Early last November I was asleep in a narrow bunk on VIA Rail’s Canadian on the way to Vancouver. It was a bucket list trip. Outside Winnipeg I was awakened by my phone’s irritating ping. And here I’d told myself to use airplane mode on the train.
But that wasn’t the half of it. An unhinged convict had just been elected President of the USA.
The nine months that followed have, as we know, been worse than even an ardent doomscroller could have imagined. A boon to the social media parasites who did their best to put Trump in office, and ended up smirking from their front row seats at his inauguration ceremony. Their algorithms are designed to promote doomscrolling by boosting negative news and sensational headlines. They’re emotionally engaging, aimed at keeping people glued to their screens.
In 2017, 29 per cent of people worldwide reported actively avoiding the news. Six years later, even before Trump 2.0, the disengaged number was 39 per cent.People are becoming anxious and isolated, perhaps even frightened.
Me, too.
Last winter I got hold of Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Unknown Terrain.
I’ve read Solnit’s stuff since discovering her profoundly insightful A Paradise Built in Hell. (2009), a hopeful exploration of the way people react to disaster.
The San Francisco author’s earlier tour de force begins with an analysis of that city’s 1906 earthquake/fire. It proceeds to re-examine, in colourful and impassioned prose, events like Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans flood, Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake, the 9/11 terror attack in New York and the Halifax explosion. Among other catastrophes.
Despite the enormity of such calamities, a sense of social possibility runs through Solnit’s re-telling of these stories. She reminds us repeatedly that, in a market fundamentalist era that privileges all that is private, economic privatization is “Impossible without the privatization of desire and imagination that tells us we are not each other’s keeper.” Her task is to use the aftermath of disasters to offer a hopeful reminder, “a glimpse of…what else our society could become.”
Disasters have often shown just how embedded people are in place and society as they struggle to cope with traumatic events. They often offer a sense of belonging as people come together, particularly when elites and state authorities fall down on the job. Mutual aid is the watchword here.
The 1985 Mexico City earthquake left some 800,000 people homeless yet gave rise to vibrant initiatives that again exposed the corrupt cruelty of the ruling PRI government. In what would become a mythic moment in Mexican history, people organized their own relief brigades, clean-up crews and shelters. New housing sprang up as they gained deeper connections one with the other, cementing what was becoming known as civil society (a sometimes slippery concept) while underpinning ever more strongly the sense that the PRI status quo was intolerable.
Consider an entirely different sort of calamity — the Blitz, during which German bombing famously failed to break the will of British people. Solnit unearths a study by an American sociologist who had served in the American military during WW II. Survey research showed that people in heavily bombed cities had much higher morale than those in lightly bombed cities. Similarly, the mass incendiary bombing that targeted residential areas of German cities failed to break civilian morale.
The Halifax explosion of 1917 that ravaged the city’s working class north end, also gave rise to the field of disaster studies, in large part due to the work of Halifax resident Henry Prince and his book Catastrophe and Social Change. Solnit is careful to avoid determinism in considering what happens after a disaster, quoting Prince’s 1920 book that stated the obvious “Catastrophe always means social change. There is not always progress.”
One recent disaster study, Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, examines the way neoliberal capitalism has used calamities like Hurricane Katrina to further advance its efforts to demolish public provision, even in times of urgent need. Solnit criticizes this “disempowering portrait from the Left,” arguing that it offers a one-dimensional portrait of frightened and disoriented disaster victims. She quotes a Klein book talk in which the Canadian, an activist writer like Solnit herself, said that during extreme crisis, “we no longer know who or where we are. We become like children, looking for daddies.” A claim that flies in the face of Solnit’s mutual aid evidence.
Which doesn’t detract from Klein’s broader point in Shock Doctrine. Disaster capitalism does tend to hit poor people hardest – those living in flimsy dwellings, in areas with poor public infrastructure. Disaster also hits hardest at societies with weak systems of public provision.
Solnit would not likely quibble with Klein’s point that disasters offer prime investment targets for disaster capitalism to move in to prey on poor people who may live – or used to live — in areas that can be snapped up by development interests. Displacement and privatization often walk in, hand in hand. I also expect that Klein would not disagree with Solnit’s main point about the way that disaster can open new doors for the flourishing of mutual aid and fellow feeling.
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Solnit’s No Straight Road… (2025) is a bracing tonic that bookends her popular Hope in the Dark, a similar essay collection (2015). She has long been urging us to action, not despair. Her 2025 essay “Despair is a Luxury” describes how, since the 1990s, she has witnessed indigenous peoples of the Americas — long having been told that their understandings of nature are archaic, their societies doomed — rise up to rewrite their history, all the while reclaiming their rights, land and culture. The ripple effects have been unsettling for many in settler society and inspirational to others.
“Indigenous ideas about our inseparability from and responsibility to the natural world,” Solnit writes, “have reshaped the moral imagination of many of the rest of us.”
In the face of the unmatched cruelties of Trump’s regime, Solnit recalls that history is crammed with ruptures and surprises. She reaches back to remind us of the unforeseen demise of Stalinist state socialism as well as the cruelty of apartheid. Those of us of a certain age have witnessed massive shifts in the position of women in society, together with the way queer people, people of colour and those with disabilities have agitated for social transformation. All of this thanks to “movements acting on new ideas and values and to innumerable everyday acts of courage and revolt by individual members of those groups.”
Solnit reminds us of theologian Walter Brueggeman’s insight. “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”
Solnit is a consummate storyteller. Consider the story of today’s frontline climate communities. (Solnit is on the Advisory Council of Third Act, the important climate action grouping of American elders) This summer began with northern boreal areas of the Canadian west being ravaged by wildfires. Canada’s First Nations communities make up 42 per cent of evacuations due to wildfires but only make up 5 per cent of Canadians.
What to make of this shocking fact?
Nothing more than to redouble our efforts to adapt to the effects of climate breakdown – particularly on those most severely affected — while opposing the crimes of the fossil fuel industry and their political acolytes. How is it that the ever-bigger wildfires, ever more deadly heatwaves are consistently reported without a single passing mention of climate breakdown?
You’re not alone when this sort of thing regularly induces nausea, feelings of hopelessness. Solnit, ever the historian, reaches back a century to that favourite Wobbly admonition. “Don’t mourn, organize!” hollered the Industrial Workers of the World.
But you can do both. The Wobblies’ hard-edged understanding of class fracture was at one with Solnit’s observation that those of us who are still materially safe and relatively comfortable are part of societies that still contribute more than our share of greenhouse gases. “We do not have the right to surrender on behalf of others,” she writes. “We have the obligation to act in solidarity with them.”
At a SCAN! membership meeting in late June, one member spoke of the “dread, anxiety and loss” that she was feeling. So many often feel that we’re alone in disastrous times. Solnit’s work shows that this sort of privatization is a slow, subtle disaster all by itself. Yet we still have purposefulness and participation, freedom and agency and without a sense of social possibility, “a disaster would be only a disaster.”
Solnit closes No Straight Road Takes You There with an epilogue that she simply calls “Credo.”
It’s dated November 5, 2024, 11PM. Just when I found myself wondering about Trump 2.0 as I lay awake in the dark as The Canadian rattled its way to Saskatoon. Solnit’s words echo those of Margaret Thatcher’s harsh TINA declaration: There is no alternative to market fundamentalism. But of course Solnit offers an altogether different message.
“There is no alternative to persevering,” she writes. “And that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining.” (Solnit’s fine book on walking is Wanderlust). “Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”
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Kingston writer and SCAN! member Jamie Swift is co-author, most recently, of The Case for Basic Income: Freedom, Security, Justice, with Elaine Power.