THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END

A declaration of hope.

In her latest book, Solnit surveys the past 60 years of social, scientific, political, and cultural changes that inspire her to feel hopeful for the future. “The rise of Indigenous influence, the shift in scientific understanding, the return to a view of nature as essential and omnipresent,” and the achievements of human rights movements all have transformed the world into which Solnit was born in 1961. Despite a world “rife with white supremacy, misogyny, authoritarianism, transphobia, savage hypercapitalism, tragic consumerism, ecocide, and climate denial,” the author sees evidence of positive change in the ways we understand gender, sexuality, race, nature, equality, and, most importantly, interconnectedness. The past decades, she asserts, have seen a shift “toward the idea that everything is connected, that the world is a network of interrelated systems, that the isolated individual is at best a fiction.” A climate and human rights activist, Solnit examines the insidious consequences of the ideology of isolation, to which she attributes current virulent efforts at suppression, fear of diversity, and denigration of ideas considered “woke.” Instead, she offers persuasive evidence of the acknowledgment of the connection of humans to wilderness, nature, and one another: local groups cleaning up salmon streams and watching the fish return; an energy revolution focused on renewables; the impact of anti-racist, feminist, immigrant, disability-rights, and queer-rights movements; the emergence of environmental awareness in creating laws and systems to protect the natural world; the shift to decolonization globally. “We assume,” she writes, “that the present is not in labor to bring forth a future unlike itself—and it is easier to see the old world dying than the new world being born. But beginnings are what come after endings.”

A convincing vision of a brighter future.