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allusory's review against another edition
3.0
If I had read this when it was originally published in 2004, I might find it more impactful than I do in 2018. Many of the examples in the book haven't aged well, though that is less of an issue than that important conversations about hope and social movements have moved out of the realms of middle class white women in the last 14 years. At a time when our country is struggling still to recognize the voices, work, and sometimes the basic humanity, of so many marginalized people, it's difficult to read a work calling for hope and change from someone who fails to give them a voice.
While much of this book mentions movements led by groups outside the US, by indigenous peoples, and by other non-white people in the US, it rarely gives them names. There are definitely exceptions, but overall it left me feeling like important voices were being left out of a work purportedly giving them praise. This was especially jarring because Solnit often hyper focuses on minutia and facts. That fixation was often at the expense of both readability and relatability.
While much of this book mentions movements led by groups outside the US, by indigenous peoples, and by other non-white people in the US, it rarely gives them names. There are definitely exceptions, but overall it left me feeling like important voices were being left out of a work purportedly giving them praise. This was especially jarring because Solnit often hyper focuses on minutia and facts. That fixation was often at the expense of both readability and relatability.
kthornberry's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
3.0
Good for the ol' existential dread
lando_reads_books's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
readingwithcoffee's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
4.75
catouch's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
kitkathy24's review against another edition
5.0
The introduction ("Grounds for Hope") is the best concise argument I've seen for learning history. I was taught in my conservative public school system that history was about knowing traditions and honoring heroes, etc., but Solnit argues for learning history as an inspiration in how mutable and unknowable the future is, how much more is possible than we typically imagine under the status quo. It's fundamentally hopeful and reminds you of your own agency.
With nuance and beautiful prose, Solnit argues that fear and despair are an abdication of responsibility and possibility, because they assume that all attempts to fight an injustice will fail. Hope requires imagination of things not yet seen, and of always making the attempt to change things regardless of the odds against success. Solnit argues, with copious examples, that the impacts of activism are commonly indirect but enormous; that activists can almost never predict the impact they will have. She argues that people often lose track of victories or downplay them, focusing on the issues that remain or the ways in which the revolution/changes were imperfect. History is a long track record of gradual successes and enormous change, which is hugely motivating. She reminds us that activism is a way of life and a recognition that the work will never be complete.
Ran a little long for my tastes. The essay on climate change was less convincing of the reasons for hope than it might have been in 2014. In 2022, with the Greenland ice sheet past its tipping point and the Trump Admin's track record (ANWR, Paris, KXL re-auth, etc.), climate is looking rougher than ever. She's right that there are reasons to hope, though.
Excerpts:
Hope as Strength & Memory
- xviii: Hope is only the beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it. ... Hope gets you there; work gets you through.
- xix: "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," Walter Brueggeman noted. Though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. … Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces that view. … One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change.
- xix: We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.
- xx: Susan Griffin… recently remarked, "I’ve seen enough change in my lifetime to know that despair is not only self-defeating, it is unrealistic."
- 11: F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function… one should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
- 12: Being politically engaged means having a sense of your own power—that what you do matters—and a sense of belonging… despair is more a kind of fatigue, a loss of faith, that can be overcome, or even an indulgence if you look at the power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone. …Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don’t depend on them.
- 48: War is easy to abhor, but it takes a serious passion to unravel the tangles of financial manipulations and to understand the pain of sweatshop workers or displaced farmers. And maybe this is what heroism looks like nowadays: occasionally high-profile heroism in public but mostly just painstaking mastery of arcane policy, stubborn perseverance year after year for a cause, empathy with those who remain unseen, and outrage channeled into dedication.
Despair, Inaction, and Perfectionism
- xvi: Some activists are afraid that if we acknowledge victory, people will give up the struggle. I've long been more afraid that people will give up and go home or never get started in the first place if they think no victory is possible or fail to recognize the victories already achieved.
- 17: To be effective, activists have to make strong, simple, urgent demands, at least some of the time… and they have to recognize that their victories may come as subtle, complex, slow changes instead, and count them anyway.
- 20: Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable. ... The activists who deny their own power and possibility likewise choose to shake off their sense of obligation: if they are doomed to lose, they don't have to do very much except situation themselves as beautiful losers or at least virtuous ones.
- 23: There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's one virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that comes from pleasure denied. ... Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that's austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. ...Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism.
- 60: A lot of activists seem to... expect finality, definitiveness, straightforward cause-and-effect relationships, instant returns, and as a result they specialize in disappointment, which sinks in as bitterness, cynicism, defeatism... History is made out of common dreams, groundswells, turning points, watersheds--it's a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect... History is like weather, not like checkers... A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That's why you can't save anything. Saving is the wrong word, one invoked over and over again, for almost every cause. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux of earthly change. Saving suggests a laying up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt; it imagines an extraction from the dangerous, unstable, ever-changing process called life on earth. But life is never so tidy and final. ...Environmentalists like to say that defeats are permanent, victories are temporary. Americans are good at responding to a crisis and then going home to let another crisis brew.
- 79: Conservatives rear-project narratives about how everyone used to be straight, god-fearing, decently clad and content with the nuclear family, narratives that any good reading of history undoes. Activists, even those who decry Judeo-Christian heritage as our own fall from grace, are as prone to tell the story of paradise, though their paradise might be matriarchal or vegan or the flip side of the technological utopia of classical socialism. They compare the possible to perfection, again and again, finding fault with the former because of the latter. Paradise is imagined as a static place, as a place before or after history, after strife and eventfulness and change: the premise is that once perfection has arrived change is no longer necessary. This idea of perfection is also why people believe in saving, in going home, and in activism as crisis response rather than everyday practice.
- 138: [A woman said], "If I had not hoped, I would not have struggled. And if I had not struggled, I would not have survived." ...For the desperate, the alternative to hope--and the struggle to realize that hope--is death or privation or torture or a grim future or no future for their children. They are motivated. ...And then there were my people, middle-class white people. It was as though many of us didn't know how to be this other kind of person, this person who could speak of big dreams, of high ideals, of deep emotions, as though something more small-scale and sarcastic was the reduced version of the self that remained to us. ...A lot of people seem to be looking for trouble, the trouble that reinforces their dismal worldview. Everything that's not perfect is failed, disappointing, a betrayal. There's idealism in there, but also unrealistic expectations, ones that cannot meet with anything but disappointment.
- 141: Despair isn't even an ideological position but a habit and a reflex. I have found, during my adventures in squandering time on social media, that a lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with "yes but." Naysaying becomes a habit. ...It boiled down to: we can't talk about good things until there are no more bad things. Which, given that the supply of bad things is inexhaustible, and more bad things are always arising, means that we can't talk about good things at all. Ever. ... The young activist Yotam Marom, ...wrote: "When I think about the politics of powerlessness, it feels clear as day to me that the source of all of it is fear. Fear of leaders, of the enemy, of the possibility of having to govern, of the stakes of winning and losing, of each other, of ourselves. We... are full of scarcity--convinced that there isn't enough of anything to go around (money, people, power, even love). We eat ourselves alive and attack our own leaders because we've been hurt and misled all our lives and can't bear for it to happen again on our watch... Our tendency to make enemies of each other is driven by a deep fear of the real enemy, a paralyzing hopelessness about our possibilities of winning.
Evidence of People Power
- xxiii: Those who doubt that [moments of revolution] matter should not how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can’t believe.
- xxv: The mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both.
- 29: How did these stories and beliefs migrate from the margins to the center? ...New stories likely start in the marginal zones, with visionaries, radicals, obscure researchers, the young, the poor--the discounted, who count anyway. ... To be pushed to the edges is to be marginalized; to push your way back to the center is often to be defamed and criminalized. ...The margins...are also portrayed as dangerous and unsavory. One of the great shocks of recent years came to me in a police station in Scotland, where... I found myself contemplating a poster of wanted criminals: not rapists and murderers but kids with peculiar hairstyles and piercings who had been active in demonstrations... in which business as usual had been disrupted but no one had been harmed. So these were the criminals who most threatened the state? Then the state was fragile and we were powerful. ...To admit that these people pose a threat to the status quo is to admit first that there is a status quo, secondly that it may be an unjust and unjustifiable thing, and thirdly that it can indeed be changed by passionate people and nonviolent means. To admit this is to admit the limits of state power and its legitimacy.
- 117: Hollywood movies and too many government pandemic plans still presume that most of us are cowards or brutes, that we panic, trample each other, rampage, or freeze helplessly in moments of crisis and chaos. Most of us believe this, even though it is a slander against the species, an obliteration of what actually happens, and a crippling blow to our ability to prepare for disasters. / Hollywood likes this view because it paces the way for movies starring some superman in the foreground and hordes of stampeding, screaming extras. Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. ...Governments like the grim view for a similar reason: it justifies their existence as repressive, controlling, hostile forces, rather than collaborators with brave and powerful citizenries.
- 123: [In the response to the San Francisco 1906 earthquake] The presiding officer... presumed that the public would immediately revert to chaos and that his task was restoring order. In the first days after the disaster, the truth was more or less the other way around, as the army and the National Guard prevented citizens from fighting the fires and collecting their property, shot people as looters (including rescuers and bystanders), and generally regarded the public as the enemy (as did some of the officials presiding over the post-Katrina "rescue"). As with many disasters, a calamity that came from outside was magnified by elite fears and institutional failures within.
Indirect Impacts
- xiv: Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. [Hope is] the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. ...Mushroomed: after a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. ...Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork--or underground work--often laid the foundation.
- xxiv: Change is rarely straightforward… Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.
- 3: Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.
Reminders
- xxiii: [During the Hurricane Katrina volunteer response] None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile; therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, … All of them said, I can rescue someone, and that’s work so meaningful and important I will risk my life and defy authorities to do it.
- 10: History will remember 2004 not with the microscopic lens of we who lived through it the aphids traverse a rose, but with a telescopic eye that sees it as part of the stream of wild changes of the past few decades, some for the worse, some for the better.
- 54: To live entirely for oneself in private is a huge luxury, a luxury countless aspects of this society encourage, but like a diet of pure foie gras it clogs and narrows the arteries of the heart.
- 93: My London-based friend John Jordan, a wonderful writer and activist,... writes me, "...When we are asked how are we going to build a new world, our answer is, 'We don't know, but let's build it together.' In effect we are saying the end is not as important as the means..."
- 108: It's hard to see radical change in the United States, and easy to see how necessary it is. I spend a lot of time looking at my country in horror. ... The Bush administration seems to be doing what every previous administration was too prudent to do: pursuing its unenlightened self-interest so recklessly that it is undermining US standing in the world and the economy that underwrote that standing.
On Climate
- 130: Many people don't grasp what we're up against, because they don't think about Earth and its systems much or they don't grasp the delicate, intricate reciprocities and counterbalances that keep it all running as well as it has since the last ice age ended and an abundant, calm Earth emerged. It's not real or vivid or visceral or even visible for most of us. / It is for a great many scientists whose fields have something to do with climate. In many cases they're scared, they're sad, and they're clear about the urgency of taking action to limit how disastrous climate change is for our species and for the systems we depend upon. Many people outside the loop think that it's too late to do anything, which, as premature despair always does, excuses us for doing nothing. ...Quite a lot of insiders think that what we do now matter tremendously, because the difference between the best and worst case scenarios is vast, and the future is not yet written.
- 134: I began to contemplate how human beings half a century or a century from now will view us, who lived in the era when climate change was recognized and there was so much that could be done about it, so much more than we have done. They may hate us, despise us, see us as the people who squandered their patrimony, like drunkards gambling away the family fortune that, in this case, is everyone's everywhere and everything, the natural world itself when it was in good working order. They will regard us as people who rearranged the china when the house was on fire. ... Many people believe that personal virtue is what matters in this crisis. ...You are not just what you personally do or do not consume but part of a greater problem if you are a citizen of a country that is a major carbon emitter... You are part of the system, and you need, we all need, to change that system. Nothing less than systemic change will save us.
With nuance and beautiful prose, Solnit argues that fear and despair are an abdication of responsibility and possibility, because they assume that all attempts to fight an injustice will fail. Hope requires imagination of things not yet seen, and of always making the attempt to change things regardless of the odds against success. Solnit argues, with copious examples, that the impacts of activism are commonly indirect but enormous; that activists can almost never predict the impact they will have. She argues that people often lose track of victories or downplay them, focusing on the issues that remain or the ways in which the revolution/changes were imperfect. History is a long track record of gradual successes and enormous change, which is hugely motivating. She reminds us that activism is a way of life and a recognition that the work will never be complete.
Ran a little long for my tastes. The essay on climate change was less convincing of the reasons for hope than it might have been in 2014. In 2022, with the Greenland ice sheet past its tipping point and the Trump Admin's track record (ANWR, Paris, KXL re-auth, etc.), climate is looking rougher than ever. She's right that there are reasons to hope, though.
Excerpts:
Hope as Strength & Memory
- xviii: Hope is only the beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it. ... Hope gets you there; work gets you through.
- xix: "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," Walter Brueggeman noted. Though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. … Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces that view. … One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change.
- xix: We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.
- xx: Susan Griffin… recently remarked, "I’ve seen enough change in my lifetime to know that despair is not only self-defeating, it is unrealistic."
- 11: F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function… one should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
- 12: Being politically engaged means having a sense of your own power—that what you do matters—and a sense of belonging… despair is more a kind of fatigue, a loss of faith, that can be overcome, or even an indulgence if you look at the power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone. …Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don’t depend on them.
- 48: War is easy to abhor, but it takes a serious passion to unravel the tangles of financial manipulations and to understand the pain of sweatshop workers or displaced farmers. And maybe this is what heroism looks like nowadays: occasionally high-profile heroism in public but mostly just painstaking mastery of arcane policy, stubborn perseverance year after year for a cause, empathy with those who remain unseen, and outrage channeled into dedication.
Despair, Inaction, and Perfectionism
- xvi: Some activists are afraid that if we acknowledge victory, people will give up the struggle. I've long been more afraid that people will give up and go home or never get started in the first place if they think no victory is possible or fail to recognize the victories already achieved.
- 17: To be effective, activists have to make strong, simple, urgent demands, at least some of the time… and they have to recognize that their victories may come as subtle, complex, slow changes instead, and count them anyway.
- 20: Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable. ... The activists who deny their own power and possibility likewise choose to shake off their sense of obligation: if they are doomed to lose, they don't have to do very much except situation themselves as beautiful losers or at least virtuous ones.
- 23: There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's one virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that comes from pleasure denied. ... Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that's austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. ...Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism.
- 60: A lot of activists seem to... expect finality, definitiveness, straightforward cause-and-effect relationships, instant returns, and as a result they specialize in disappointment, which sinks in as bitterness, cynicism, defeatism... History is made out of common dreams, groundswells, turning points, watersheds--it's a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect... History is like weather, not like checkers... A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That's why you can't save anything. Saving is the wrong word, one invoked over and over again, for almost every cause. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux of earthly change. Saving suggests a laying up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt; it imagines an extraction from the dangerous, unstable, ever-changing process called life on earth. But life is never so tidy and final. ...Environmentalists like to say that defeats are permanent, victories are temporary. Americans are good at responding to a crisis and then going home to let another crisis brew.
- 79: Conservatives rear-project narratives about how everyone used to be straight, god-fearing, decently clad and content with the nuclear family, narratives that any good reading of history undoes. Activists, even those who decry Judeo-Christian heritage as our own fall from grace, are as prone to tell the story of paradise, though their paradise might be matriarchal or vegan or the flip side of the technological utopia of classical socialism. They compare the possible to perfection, again and again, finding fault with the former because of the latter. Paradise is imagined as a static place, as a place before or after history, after strife and eventfulness and change: the premise is that once perfection has arrived change is no longer necessary. This idea of perfection is also why people believe in saving, in going home, and in activism as crisis response rather than everyday practice.
- 138: [A woman said], "If I had not hoped, I would not have struggled. And if I had not struggled, I would not have survived." ...For the desperate, the alternative to hope--and the struggle to realize that hope--is death or privation or torture or a grim future or no future for their children. They are motivated. ...And then there were my people, middle-class white people. It was as though many of us didn't know how to be this other kind of person, this person who could speak of big dreams, of high ideals, of deep emotions, as though something more small-scale and sarcastic was the reduced version of the self that remained to us. ...A lot of people seem to be looking for trouble, the trouble that reinforces their dismal worldview. Everything that's not perfect is failed, disappointing, a betrayal. There's idealism in there, but also unrealistic expectations, ones that cannot meet with anything but disappointment.
- 141: Despair isn't even an ideological position but a habit and a reflex. I have found, during my adventures in squandering time on social media, that a lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with "yes but." Naysaying becomes a habit. ...It boiled down to: we can't talk about good things until there are no more bad things. Which, given that the supply of bad things is inexhaustible, and more bad things are always arising, means that we can't talk about good things at all. Ever. ... The young activist Yotam Marom, ...wrote: "When I think about the politics of powerlessness, it feels clear as day to me that the source of all of it is fear. Fear of leaders, of the enemy, of the possibility of having to govern, of the stakes of winning and losing, of each other, of ourselves. We... are full of scarcity--convinced that there isn't enough of anything to go around (money, people, power, even love). We eat ourselves alive and attack our own leaders because we've been hurt and misled all our lives and can't bear for it to happen again on our watch... Our tendency to make enemies of each other is driven by a deep fear of the real enemy, a paralyzing hopelessness about our possibilities of winning.
Evidence of People Power
- xxiii: Those who doubt that [moments of revolution] matter should not how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can’t believe.
- xxv: The mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both.
- 29: How did these stories and beliefs migrate from the margins to the center? ...New stories likely start in the marginal zones, with visionaries, radicals, obscure researchers, the young, the poor--the discounted, who count anyway. ... To be pushed to the edges is to be marginalized; to push your way back to the center is often to be defamed and criminalized. ...The margins...are also portrayed as dangerous and unsavory. One of the great shocks of recent years came to me in a police station in Scotland, where... I found myself contemplating a poster of wanted criminals: not rapists and murderers but kids with peculiar hairstyles and piercings who had been active in demonstrations... in which business as usual had been disrupted but no one had been harmed. So these were the criminals who most threatened the state? Then the state was fragile and we were powerful. ...To admit that these people pose a threat to the status quo is to admit first that there is a status quo, secondly that it may be an unjust and unjustifiable thing, and thirdly that it can indeed be changed by passionate people and nonviolent means. To admit this is to admit the limits of state power and its legitimacy.
- 117: Hollywood movies and too many government pandemic plans still presume that most of us are cowards or brutes, that we panic, trample each other, rampage, or freeze helplessly in moments of crisis and chaos. Most of us believe this, even though it is a slander against the species, an obliteration of what actually happens, and a crippling blow to our ability to prepare for disasters. / Hollywood likes this view because it paces the way for movies starring some superman in the foreground and hordes of stampeding, screaming extras. Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. ...Governments like the grim view for a similar reason: it justifies their existence as repressive, controlling, hostile forces, rather than collaborators with brave and powerful citizenries.
- 123: [In the response to the San Francisco 1906 earthquake] The presiding officer... presumed that the public would immediately revert to chaos and that his task was restoring order. In the first days after the disaster, the truth was more or less the other way around, as the army and the National Guard prevented citizens from fighting the fires and collecting their property, shot people as looters (including rescuers and bystanders), and generally regarded the public as the enemy (as did some of the officials presiding over the post-Katrina "rescue"). As with many disasters, a calamity that came from outside was magnified by elite fears and institutional failures within.
Indirect Impacts
- xiv: Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. [Hope is] the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. ...Mushroomed: after a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. ...Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork--or underground work--often laid the foundation.
- xxiv: Change is rarely straightforward… Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.
- 3: Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.
Reminders
- xxiii: [During the Hurricane Katrina volunteer response] None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile; therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, … All of them said, I can rescue someone, and that’s work so meaningful and important I will risk my life and defy authorities to do it.
- 10: History will remember 2004 not with the microscopic lens of we who lived through it the aphids traverse a rose, but with a telescopic eye that sees it as part of the stream of wild changes of the past few decades, some for the worse, some for the better.
- 54: To live entirely for oneself in private is a huge luxury, a luxury countless aspects of this society encourage, but like a diet of pure foie gras it clogs and narrows the arteries of the heart.
- 93: My London-based friend John Jordan, a wonderful writer and activist,... writes me, "...When we are asked how are we going to build a new world, our answer is, 'We don't know, but let's build it together.' In effect we are saying the end is not as important as the means..."
- 108: It's hard to see radical change in the United States, and easy to see how necessary it is. I spend a lot of time looking at my country in horror. ... The Bush administration seems to be doing what every previous administration was too prudent to do: pursuing its unenlightened self-interest so recklessly that it is undermining US standing in the world and the economy that underwrote that standing.
On Climate
- 130: Many people don't grasp what we're up against, because they don't think about Earth and its systems much or they don't grasp the delicate, intricate reciprocities and counterbalances that keep it all running as well as it has since the last ice age ended and an abundant, calm Earth emerged. It's not real or vivid or visceral or even visible for most of us. / It is for a great many scientists whose fields have something to do with climate. In many cases they're scared, they're sad, and they're clear about the urgency of taking action to limit how disastrous climate change is for our species and for the systems we depend upon. Many people outside the loop think that it's too late to do anything, which, as premature despair always does, excuses us for doing nothing. ...Quite a lot of insiders think that what we do now matter tremendously, because the difference between the best and worst case scenarios is vast, and the future is not yet written.
- 134: I began to contemplate how human beings half a century or a century from now will view us, who lived in the era when climate change was recognized and there was so much that could be done about it, so much more than we have done. They may hate us, despise us, see us as the people who squandered their patrimony, like drunkards gambling away the family fortune that, in this case, is everyone's everywhere and everything, the natural world itself when it was in good working order. They will regard us as people who rearranged the china when the house was on fire. ... Many people believe that personal virtue is what matters in this crisis. ...You are not just what you personally do or do not consume but part of a greater problem if you are a citizen of a country that is a major carbon emitter... You are part of the system, and you need, we all need, to change that system. Nothing less than systemic change will save us.
jeremyanderberg's review against another edition
5.0
My goodness was this great. Everyone needs to read it. Solnit fights against the cynicism and despair of our modern age (especially among progressives). Seriously, must read.
kochella's review against another edition
2.0
I'm somewhat surprised by the high ratings for this book. I didn't think it added much in terms of new thinking and found it to be terribly stream-of-consciousness and disorganized. Since it was originally written in 2005, it was also quite dated (particularly the passages hailing the "election" of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela as a major step for democracy). It was just "ok" for me.