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.

The Wheel Turns, The Boat Rocks, The Sea Rises: Change In A Time Of Climate Change

When we argue for change, notably changing our ways in response to climate change, we’re arguing against people who claim we’re disrupting a stable system.

Rebecca Solnit
By Rebecca Solnit

There have undoubtedly been stable periods in human history, but you and your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents never lived through one, and neither will any children or grandchildren you may have or come to have. Everything has been changing continuously, profoundly -- from the role of women to the nature of agriculture. For the past

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The Arc Of Justice And The Long Run

Hope, History, and Unpredictability.

Rebecca Solnit
By Rebecca Solnit

North American cicada nymphs live underground for 17 years before they emerge as adults. Many seeds stay dormant far longer than that before some disturbance makes them germinate. Some trees bear fruit long after the people who have planted them have died, and one Massachusetts pear tree, planted by a Puritan in 1630, is still bearing fruit far

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Thoughts For The Second Anniversary Of Occupy Wall Street

It’s the second anniversary of that day in lower Manhattan when people first sat down in outrage.

Rebecca Solnit
By Rebecca Solnit

I would have liked to know what the drummer hoped and what she expected. We’ll never know why she decided to take a drum to the central markets of Paris on October 5, 1789, and why, that day, the tinder was so ready to catch fire and a drumbeat was one of the sparks. To the beat of that drum, the working women of the marketplace marched all the

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