John King and Rebecca Solnit

Join us for the first event in the re-launched Herb Caen Lecture series, sponsored by Berkeley Journalism and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Acclaimed author and activist Rebecca Solnit, a Berkeley Journalism alum, will talk with San Francisco Chronicle Urban Design Critic John King about her 2023 co-edited anthology “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility” and her insights on local and global climate stories.

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty-five books on feminism, environmental and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. She co-edited the 2023 anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Her other books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and in 2022 launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, a post that touches on everything from the city’s changing skyline to the urgent need for the Bay Area to take a more proactive and thoughtful approach to adapting our shorelines to future sea level rise. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, he also is the author of “Portal: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities,” published in 2023 by W.W. Norton.

About the Herb Caen Lecture

The Herb Caen/San Francisco Chronicle Lecture Fund was established in 1996 in honor of Herb Caen by the Chronicle Publishing Company. The Herb Caen Lecture features prominent speakers who have views on communications in America and their importance to our future. Speakers are drawn from diverse fields including journalism, the arts, the sciences, and business.