Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.
Rebecca Solnit
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Revolutionary Plots
THE ANTI-WAR POET and soldier Siegfried Sassoon reports that toward the end of World War I, Winston Churchill told him that war is the normal occupation of man. Challenged, Churchill amended Continue reading
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Elegy for a Toxic Logic
A STUDENT of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, once sheepishly asked him whether he could sum up the essence of Zen in a single sentence. Continue reading
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The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years Continue reading
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Jurassic Park of the Free Market
In PIERS VITEBSKY’S wonderful book The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, he speculates that perhaps these nomads did not domesticate reindeer thousands of years ago; rather, reindeer Continue reading
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Looking Away from Beauty
EVERY FOUR YEARS I marvel all over again at those bodies honed like precision instruments to defy the bounds of human ability, those people flying with graceful force over hurdles, off Continue reading
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Revolutions per Minute
WHEN I WAS a young activist, the ’60s were not yet far enough away, and people still talked about “after the revolution.” They still believed in some sort of decisive event Continue reading
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One Nation Under Elvis
THE BIGGEST WILDERNESS I’ve ever been in — a roadless area roughly the size of Portugal with about fifty contiguous watersheds and the whole panoply of charismatic macrofauna doing their thing Continue reading
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Our Storied Future
THE EUROPEAN tradition loves opposites. One that Hannah Arendt dwelt upon in The Human Condition is the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. For Arendt, the active life was the life Continue reading
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The Limits of Landscape
I LOVE A LOT OF THINGS that I think are at least a little problematic, from my car to cowboy movies, and landscape might be one of them. That is, landscape Continue reading
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Finding Time
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF MY APOCALYPSE are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, Continue reading