Solnit, a well-known voice in progressive politics, shows us a very different side of Eric Blair, the complex bundle of contradictions better known as George Orwell. The world knows him as a dystopian author of Animal Farm and 1984: two scathing novels attacking Stalinist Totalitarian Communism. Academics also know his work chronicling the lives of coal miners in his native UK, the impact of imperialism in Burma (where, as a young man, he was a police officer), and fighters in the Spanish Civil War (where he was a soldier fighting against Franco’s fascists). Solnit knows him as an avid gardener with a special passion for roses—who sought refuge from polluted London first in the small cottage where he gardened in 1936, and near the end of his life on a farm on a remote Scottish island where the last eight miles of the journey could only be done on foot; a fighter for the principle of clear language and opponent of government or corporate euphemisms; and above all, an optimist who maintained hope all the way through his life.

Why am I reviewing this book HERE, in my newsletter? What relevance does this fascinating portrait of a many-faceted man have for my audience of business leaders involved in social and environmental good, with an interest in marketing?

First, because Orwell was incredibly aware of the interplay of humans with the natural world. Second, because he was involved in social causes throughout his adulthood, even putting his own life at risk several times. Third, because he himself was a solopreneur, running a little shop in the cottage with his wife. Fourth, because Orwell, himself an outcast as a working-class student at elite Eton and then as an Eton-educated person seen as trying to be better than his peers (p. 22), understood that history is shaped by people on the margins. Fifth and perhaps most germane, because this book has a lot of relevance in its discussions of messaging, building positive AND negative movements, and influencing culture.

Solnit starts (p. 8) by noting that planting can be a semi-permanent legacy; trees we plant might outlive us by generations, sometimes centuries. A tree in my front yard was planted in 1916, when my oldest grandparent was 11; I’ve eaten carob from the 2000+-year-old tree that sustained Shimon Bar-Yochai when he hid from the Romans in a cave in northern Israel for thirteen years when people who had known Christ were still alive. Orwell suggested planting an acorn for “every time you commit an antisocial act (p. 10).”

Solnit has a gift for lyrical writing. She refers to the Carboniferous Era as “a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago” (p. 60). Here’s another of many beautiful passages:

Much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passages of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm… (p. 189).

Solnit celebrates Orwell’s joy in the natural beauty and simple pleasures around him, decrying the puritan, humorless aspects of the Left (e.g., pp. 91-92). Having been criticized for making space for pleasure travel, daily time in nature, and eating delicious food instead of being an activist every waking minute, I appreciate this celebration, and the third-party validation she offers through people like Emma Goldman. In my 20s, I proudly wore a t-shirt with a picture of Emma and a distilled version of her response to an activist who criticized her for dancing, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” I still agree, even though the shirt wore out long ago. Solnit gives the complete and accurate quote, in context (p. 114).

So much more to say, but this is already long. Quick highlights:

• Class perspectives on how we experience nature (p. 163) and beauty—and their interaction with justice/injustice, including visiting a sweatshop “rose factory” in Colombia (pp. 189-219)
• How authoritarians exploit lies and gaslighting (pp. 222-224)—and the dangers of letting them create and control history (pp. 222-228 and in numerous references to 1984 protagonist Winston Smith’s career expunging inconvenient history from the written record)
• Orwell’s surprising critique of Gandhi as dogmatic and questioning his tactics (pp. 263-264)
• Right at the end, a key insight: Orwell wasn’t a prophet of doom but a merchant of hope (pp. 259-264). Orwell issued warnings, not prophecies. Warnings give people the option to change, and avoid calamity. In his own words, “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe [in 1984] necessarily will arrive, but…something resembling it could arrive” (p. 262), “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection” (p. 263), and “Our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have” (p. 264).