Rebecca Solnit
Embracing Uncertainty — Navigating Change, Hope, and Action
Note: Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain
Elliott Bay Book Company
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Today’s world is rapidly changing, including our language. Phrases like “ecological grief” and “political stress” have recently popped up in our lexicon. How do we live in this new space of unknown and uncertainty?
Activist and author Rebecca Solnit has long thought about how to embrace the mysteries of our future while also finding inspiration to take action. In her latest essay collection, No Straight Road Takes You There, Solnit explores several timely topics: climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Through these essays, Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.
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Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, Solnit offers insights and inspiration for today’s challenges. She urges us to pay attention to the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be or should be changed. She offers language to live in a space of unknowing, tracing the paths that ideas have taken and giving us a path forward.
“I’ve tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take,” Solnit writes in the book’s introduction, “the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can’t see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past.”
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and the advisory boards of Dayenu and Third Act.
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