202605171120 No Straight Road Takes You There

Essays for Uneven Terrain

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A collection of essays from Rebecca Solnit about 202203231646 Affecting long-term change and hope for the future.

In Praise of the Indirect, the Unpredictable, the Immeasurable

I’ve become a love of slowness, patience, endurance, and long-term vision, because these things seem like crucial equipment for changing the world or even understanding it. (pp. 2)¹

as the poet Antonio Machado famously said “Walker, there is no path; the path is made by walking.” (pp. 6)¹

A Truce with the Trees

• Beautiful telling of the artistry of violin making and the global nature plus harmony of renewable craft, contrasted with the permanent harm we’re doing to it, the breaking of the truce.

A Sky Full of Forests

• We must tell stories: of how we got here, how things used to be, and how they could be, of how they should be. We must pour water on the fires and provide rafts in the flood. We must change minds and hearts. We must envision a humanity as it should be. (pp. 23)¹

On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends

When it comes to real life, this state of unknowing is both normal and so wildly uncomfortable that we engage in foolish and delusional imitations of knowing. (pp. 29) ¹

• Be absorbed in the act of becoming. (pp. 32)¹

Tortoise at the Mayfly Party

• Be the tortoise at the mayfly party. 202109251140 Play long term-games. Take the long view. Pay attention to the genealogies and evolution of power and ideas. Change is invisible if your timeframe is shorter than the change itself.
• The short term view breeds defeatism. Thread on the attention deficit of product development #thread.

Even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading. (pp. 34)¹

In Praise of the Meander

• Trees work in harmony to share the sunlight, not compete for it. The term “crown shy” from A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers.
• We all take different paths through life. The meandering path is as good as the direct one.

Insurrectionary Aunthood

• We should consider that we are all mutually together. We are a symbiotic and evolving species of interconnectedness, not isolationist. We show up for our communities because of our interconnectedness, not in expectation of reciprocity.

Despair Is a Luxury

Whether you feel assured that everything is going to hell or will all turn out fine, you are not impelled to act. All these postures undermine participation in [...] life (pp. 65)¹

• We should leave room to act — room for agency — instead of despairing. “This could happen” is very different than “this will happen” even in dire times and stark warnings. It is a luxury that makes our lives easier when we despair to an outcome instead of understanding the responsibility and opportunity we have to act.
• Not Too Late Climate Project

To hope is to risk. It’s to take a chance on losing. It’s also to take a chance on winning, and you can’t win if you don’t try. (pp. 73)¹

On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway

• It is better to bring people out of their delusions with kindness and invitation, but you do not compromise. We know the world is not flat, we don’t compromise that it’s somewhere between flat and round.
• We have no responsibility to appease, pander, or compromise with racist, sexist, or bigoted people. We must not get mired in moral relativism with amoral people.

Against Centrism and Its Biases

• The notion that there is some mythical center position that is apolitical is ridiculous. A “center” does not exist between a rapist and moral people. Further, “centers” have the inherent bias of the status quo, the systems they exist in, a neutral acceptance of injustices that exist, the institutional bias

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

MLK sourced from (pp. 86)¹

Masculinity as Radical Selfishness

• The hypocrisy of proponents of rugged individualism when viewed through the lens of COVID 19 where they were incapable of existing in isolation or being asked to do one “hard” thing like wearing a mask is staggering. Further the selfishness of men in a time where childcare and household chores were harder than ever pushed many women out of their careers and studies. Solnit quotes the New York Times from May 8th, 2020.¹

Nearly half of men say they do most of the home schooling. 3 percent of women agree. (pp. 107)

• Which ultimately begs the question of how much I share in these things and how much I may be oblivious of.

Abortion Is an Economic Issue

• Abortion is an economic and labor issue as well as a human rights and health care issue. Especially in places where it is outlawed, access to abortions turns into a test of your means to travel and take time off work to get one, or to defend yourself in court if apprehended. Those with means and time are impacted less than those without. Pregnancy also impacts women with physically demanding jobs more than those with desk jobs, and those physically demanding jobs often have worse pay and worse benefits.

Toward a Democracy of Voices

• Only in a democracy of voices can we have a democracy of facts. Facts require all voices being heard and the strength of the facts deciding the outcomes.
• Gendered violence is a silencing of voices and facts. It is a dominance that requires the victim to accept known falsehoods as fact or minimally as unutterable.

The Storykiller and His Sentence

He who has the story has the power; she who has no story, not even her own, has no power. (pp. 122)¹

• There are stories everywhere of violence against women, women being murdered, women being powerless in the face of abuse. They are all over the news even in unrelated stories where a man who has perpetrated these acts continues to have power when his victims have none. The society we live in has no respect for the dignity and rights of its people.

Feminism Has Just Begun

Feminism is a human rights movement that endeavors to change things that are not just centuries but in many cases millennia old, and that it is far from done and faces setbacks and resistance is neither shocking nor reason to stop. (pp. 127)¹

The conversations are about violence and inequality, about the intersectionalities of race and gender, about the rethinking of gender beyond the simplest binaries, about what freedom could look like, what desire could be, what equality could mean. Just to have those conversations is liberatory. (pp. 130)¹

Deep Time Versus Short Term

• The fossil fuel industry industry chases short-term profit and leaves long-term wreckage in its wake, both to the local landscape and ecosystem and on a larger scale to the world by fueling climate change.
• 202501151828 Without the Earth we are all finished
• 202501172019 We ever-smaller humans
• A note of hope this year though. The transition to renewable energy has been underway and profitable for a while now, but solar has exploded this year with many countries now getting more than half of their power from solar and other renewables.

Changing the Climate Story

• We need to tell compelling stories (factual ones) about possible futures and the present (most people 66%–80% want climate action while believing that only a minority 37%–43%– want it) (on average 8 million people die annually from fossil fuels globally)
• We need to change the false narratives that individual consumption is a sizable impact on climate change. The top 1% of wealthy people produce more carbon than the bottom 50%. Your bank savings are leant to fossil fuel companies through investments. Just as we have seatbelts in all cars, we must electrify and decarbonize society in the large.
• It is now true that it is more costly both ecologically and also financially, not to convert totally to renewable energies. The future of energy is too cheap to meter, and too local to be a political factor.

Climate of Abundance

• What if we lived in a world of abundance: of safety, of food, of respect, of culture, of energy, of community, of belonging?
• Doing what the climate crisis requires could be the opposite of austerity, it could be abundance. It would make the lives of many (or most) much better, and it could reduce the abundance of misery we currently have.

A monastic once told me renunciation can mean giving up things that make you miserable. (pp. 156)¹

“Getting and spending we lay waste our powers” said William Wordsworth a couple centuries ago. (pp. 158)¹

The Great Transformation

• There has been a transformation of the philosophical mindset of western people influenced by Buddhism and Zen focused on selflessness and awareness.
• The world is made of interconnected systems and it’s our mandate to understand our place in them and how to act responsibly.

Hope on Far Horizons

We dwell on a planet that could be called Ocean rather than Earth. (pp. 167)¹

• 202304212016 The philosophy of water

Credo

• An excellent short reminder of how to fight and mourn and resist and lead and change. Read it when you need to refill your tank.