Rebecca Solnit has written eighteen acclaimed works of non-fiction, including Wanderlust: A History of Walking and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. An activist, columnist and cultural historian, she has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lannan Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.
‘Like Simon Schama, Solnit is a cultural historian in the desert-mystic mode, trailing ideas like swarms of butterflies’
—Harper’s
‘Fascinating, inspiring and beautifully written’
—George Monbiot
‘Hope in the Dark is great. The powerful in this world seem to want to frighten us into following their orders unquestioningly and this book offers us the key to liberation – and that key is hope’ — Tony Benn
‘This is a book to be cherished, something to keep close at hand for those dark moments when you wonder whether the world really is a better place than it was fifty years ago’
—Independent on Sunday
‘Her passionate defence of direct action is a refreshingly corrective, while, crucially, her celebration of people power is proactive rather than complacent’
—Metro
‘A jewel of a book. Solnit reveals where we were, where we are, and the step-by-step advances that have been made in human rights, as we stubbornly stumble out of the darkness’
—Studs Terkel
ALSO BY REBECCA SOLNIT
Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the LandscapeWars of the American West
A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and theCrisis of American Urbanism
As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and theTechnological Wild West
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communitiesthat Arise in Disaster
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
The Faraway Nearby
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas
Men Explain Things to Me
The Encyclopaedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
REBECCA SOLNIT
This Canons edition published by Canongate Books in 2016
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Rebecca Solnit 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States of America in 2004
by Nation Books, 250 W. 57th Street, 15th Floor
New York, NY 10107
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for the book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 907 4
eISBN 978 1 84767 683 2
Contents
Foreword to the Third Edition: Grounds for Hope
6 The Millennium Arrives: November 9, 1989
7 The Millennium Arrives: January 1, 1994
8 The Millennium Arrives: November 30, 1999
9 The Millennium Arrives: September 11, 2001
10 The Millennium Arrives: February 15, 2003
11 Changing the Imagination of Change
12 On the Indirectness of Direct Action
13 The Angel of Alternate History
15 Getting the Hell out of Paradise
17 After Ideology, or Alterations in Time
18 The Global Local, or Alterations in Place
19 A Dream Three Times the Size of Texas
21 Journey to the Center of the World
Looking Backward: The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People (2009)
Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart (2014)
Backward and Forward: An Afterword