Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit is an activist, TomDispatch.com regular, and author of many books, including the just published, Men Explain Things to Me (Dispatch Books, Haymarket Books). Her first essay for TomDispatch.com turned into the book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Other previous books include: The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, The Battle of The Story of the Battle in Seattle (with her brother David), and Storming The Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. She is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine.
Articles by this author
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Views Friday, January 20, 2017 We Could’ve Avoided President Donald Trump. Now, We Must Learn the Lessons The road to President Trump was long and bumpy. There were many turns not taken, countless alternative routes that would have spared us this outcome. Instead, we kept going, corruption, infighting and sheer obliviousness stopping us changing course. What could have been different? There are a... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 29, 2016 Another, More Beautiful America is Rising. Trump Will Be Resisted The time when you don’t need hope is when your hopes have been fulfilled. Hope is for when you don’t have what you need and for when things are not OK. It is the belief that liberation might be possible that motivates you to make it more possible, and pursuing hope even when it doesn’t lead to the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, November 29, 2016 The US Election Recount Is a Long Shot – But the Alternative Is Catastrophe When big changes and dangers arise, you have to think big. You don’t put out a forest fire with a glass of water. Thinking small can prevent you from even recognizing trouble, let alone your options for overcoming it. There’s never been a time when thinking big matters more than now. Many across... Read more |
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Views Monday, November 07, 2016 Whether Trump or Clinton Wins the US Election, What Follows Is Up To Us Presidential elections are a form of madness that comes over us once every four years. They fit the great-man or -woman narrative of history, seducing us into forgetting how powerful we are. They erase our memory of grassroots power, direct democracy and civil society. Leaders beget followers;... Read more |
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Views Sunday, November 06, 2016 The 2000 Election Unleashed Disaster on the World. We Can’t Let that Happen Again in 2016. T he horror of those days haunts me still. Some of us thought that a terrible danger loomed if the Republican Party took charge. Others hated the Democratic administration so much that they insisted there was no difference between George Bush and Al Gore. That was true when it came to free trade... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, June 08, 2016 Why America Needs a National Rape Monument for its Countless Victims The nameless survivor of former Stanford student Brock Taylor’s hideous sexual assault won an extraordinary victory with her letter to him, now read by millions of people. It’s as though she erected a statue that said: this is who you are – a vile and despicable person. This is what you did—a... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 08, 2015 Oil Fuels War and Terrorists Like ISIS. The Climate Movement Can Bring Peace Greed for petroleum has produced plenty of war. War can be defined narrowly, as conflict between nations, or broadly, as large-scale violence in pursuit of gain. This is why so many see the climate movement as a peace movement – especially after the recent massacres in Paris. In the fossil-fuel era... Read more |
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Views Friday, November 20, 2015 Climate Change Is Violence The following post, by writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit , is an essay that appears in her new anthology The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness , out this year from Trinity University Press. If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way:... Read more |
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Views Friday, May 15, 2015 One Magical Politician Won't Stop Climate Change. It's Up to All of Us Lots of people eagerly study all the polls and reports on how many people believe that climate change is real and urgent. They seem to think there is some critical mass that, through the weight of belief alone, will get us where we want to go. As if when the numbers aren’t high enough, we can’t... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 23, 2014 Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart: The Climate for 2015 It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the... Read more |