the beginning comes after the end
notes on a world of change
this was all over the place but there are some good themes in here that bear exploration. solnit doesn’t leave me feeling that optimistic, but it’s not for a lack of trying. that said, i enjoyed the read. solnit outlines a positive vision and leans on our interconnectedness and inter-dependence. she does a pretty good job at showing how far we’ve come over the past 40+ years on a number of fronts (skewering the misogyny in purple rain in the process.) pretty much everything i’ve encountered by solnit is of the “arc of history bends towards justice” variety. it’s a reach to feel that these days.
recommendation: it’s a pretty short read, you’ll take something away from it.
(from 2026 books)
highlights
1. Swimming Upstream
These ideas of interconnection emerge from many sources, from new economic models and new scientific ideas about biology and psychology, from Buddhist and Indigenous worldviews, from shifting values, from hopes and desires to undo the terrible loneliness and tendency toward isolation and the severing of connections and relationships between people, peoples, and people and nature, that seem entrenched in current social configurations.
2. Winged Seeds
ideas tend to outlive their attacks.
The memory of rights taken away will not be uprooted easily, and while the US has increasingly allowed states to restrict those rights, other nations, including Mexico, Argentina, Ireland, and Spain (and some US states) have expanded them. In June 2025, the United Kingdom overturned an 1861 law criminalizing abortion, used mostly to punish women who had abortions after twenty-four weeks (and in 2019, decriminalized abortion in Northern Ireland).
you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking—
“The old world is dying. The new one is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise.”
Monsters take the forms of authoritarians, corporations bent on quarterly profits at the expense of the long-term fate of the earth; of racism, misogyny, and other inculcated hates that serve to divide, silence, and marginalize; of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos that has broken much and threatens to break far more.
Our psyches are where they go strip-mining, but they savage the natural world, too.
They believe they are not strangling a new world being born; they are rejuvenating a dying world, making it thrive again, or pretending it never declined. Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” I always thought of as code for “Make America 1958 (or perhaps 1858) Again.”
3. Varieties of Invisibility
We are well into an energy revolution in which renewables are the inevitable future because they are simply the cheapest and best—as in cleanest, safest, most widely distributed, least environmentally destructive—way to make electricity, and it turns out that machines, including cars and stoves, that run on electricity are far more efficient than the fossil-fuel versions.
The tactics and technologies are new, but this is only a regression to old forms of misogyny in which women were routinely described as separate and inferior species to be subjugated and exploited. Perhaps when something is no longer established and accepted, it has to fight hard for its agenda, when once that agenda was guaranteed: this is the lash in backlash.
Generational segregation deprives younger people of hearing from their elders about change, or so I would like to believe, but a lot of older people seem to perceive the rollercoaster of history we’re all on as if we were standing still on solid ground.
i need to come back to this
Only in the long view can you see the patterns emerging, the way the present builds on the past, the way past surprises guarantee more surprises are coming, the ingredients of change over years, decades, centuries. If you don’t see time on the scale of change, you don’t see change; if you don’t remember how things used to be, you don’t know they’re different than they were and how that unfolded. While some people are too young to remember the past firsthand (and some know it other ways), I’m often struck by my peers who’ve lived through dizzying change and somehow adjusted without noticing it.
Another form change takes is cessation. To see the absence of something, you must remember that it was once present and maybe how it was eradicated. As has often been said, the now all too common dismissal of or outright opposition to vaccines seems drawn in part from forgetting the devastation wrought by many diseases such as measles, polio, and smallpox before vaccines for them were developed and vaccine campaigns had their impact. Sometimes the sense that a movement has failed or not mattered comes from forgetting its victories and what those victories were against. To notice that something does not happen anymore, be it a disease, an assumption, a kind of persecution, or anything else, you have to remember it used to happen. It’s also easy to overlook that what is with us now is here because of past efforts, the kinds that prevented the trees from being cut down, a species from going extinct, services from being cut, institutions from being shut down.
also known as baseline shift
4. A Single Garment of Destiny
“Whereas desegregation can be brought about by laws, integration requires a change in attitudes.
6. The Disconnectors
Protecting the environment is cast, by the right, as interference with freedom, since in many right-wing versions, freedom means the freedom to harm,
Which clarifies, of course, that freedom is for an elite minority and lack of freedom for the majority.
Thoughtfulness requires recognizing that categories are leaky, that anomalies and exceptions abound, that virtually every description falls short of the actuality.
Powerful independent women, like trans and queer people, unsettle a worldview in which men and women exist in airtight categories with fixed roles.
At some level, the fact of climate change is offensive to isolationists, since the climate is the great overarching system within which all life on earth exists, and climate science and climate activism both announce that everything we do has consequences because everything is connected.
7. Honey and the Hive
Nevertheless, the social Darwinists emphasized competition and domination and, by insisting it was natural, inevitable, and universal, produced a pseudo-scientific “everybody does it” justification for capitalism and for the ruthlessness of capitalists and elites.
South rather than the consumption habits of people in the Global North, and failed to foresee that birth rates were already falling across most of the planet and would continue to fall, so much so that many parts of the world now have below-replacement birth rates. But the overpopulation panic led to brutal interventions among the poor in the Global South as pressure to use birth control or accept sterilization or even forced sterilization. Meanwhile, the global food supply increased, and hunger actually decreased worldwide, due in part to agricultural improvements.
8. The River Widens
(though I once read of a study concluding that though mindfulness and meditation were offered to workers by their employers to make them more contented and productive, it could nevertheless sometimes make them less willing to cooperate with unscrupulous practices).
If you recognize that the Americas were widely inhabited at the time Columbus arrived, you have a history not of discovery but invasion, colonization, and genocide. If you understand the millennia of human presence in places from the Amazon to the Arctic, then you have to relinquish the Eurocentric story in which humanity’s only possible relationship to nature is destructive, and in which human beings are separate from the rest of creation.
At the same time, many Indigenous Peoples and local communities around the world have views, structures, and practices aligned with generating a just and sustainable
world. Transformative change is necessary to achieve the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity and related global sustainability objectives by shifting views, structures and practices in ways that target and address these underlying causes.” The Indigenous cultures despised as primitive, dirty, and defeated in my youth were being looked to for guidance and models to get us to a viable future. Inconceivable only a few decades earlier, it was an astonishing change that took place mostly in millimeters, not miles, but they added up.
The rise of Indigenous influence, the shift in scientific understanding, the return to a view of nature as essential and omnipresent, the move toward more equality and inclusion, brings into focus the change in how we tell the overarching story of the last five hundred years and more. Rather than telling it as the triumph of European and Christian civilization, we increasingly narrate it as one of destruction and division, the result of a worldview driving a society that was tremendously powerful and also tremendously harmful. A worldview that strayed from the knowledge of interconnection, preached a gospel of separation, permitted and pursued the violence of colonialism, genocide, misogyny, and racism, including enslavement; and the violence of extractivism, the destruction of nature, and the extinction of other species.