The Beginning Comes After the End

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit opens with an October 2024 land-back ceremony north of San Francisco, where the Western Rivers Conservancy hands 466 acres back to the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. She connects this event to a broader wave of land returns: the largest dam removal in US history on the Klamath River, where Chinook salmon surged upstream after decades of tribal campaigning; the return of acreage to the Yurok tribe; and the establishment of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary. Each return, she argues, required a worldview shift from the erasure of Native Americans to recognition of Indigenous presence and stewardship. Graton Rancheria chairman Greg Sarris frames the ceremony as the fulfillment of a 1950s prophecy by Essie Parrish, a Kashaya Pomo Dreamer, or spiritual visionary, who foresaw that white people would come to Indigenous people to learn how to care for the land. Solnit introduces the book's central metaphor: the chrysalis, in which a caterpillar dissolves into formless matter before imaginal cells, attacked by the caterpillar's own immune system, guide the creation of a butterfly. Society, she proposes, is at a comparable stage of dissolution.

In the second chapter, Solnit establishes her thesis: Ideas spread like seeds, taking root as laws, rights, and social possibilities that amount to civilizational transformation. Ideas, once released, are difficult to destroy, as illustrated by the backlash to the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion rights, which was met by expanded reproductive rights in Mexico, Argentina, and other nations. She cites Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's passage about an old world dying and a new one struggling to be born, and identifies Silicon Valley oligarchs and Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement as manifestations of the dying old order. She contends that the dominant Eurocentric story once drowned out older narratives, and that the current era's revolution involves recovering suppressed voices, crediting the Zapatistas' 1994 Indigenous uprising in southern Mexico as an influential model.

The third chapter argues that the most significant changes of recent decades are largely invisible because they unfold too slowly, too broadly, or without sufficient historical memory to be recognized. Solnit opens with the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami in Japan to illustrate how unprecedented events can be literally unrecognizable, then draws a parallel to the failure to anticipate Trump's 2016 election. She identifies mechanisms that render change invisible: temporal scale, journalism's focus on sudden events, and amnesia that normalizes the present. A key example is the energy revolution: In the US in 2024, solar and wind energy outstripped coal for electricity generation, and the UK closed its last coal-burning power plant. Environmentalist Bill McKibben observed in 2025 that 96 percent of global demand for new electricity was met by renewables. Solnit also argues that the rise of online misogyny obscures the larger reality that a majority of men have accepted feminist ideas, changing their behavior around parenting and domestic life.

The fourth chapter traces the emergence of interconnection as a central idea through marine biologist Rachel Carson and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Solnit begins with the collection of 320,000 baby teeth in St. Louis in the late 1950s to measure strontium-90 contamination from nuclear testing, a demonstration that ignoring interconnection carried tangible costs. She summarizes Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring, which argued that pesticides traveled through entire ecosystems, killing birds and natural predators and contaminating human food. She then turns to King, quoting his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" declaration that "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny" (35). She introduces Grace Lee Boggs, a Detroit-based political philosopher who saw the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott as the beginning of a new form of struggle. Solnit corrects the widespread reduction of Rosa Parks to a tired seamstress, noting that Parks was a courageous organizer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who had focused since the 1940s on violence against Black women. She argues that King's work against segregation was ecological, and that King named the principle of connection and care "love."

The fifth chapter establishes a baseline of the mid-twentieth century to measure the scale of change. Solnit catalogs the world of hierarchy that prevailed: rigid racial segregation, anti-Jewish discrimination, the exclusion of women from professions and financial independence, the criminalization of homosexuality, and routine corporal punishment in schools. She traces legal milestones including the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision overturning bans on interracial marriage. She argues that all the era's social revolutions shared a rebellion against hierarchy, tracing how the civil rights movement inspired Latino, Asian American, Indigenous, and LGBTQ rights movements, with the first Pride marches in 1970–71. Drawing on L. A. Kauffman's book Direct Action, she describes how 1976 antinuclear protests incorporated Quaker consensus decision-making and feminist listening practices, creating a model of horizontal organizing adopted by movements ever since.

The sixth chapter examines the ideology of isolation as a backlash against interconnection. Solnit argues that the far right inadvertently confirms the significance of the changes it opposes by treating environmentalism, feminism, queer rights, and racial justice as parts of a single agenda. She defines the ideology of isolation: It valorizes individual freedom at the expense of the collective, denies interdependence, and equates disconnection with strength. She traces this worldview through historian Carolyn Merchant's 1980 book The Death of Nature, which argues that early modern European thinkers constructed a mechanistic philosophy justifying the exploitation of nature and women. She examines the ideology's impact on the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing that the pandemic's essential truth, that we share the air we breathe, was met by right-wing refusal to mask or vaccinate. She speculates that the authoritarian backlash may be a supernova: a dying star that appears to gain strength precisely because it is collapsing.

The seventh chapter traces a scientific revolution in understanding nature as cooperative rather than competitive. Solnit describes primatologist Jane Goodall's fieldwork beginning in 1960, which revealed tool use, complex social relationships, and emotional lives in chimpanzees. She devotes particular attention to biologist Lynn Margulis, whose 1967 paper argued that complex cells arose through the merger of two single-celled organisms, meaning complex life was in its origins symbiotic. Solnit contrasts Margulis's vision with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins's "selfish gene" framework and with social Darwinism. She critiques ecologist Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," which claimed cooperative resource management was doomed, and contrasts it with economist Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning work demonstrating that communities successfully manage shared resources. She turns to forest ecologist Suzanne Simard's research on trees sharing nutrients through fungal networks in the soil, demonstrating that forests function as communities rather than collections of competing individuals.

The eighth chapter traces the growing influence of Buddhist and Indigenous worldviews on Western culture. Solnit argues that Buddhism's core teaching of dependent co-arising, the principle that each entity exists in relationship to all others, offers a cosmology compatible with contemporary science. She contends that recognition of Indigenous peoples has been one of the most significant transformations since the early 1990s, identifying the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus's arrival as a turning point. She traces specific advances: the Zapatista uprising of 1994, Canada's creation of the Indigenous-governed territory of Nunavut in 1999, Bolivia's election of its first Indigenous president in 2006, and the 2016 Standing Rock protests. She discusses the rights of nature movement, from Ecuador's 2008 constitutional recognition of the rights of Pacha Mama, an Indigenous concept of Mother Earth, to the 2024 legal recognition of the Marañón River's rights in Peru. She cites botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which has sold more than 1.6 million copies, as evidence of widespread appetite for Indigenous worldviews of interconnection.

The final chapter reflects on fluidity, change, and grounds for hope. Solnit catalogs the decolonization of public space: the removal of Confederate, colonial, and conquistador statues accelerating through the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. She traces the trajectory of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, contested in 2016 by student activist Zyahna Bryant, defended in 2017 by the violent Unite the Right rally that killed counterprotestor Heather Heyer, removed in 2021, and melted down in 2023. She draws on public figures to illustrate what was once impossible: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noting that his family was "literally impossible as recently as twenty-five years ago" (125), and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, of Laguna Pueblo heritage, speaking about her mother's punishment for speaking her native language. Solnit identifies seeds of a promising future in young people's fluid approach to gender and sexuality, growing attachment to the natural world, and cultural movements like Afrofuturism, speculative art imagining Black futures, and Indigenous-futurism, creative work centering Indigenous futures and sovereignty. She closes by quoting activist adrienne maree brown: "We are creating a world we have never seen" (131).