Attention climate doom-and-gloomers! In her latest book, Solvable, the atmospheric scientist Susan Soloman has a premise—the lifeline we’re all hoping for: We have healed the earth before, and we can do it again.
Justin Knight.
Susan, an MIT professor who was the Founding Director of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, is basing this idea on historical fact. She personally helped heal the damaged ozone layer using discoveries made when she led a 1986 expedition to Antarctica. So if she says the climate crisis is solvable—and how—it’s worth listening. The path forward is rooted, to her mind, in solutions to yesterday’s environmental problems. She dips in and out of these victories in her dense but fluid chapters—ozone depletion, smog, pesticides, and lead—to demonstrate what, exactly, makes environmental change possible.
Susan is a fluent writer. Not all scientists are—and she’s a scientist through and through, the winner of the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Grande Medaille from the French Academy of Sciences, and the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, among other awards.
She deftly takes science and places it in history, weaving in and out of politics, public awareness, popular culture (even managing a passing mention of Beatlemania), industry, activism, and the women’s movement, to offer it broad, accessible context. It works. Solvable is an unlikely page turner, even for those of us who are not chemists.
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Spoiler alert: According to history, mothers who advocate for public health are a critical part of solving the climate crisis. So if you’re reading this, you’re likely already part of the practical solutions. Pick up a copy of Solvable, and dig in for more. Meanwhile, here are Susan’s wise answers to our questions covering everything from extreme weather to heavy lifting to cautious optimism.
Which environmental book changed your life? Who are your favorite environmental writers?
Reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when I was a teenager was a transformative experience, and Rachel Carson is an unparalleled environmental writer. She woke the world up to the dangers of long-lived pesticides building up in our environment and threatening the survival of many magnificent species, and she did it with a writing style that remains unmatched. It was her remarkable skill in writing that fostered widespread interest in the book, followed by widespread concern as people absorbed what she was saying and as the evidence for it mounted in the years after the book was published. And of course, the impact of her books ignited the environmental movement.
Why did you choose to write an environmental book?
I think there are beautiful triumphs in environmental history. I wanted to share those to give people a sense of how they happen, and a sense of hope for the future. When you look at smog, acid rain, lead in gas and paint, the depletion of the ozone layer, or DDT, you see that we managed all these—after some fits and starts, we got there. How did that happen? It turns out that there are some common threads that ultimately supported environmental progress. Citizen engagement is key—nothing happens without it, but when it’s strong enough, seemingly intractable problems have been solved. I wanted to convey the history of how we humans did all that and what the implications are for dealing with today’s problems.
What do you go without because of the climate crisis?
I’ve become a pescatarian—that is, I eat vegetables and fish but no meat of any kind. I think it’s good for my carbon footprint, as well as my health!
What are your greatest climate fears for the future?
I do fear how bad wildfire is going to get and how many ecosystems will be devastated, as well as human lives lost. Parts of the world have gotten much hotter and drier, and that is expected to worsen. I also fear the extreme rainfall and flooding that has hit other places, with horrific community impacts. As the planet gets hotter, the extremes of rain increase more than the average, and the air holds more water. All this adds up to the need to stop emitting the greenhouse gases causing the problem.
What’s your current state of mind when it comes to the climate crisis?
Cautiously optimistic. I think that environmental success involves three Ps. First off, so many people have gotten interested in climate change—that’s because it’s now personal to them. Whether it’s heat waves, or fires, or flooding, we are seeing so many changes in our climate that it’s personal. Second, it’s perceptible—we can see it and feel it. It’s hard to provide misinformation to confuse people when they see things happening with their own eyes. Third, we do now have practical solutions. There are a lot of things we can do to bend the curve of emissions, and get them to start dropping, recognizing that it’s a long game. All the tools we need are here; we just have to get on with it.
What do you consider your greatest climate achievement?
My greatest climate achievement was my work to save the ozone layer, which also resulted in the elimination of a lot of greenhouse warming from chlorofluorocarbon gases. In addition to depleting ozone, chlorofluorocarbons are strong greenhouse gases, so by saving the ozone layer to save our skins (and other living things) from too much ultraviolet light, we also avoided a great deal of global warming. The number one problem is still carbon dioxide, but chlorofluorocarbons contribute a significant amount of warming so it’s good to avoid that if we can! And we did.
What does hope for the future mean to you?
Hope means recognizing that all is not lost and that throwing up your hands, or worse yet, giving up, is the worst thing we can do. The climate crisis is upon us, and to get to a better end point is going to need citizen engagement. It is a heavy lift, probably the toughest thing humanity has yet done, but so many things are falling into place that I think we can be very optimistic. The prices of solar, onshore wind, batteries, and electric vehicles have been coming down fast and are going to continue to fall. That should give us all a huge amount of hope. We need to keep pushing for that energy transition to happen, and to happen in a just and equitable way worldwide, and we can make that critical progress that needs to happen in the next decade, and then the decade after that.
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