IN 2022, Thelma Young Lutunatabua and Rebecca Solnit launched Not Too Late, a project designed to offer good facts and frameworks about climate change and the climate movement. The project fosters inquiries and conversations about achievable solutions to the crises we’re facing: solutions that address the root causes of climate disaster as well as ease our collective despair. A collection of the same title was recently released by Haymarket Books, and it features contributions from twenty climate visionaries from around the world, including the following conversation between Rebecca, Thelma, and adrienne maree brown.
Thelma Young Lutunatabua: I love your collection of visionary futurism, Octavia’s Brood. The introduction, written with your coauthor, Walidah Imarisha, says, “Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.” If we, as a society, were able to unshackle our imaginations, what could be possible?
If we were able to unshackle our imaginations in this moment, I think our compatibility with Earth would become possible. I believe that humans have a concept of ourselves as taking from Earth and not necessarily giving anything back to it, using Earth as kind of a temporary machine from which we’re going to launch some other situation or find some other planet. And it’s a very limited worldview. I think if we were to unshackle our imaginations, we would be able to see this is an abundant
