Hope In The Dark: The Untold History of People Power

Perfectionism has no place on a flawed planet, and life will always have objectionable aspects. Solnit points out that although “[w]e cannot eliminate all devastation for all time […] we can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its sources and foundations: these are victories” (77). When Solnit, early in her career, wrote a women’s rights article for a publication called Maximum Rocknroll, an old guy said that women had nothing to complain about because their pay had risen from 66 cents to a man’s dollar to 77 cents. Solnit uses the metaphor of the improved but still imperfect 77 cents to a dollar to enable activists to “recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and fight, in which the world is always being made and never finished” (78). Subsequently, activists should celebrate small victories while continuing their activism at the same time. Visions of paradise, both in a retrospective sense on the right and in a utopian sense on the political left, are irrelevant because we imagine paradise as a static place of arrival rather than one in which activism is a continual practice.

Solnit even speculates that we’d be worse off if we achieved paradise because we’d become complacent and lethargic. Instead, crisis is where we can best exercise our compassion and creativity. Moreover, she posits that activist communities prefigure aspects of the goal they want to achieve. Thus, if those who campaign for democracy are part of a democratic organization, they’ve partially achieved their goal.

Writing within 15 years of the end of the Soviet Union, Solnit argues that the old Cold War binaries of left- and right-wing politics no longer make sense, especially as the interests and ideologies of political parties on both sides of the spectrum shift. She points out the arbitrariness of the definition of left and right wing, which came about at the French National Assembly in 1789, when the more radical politicians sat on the left.

Solnit often wonders which unlikely allegiances might arise if the old definitions were set aside, noting that left-wing environmentalists and people in the American militia have something in common: Both value the local and fear its elimination by transnational corporations. She wonders what would have happened “if we could have found common ground, if we could have made our position neither right nor left but truly grassroots” (84). Solnit reflects that the division between more middle-class, often white environmentalists and white working-class people with traditional and often racist beliefs arose in the so-called golden age of activism, when the environmentalists carried on a form of “class war while feeling progressive” by labeling the others as “rednecks” (85), while the working-class people considered the environmentalists violent hippies.

Solnit recalls how in 1996, at a Citizen Alert board retreat in Nevada, environmentalists ended up drinking in an anti-environmentalist bar because it was the only place that served beer on tap. There, Solnit met a young rancher who hated environmentalists—but not more than the mining corporations that were destroying his trade. Finding common ground in their respect for the land and their hatred of mining corporations, Solnit and the rancher began to let go of their assumptions, respect each other, and have a conversation. Solnit points out that ranchers often know and love their land with an intimacy that eludes most environmentalists and that working with ranchers opens a middle way to negotiate a place for humans in the landscape, rather than the unspoiled land fantasies of middle-class environmentalists. This would mean a renegotiation in the traditionally white middle-class environmental movement—which often ends up alienating the people who live in the landscapes it’s trying to protect—and working with their resources. True activism requires people in different places on the political spectrum to connect.

Solnit argues that the anti-ideology, collaborative movement in US activism parallels some aspects of the Zapatista movement in Mexico. The collaboration of people with antagonistic goals means that activism becomes less about a specific agenda and more about changing the zeitgeist. As Solnit writes, “It’s to reject the static utopia in favor of the improvisational journey” (92).

She cites London-based activist John Jordan, who states that instead of clinging rigidly to old ideologies, new forms of activism will base themselves on the present moment rather than future aspirations. Jordan’s answer to the question of how the new world will be built, is: “‘We don’t know, but let’s build it together’” (93). Thus, new activism requires collaboration and the spread of power from the elites to the masses, as all participants have creative energy and engage in joyful action. Hope is no longer something reserved for the future but becomes part of the present.

Solnit notes the recent trend for recognizing difference instead of positing universalizing statements about humanity, which can’t account for the complexity of individual people and groups. Instead, our age is one of paradox in which we must “embrace both sides instead of cutting off one or the other for the sake of coherence” (96). We can thus renegotiate the relationship between the global and the local without shutting out either side.

Similarly, the politics of bioregionalism require that the political establishment embrace its fears of anarchism, as it’s anarchic to state a conviction that your local community is best at governing the land because of its expertise in it. Resisting other centralized organizations, such as monolithic media empires, can be done “not with a monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself” (100). Thus, disparate protest groups embody the multiplicity inimical to the idea of a monolith.

Solnit concludes that her vision of activism is to work toward people producing meaning in a world that is still being created, rather than one that is already finished.

Before October 12, 1992—the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America—opposition from Indigenous people centered on what would essentially be a celebration of colonialism. Indigenous people have, around and following this date, used the occasion to assert their own history of the Americas “as a place that was not discovered but invaded” (101). Columbus Day has since become an occasion to question narratives that posit America as a virgin, unpopulated land and to correct the claim that Native Americans have all died out.

Western history books assert the dominant narrative that Indigenous groups were forced to assimilate out of any markers of their own identity—or even that they were too weak and static to survive the tide of progress. Interestingly, many Native American groups that were presumed extinct at the time of Solnit’s childhood in the 1960s waged campaigns for their land and eventually reclaimed it. For Solnit, recognizing such groups is an important step in recognizing nature as a populated entity rather than virgin territory. The largest-scale win has been on the part of the Inuit people, whom white people in the 1960s claimed were on the verge of disappearing, while branding their territory in Canada a frozen wasteland. However, on April 1, 1999, the Inuit people reclaimed their original homeland, Nunavut, which is three times the size of Texas. This indicates that central powers began to recognize a more inclusive history of the Americas.

Solnit acknowledges the difficulty of being optimistic in a world where environmental degradation is such that Antarctic ice-shelves the size of small European nations are falling into the sea, putting at risk the existence of several small islands. She believes that the US is “the most disproportionate producer of climate change” given the careless consumption of resources by a “distracted population” (107) and the Bush administration denying climate change and refusing to slow consumption. While imagining radical change in the US is difficult, activity in the margins is grounds for hope. We still have “an extraordinary imaginative power to reinvent ourselves […] at large in the world” (109), which means that we can embrace the dark uncertainty of the future to challenge the trend of rampant neoliberal capitalism.

Although the future is dark, Solnit sees much to be hopeful for when she contemplates the signs of revival in her native city, San Francisco. While ocean wildlife populations are depleted along the Pacific Coast, it has seen a return of sea otters, which were thought hunted into extinction. In addition, sites of persecution have been redeemed. For example, the new Asian Art Museum exposed a sandlot site that was used to spread hate-speech in 1877 about the city’s Chinese immigrant population in “a kind of redress or at least an address of the changing status of Asians in this part of America” (112). Similarly, the city plaza hosts an affordable farmer’s market, which sells food that supports local farmers and donates it to the city’s homeless population, which has radically increased since the implementation of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies in the 1980s. Solnit sees her city as “a place where history is still unfolding” and each day as “a day of creation” (114).