Solnit, who spoke for about 30 minutes and took questions afterward, was described by Williams as “singular, original, defiant, and loving.” Through her work, which spans human rights, women’s rights, the environment, and climate change, Solnit is “building a constituency for change,” Williams said. “And one of the biggest, wrongest ones that seems to shape - or misshape - the collective imagination is this idea that there’s an option not to change, and that change is just something we should aspire to or demand, that there’s some sort of stability we can choose instead of changing everything.” “Like the chassis of a car or the framing of a house or the skeleton of our own body, assumptions lurk under the stories we tell, giving them their structure or limiting the shapes they can take,” Solnit said. The event, “Stories Are Cages, Stories Are Wings - So What Stories Do We Tell About Climate?,” featured Solnit in conversation with Terry Tempest Williams, Divinity School writer-in-residence, as well as a poetry reading and a musical performance of Beethoven. Solnit, the author of 24 books, including the recently released anthology “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility,” spoke as part of Harvard Divinity School’s Climate Justice Week, designed to promote thinking around climate justice and highlight the roles that religion and spirituality play in the conversation.

The choice is between the uncertainty of a transition from fossil fuels that results in more manageable changes or to continue on the path we’re on, fostering what are likely to be more sweeping and dangerous disruptions. And those changes are going to keep coming - and worsening - regardless of the path we take. That’s because there is no status quo, as the effects of climate change are multiplying around us, Solnit said.

Stories can drive action, but perhaps the most damaging climate change story we can tell is the tall tale that we can simply opt for the stability and safety of the status quo, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said Wednesday evening at Harvard’s Memorial Church.

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