How to stay hopeful in trying times
Despite a president who seems determined to trample the government, economy, and environment, Solnit remains as hopeful as she was in 2004. She still thinks the progressive left is much too prone to doom and gloom. She still thinks that those who supposedly have no power end up changing the world again and again. She still thinks we as a society have gained more ground on human rights and climate issues than we've lost. In an interview with me this month, she said, 'You can change the laws, but you can't change people's minds as easily. The right is using political power to make up for what they lack: cultural power. A lot of what they want to do and are doing is wildly unpopular. People support climate action. People support reproductive rights.'
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Solnit is one of the country's most versatile writers — she's tackled everything from sexism and violence against women ('Men Explain Things to Me') to the history of walking ('Wanderlust') to the advent of technological change in the American West ('River of Shadows'). The now 63-year-old is the author of more than 20 books and countless essays published over three decades.
Haymarket Books
Her latest compilation of essays embraces the unpredictability of change while acknowledging the fraught nature of the current moment, when many fear American democracy hangs in the balance. 'We cannot know what will be the spark that catches fire,' she says. 'But we make the future in the present. The future depends on how we show up, or fail to show up, today.'
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You've written about so much — women's rights, the environment, civil liberties — that seems to be under assault right now. But you aren't despairing. Why?
There's an essay in the book called 'Despair Is a Luxury.' Giving up is breaking solidarity with the people who are most impacted — the poor, disabled, immigrants. We can't just stand aside.
But also despair, in its own strange way, is a form of false confidence. It's a sense that the future has already been decided and there's nothing we can do about it. In fact, the future is something we make in the present. We can learn from the past about how change works, how power works, where civil society movements and amazing individuals from Rachel Carson to Greta Thunberg have been able to intervene and change the world.
And so despair, pessimism, and cynicism are a false sense of inevitability about the future. People do not like uncertainty. But I feel that uncertainty and possibility are related. So I do not despair.
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In 'Despair Is a Luxury,' you also say that too often we scorn people who are hopeful. Why is it so easy to dismiss them as naive or Pollyanna-ish?
You know, despair is like a black leather jacket. Everybody thinks they look cool in it. Hope is a pink dress nobody wants to wear in public.
But that pink dress is quite sophisticated, because hope is not the same thing as optimism. It does not assume good things will happen. It just says good things may be possible. But we have to actually show up and make them happen. Legislation doesn't pass by itself. Immigrant rights don't get defended without our participation. Climate progress all started with organizing and activism. It is cynicism that is naive — which I've written about before. Cynics are very bought into the status quo idea that power resides among a handful of elites — famous, powerful, wealthy people who hold office. But the historical record shows us that those who are not supposed to have power have changed the world over and over again. To think that they can continue to do so is not naive.
How have your views on how progress happens changed over the decades that you've been a writer and activist?
I think that at first I didn't really have a theory of change. My first book ['Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era,' published in 1991] was about the visual artists who were part of beat culture in California during the Cold War. They taught me how people change the world. These artists were not very well known, but they were huge influences on transforming culture. A second book ['Savage Dreams,' originally published in 1994] was about the nuclear and Indian wars. For that book, I went to Yosemite, which had been a place where terrible representational genocide had happened: The existence of Native people had been written out by Ansel Adams and John Muir, and others — wilderness was a place where man is only a visitor.
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I got to see that change. When I came back to Yosemite after publishing 'Savage Dreams,' I was like, ''Wow, these problems I wrote about, they're not resolved, we're not in utopia or paradise, but there have been huge shifts in how the National Park Service represents indigenous people.' Feminism is another example. At various points in my life, people have announced that feminism failed. People do not understand the mind-blowing transformation, not just of centuries but millennia of patriarchy that just in my lifetime have been changed so profoundly.
The fact that it's not all perfect and finished isn't cause for despair — why should we complete something in one lifetime?
I took heart from one of the essays in the book, 'Feminism Has Just Begun,' because I do think that for women of my generation (I'm a millennial), it can be easy to fixate on the backlash. When I read that essay, I was struck by just how much the norms for women have changed for the better. And as you say in that essay, there is some progress that can't be undone. Sure, states can outlaw abortion, but they can't take away the belief among the majority of Americans that women have a right to it.
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People on the left often don't recognize our victories, let alone bask in them. And I think the whole MAGA-Trump backlash and the versions of it happening around the world are essentially saying, 'You all changed the world profoundly in terms of marriage equality, rights for queer and trans people, rights for people of color, immigrant rights, disability rights, women's rights.' And what they're actually saying to us is that we have been very successful. We have changed the world a lot. The backlash is that they don't like what we did and want to change it back. But I don't think that people are going to easily surrender what they've gained.
People are looking for ways to hold on to hope — how, on a practical level, can the average person do that?
I'm sad because I missed a bunch of
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You can lay the flammable material for the bonfire, you can pile up the wood and kindling, but it's the lightning strike that's going to set it ablaze. I watched those George Floyd protests. I watched Occupy Wall Street. I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall. I watched a bunch of extraordinary moments that nobody saw coming, and suddenly the world was different. So pile up your fuel. Find common ground. We now have the possibility to form an unprecedented coalition. Suddenly people who love
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Christine Mehta can be reached at
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