a week so that, you know, to cut more roses, pack more roses, ship more roses? I mean, thank you for telling us about that. My understanding is that's not something that most people ever get to see. And it's very striking that, you know, your book about Orwell also contains this like very vivid view of like what goes on in this like industry that most people.

I mean, we're the consumers of where the recipients of. But we have no idea what goes on there. It's really startling. I'd known about it for a while, but I had and I had been my example of how do we respond to things that might be visually beautiful, but we know or should know are morally hideous. But yeah, getting inside was pretty exciting. I was with a wonderful friend named Nate Miller, who had actually done a big report on labor conditions in the Rose factories and had lived in Columbia for years, was fluent, and they clearly didn't do their homework because if they knew who the hell he was,

they would have never let us in. And they just thought I was some nice white lady writing about flowers. I was writing about flowers, but I was writing about flowers and Orwell and politics and climate and the environment. And one of the things I really wanted to do in this book is look also, you know, this is a book called Orwell's Roses. It's about Orwell. It's also about roses, you know, as a kind of central symbol in Western culture for all kinds of beautiful and spiritual and erotic things.

Western culture for all kinds of beautiful and spiritual and erotic things. Also, they can be a synodosher stand-in for flowering plants or plants, you know, for thinking about ecological things, for thinking about gardens. But in our time, they're also an industrial product and, you know, that's utterly alienated and kind of hideous. And so I wanted to, you know, just as I wanted to talk about gardens as sites of politics, I wanted to look at roses. The ugliest version of roses, as well as the most beautiful. Orwell tending his little garden, loving his flowers. You know, these six pence roses he got at Woolworth's might be one of the most beautiful versions of roses or Jamaica Kincaid and her roses. These industrial rose production, macchiodoras are the antithesis.

But can you, if someone were to give you a bouquet of roses today, knowing all this, do you think you could still take Orwell's sort of like simple sensory pleasure in them? I think I might have a little discomfort, a sense of unease about these, because I would know that they also might represent exploitation and destruction. One of the joys, I'm a Californian, I'm a habituate of farmer's markets. I'm now looking at hydrangeas, a beautiful flower called scabiosa, a kind of queen anne's lace, all of which I got from some local farmers at the farmer's market I go to on Sundays. And, you know, so I'm all for flowers on the table and, you know, kind of sustainable or local or justly produced flowers.

And I should say these were supposed to be rainforest certified flowers. But all that, you know, you get this little sticker that says that, oh, environmentally and in labor conditions, these are perfectly lovely. But that was not what I saw in this rainforest certified place so yeah so so but i also think there's a different kind of beauty and to not know who you are where you are what you're connected to to i think can be morally reprehensible if you're us privileged people who have the capacity to know and it's also to be lost in a way to know who you are and where you are and how the world works i you know i think knowledge is not only power but it can often be beautiful so i think that there is a kind of beauty in understanding

these things and being able to make choices that where you support you know an organic flower farm, non-exploitative labor, good relations. There's a beautiful essay by Jamaica Kincaid that was in the New Yorker many years ago that had a huge impact on me, where she starts by looking at a garden in South Carolina made by slave labor and gets into an argument with white people who think it's beautiful when she thinks it's ugly. And she ends by talking about winning a prize and using the money to expand her own garden and very clearly is showing us what the opposite is, which is the egalitarian and mutually respectful relationship she has with the men she employs who correct her plans because they understand things better than she does because they're the workers.

She listens to them. They listen to her. It's a completely beautiful and honorable transaction. And so like Orwell, she believes that acts and relationships can also be beautiful and a garden should be full of those. A garden full of slave labor is ugly. Yeah. You said you also were writing about the climate, the environment more broadly in this book.

How does that come in? Well, first of all, I feel like in this moment of unprecedented crisis, everything should be about climate. unprecedented crisis. Everything should be about climate. Whenever I give a talk, I work the climate in somehow. I'm on one board and two advisory boards for climate groups. We are in the midst of an epic crisis. And of course, Orwell was not aware of that, but he did go into the coal mines, which, you know, and coal would produce some of that crisis. He did see how ugly and destructive coal was. And of course, that let me think more deeply about what coal is, which is the fossilized residue of plants from an era we call carboniferous, because it laid down so much of the carbon we're now burning. You know, and it let me think about what plants do,

which is they sequester carbon. And they've been doing that for hundreds of millions of years to produce. And before that, the tiny organisms in the ocean produce the oxygen. And plants still pump oxygen into the atmosphere, take carbon out of it. carbon out of it. And, you know, so his time in the coal mines let me think about what coal is, what plants do, how not only were the coal mines a kind of violence, a kind of war with the workers as victims and all the people poisoned by coal, but how in a sense we're in a war against plants as we try to reverse what they do, to put the carbon back in the sky

that they so thoughtfully sequestered for us. You know, so it's, you know, it's... You can't really think about climate change without thinking about plants. And although Orwell did not think about climate change because it wasn't a reality in his time, he did think a lot about plants and about coal. And he did worry about human power. He was the man who coined the phrase Cold War. He saw from the very news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 that atomic weapons were terrifying.

And he worried that they could be used to change the climate, to melt the ice caps. And so it wasn't such a stretch to think, okay, Orwell's deep involvement with plants and with coal lets us think about what plants and coal mean in our time. And this is very much a book in which roses are kind of a gateway to think about Orwell. But Orwell is also a gateway to think about roses and plants. I wish I could do an entire additional interview with you about how you write these books and just how you connect the ideas together, you know, and how you gather, you know, how you start thinking about your subject matter and how you gather these thoughts.

Because I love the way that, you know, you're able to take these ideas, which in another writer's hands might seem very disparate and make them all one complete thought and topic. It's it's really striking. I'm glad it seems seamless to you. I know some people think I'm scattered and I admire writers like Bill McKibben and Michael Pollan, who are so on topic and clear all the time when I'm always feeling like, but since everything's connected to everything else, we need to have a kind of nonlinear way of mapping the patterns, the relationships. And somebody, actually my friend Adam Hothschild, who also writes very lovely linear books, said that he thought the structure of this book was a rosebush. said that he thought the structure of this book was a rosebush.

Oh, that is so beautiful. But no, that nonlinear structure, it, I don't know, enlightens you to so many more the ways all these things are connected. I mean, just hearing you talk about it, you know, talking about climate, you earlier said that, you know, we're flying the roses from Bogota to Miami and, you know, the, and we're flying them with, you know, fossil fuels, which came from, you know, millennia old plants. Like it's. Yeah. And so for a rose to have a huge climate footprint is just, you know, kind of bizarre and hideous and just so alienated. I know 1.6 million roses in a 747 over the ocean. That is so far from gardens and our pretty little pictures of what roses are. It was such a great emblem.

I actually wanted to go to Colombia. I wanted to write about that even before I ran into these rose bushes that, you know, the people who own the cottage now think maybe Orwell's roses, may not. But at the time, we thought were Orwell's roses and got me started. And so it was kind of a joy to go, you know, this is a book about beauty, but also about ugliness and all its dimensions. Amazing. So you don't know if the roses were Orwell's or not that you saw? No.

At the time, they said just very simply to me, you know, would you like to see Orwell's roses, the roses he planted? And just as I was going to press, they said, we're not as sure as we were four years ago that these are actually his roses. There's a very good chance they are. There's quite, you know, so I... You're like, come on, you're not as sure as we were four years ago that these are actually his roses. There's a very good chance they are. There's quite, you know, so I'm like, come on, you're screwing my book here. I just wrote a whole book about these roses. But it was like, we're almost in almost going to print.

So I just jumped in and put a bunch of qualifiers in where I could. And it's one of those things where, you know, like Orwell, I believe in truth is accuracy and precision. I tried to be as clear as possible that nothing is definitive. I don't think you can do a core sample on a rose the way you can on a tree to count its rings. But they are roses growing where Orwell planted and tended roses, saw them growing 10 years later and wrote an essay about the roses and the fruit trees that sent me there. So there's that. I mean, for me, that's good enough. You go to the place where Orwell was tending roses and he wrote an essay about roses in that spot and there's still roses there. Is that not enough to say those were Orwell's roses?

those were Orwell's roses? You know, I was trained as a journalist. It's a bit like Gorbachev and Reagan and nuclear weapons kind of trust but verify. And so I've always try, I'm a total stickler for truth and accuracy and nonfiction and the more essayistic and poetic and personal versions as well as in journalism so I felt like I needed to make it clear we don't know for sure but there's a very good chance these are Orwell's and I certainly believed at the time and it was so exciting because the jolt for me was both my god I never thought hard enough about what what it meant that this particular famous leftist was planting and cultivating and loving and writing about his roses, but also just that immediacy of the connection. And, you know, the conversation Sam and I were having that sent me to look for the fruit trees was about trees planted by people who were gone and i love the way that a tree you know i'm here in california where we have 5 000 year old bristlecone pines 2 000 year old redwoods where just to be in the

presence of something that was alive you know i can just go to mere woods and there are trees that lived half their life before columbus land before columbus landed in Hispaniola, you know, before the pilgrims landed, you know, in what was not then named New England and, you know, before Christianity existed. And it's just to be in the presence of beings with these other time scales, you know, these living, there's something about a living connection that's very different than this rock is 2 billion years old. And, you know, and that was part of the joy of meeting these roses that are maybe, maybe not Orwell's roses, was that sense of living connection. I had never expected to somebody who felt really far gone to me.

Well, man, I feel like you've given us so many wonderful final thoughts about the book. So we only have a few minutes left. I am so fascinated by, again, your writing process and how you connect these ideas and how you find them. So I'm very curious to know, you know, what are you, do you have any sense of what you're working on next? What new ideas are germinating? Is there anything else that you're currently fascinated by that you're, you know, working on developing next? I'm, for me, this is a revolution. You know, I'm not actually writing a next book immediately. My books have leapfrogged each other.

I've done 20 books, including collected essays in 20 years. Wow. But I'm just continuing to write essays as the occasion arises and trying to be a better climate activist, a good great aunt. And, you know, I spent Sunday with my nieces, my great nieces in gardens, you know, and there will be more books. But, but it's really looking at, you know, the kind of stuff that I often write about, trying to rethink some of the assumptions behind how we how we talk in public about who we are, what constitutes truth or fairness, or a voice that we should give credibility to, trying

to find ways to talk about climate, trying to, you know, celebrate what there is to celebrate. And, you know, Orwell's response to one, and he both had somebody write in and say that roses are bourgeois, but also somebody who told him he was pessimistic. And he said, I like to celebrate when I find something that there is to celebrate. So, but also to critique those things that need to be critiqued. So I'm really an essayist by nature. And sometimes it leads to something that's like a complex book length essay like this rose bush shaped book but often i'm functioning at you know the scale of 1200 to 5000 words and that happens all the time too so so lots of little things what form does your what else are you trying to do as an activist? I'm just curious. non-existence was, of course, about that, about finding a voice and trying to have a voice in a society in which women are often voiceless in so many ways. So, you know, I can't help but

pipe up about that. But I feel that sort of deep commitment to talk about climate because it's the issue of our time. And it's a really different job. I mean, feminism is about our bodies, our gender, And it's a really different job. Feminism is about our bodies, our gender, our sex, our identities. It's so visceral and personal. Climate is science and technology and economics. And we're all constantly finding ways to make that visceral and personal and imaginable to people. And for me, just to understand you know and translate somebody called me a translator the other day and i loved it you know you look at the super wonky business of how

renewable energy has become incredible has been a revolution really it's so much cheaper so much more effective so much more, growing by leaps and bounds, so much more viable so that we can leave the age of fossil fuel behind. But it's all this very wonky numbers game. How do you translate that to make people feel like, oh my God, we had this amazing revolution. We can stop funding fossil fuel extraction. We can shut it down. We can essentially outlaw the destruction of the climate that burning fossil fuel extraction. We can shut it down. We can essentially outlaw the destruction of the climate that burning fossil fuels is because we have the solutions. You know, how do you make that exciting? You know, so, you know, it's hard. And I love the scientists like

Michael Mann who are doing it, the climate activists like Greta Thunberg, who are doing it, you know, a lot of the native leadership who have really made it a chance to talk about bigger ideas about what are our obligations and relationships to nature, our time scales, our, you know, our sense of community, things like that. So it's both exciting and incredibly difficult. Well, I can't thank you enough for the work that you do, for your wonderful writing, and for being on this show. It's been, like I said, wonderful having you. And I hope it's not too long until your next book so we can have you back. Or if you just want to come talk about a new essay,

that's fine too. Although it's not, I know you don't do book tours for that generally, but you've invented a new phenomenon and I'm so in the essay tour. Yeah. Just publish a new couple thousand words and then come on and talk about it. I would love that. That would be a delight. It's been a huge pleasure talking to you. Don't stop preaching to the choir. They came to listen and to sing. Well, thank you so much for coming to preach to us. And thank you so much for the choir for listening today. So thank you, Rebecca. You're welcome.

You're welcome. Well, thank you once again to Rebecca Solnit for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of Orwell's Roses, that URL once again to Rebecca Solnit for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of Orwell's Roses, that URL once again to our special bookshop is factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song. The fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building the incredible custom gaming PC that this very show is recorded upon. If you want to get in touch with me, you can reach out at

factually at adamconover.net. That's factually at adamconover.net. Until next week, we'll see you on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. Heroes