You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. I t is important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. This has been a truly remarkable decade for movement-building, social change and deep shifts in ideas, perspective and frameworks for large parts of the population (and, of course, backlashes against all those things). It means facing them and addressing them by remembering what else the 21st century has brought, including the movements, heroes and shifts in consciousness that address these things now. Hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. Worse than these is the arrival of climate change, faster, harder and more devastating than scientists anticipated. The attack on civil liberties, including the right to privacy, continues long after its “global war on terror” justifications have faded away. The 21st century has seen the rise of hideous economic inequality, perhaps due to amnesia both of the working people who countenance declines in wages, working conditions and social services, and the elites who forgot that they conceded to some of these things in the hope of avoiding revolution. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.

This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. And the changes we have undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are astonishing.

Popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. Progressive, populist and grassroots constituencies have had many victories. Coming back to the text more than a dozen tumultuous years later, I believe its premises hold up.

Hope in the dark by rebecca solnit