March 12, 2026

The Beginning Comes After the End, by Rebecca Solnit

“All those predecessors, one way or another, participated in making the world we inhabit, the one we arrived in that already had language and stories, temples, and bridges and libraries, the one that also had human impact as mountains of garbage and garbage on mountains all the way to the top of Everest and pollution and destruction and extinction. It also had songs and dreams and societies for the protection of this river and those children. And for the protection of California condors, which almost went extinct by the 1980s, when they were only 27 left on earth. They were, through extraordinary dedication and expertise, brought back from the brink, bred entirely and then partially in captivity, the new members of the species released into the wild, so that as of 2026, there are now almost 600, some of them only recently returned to the Klamath basin of northernmost California, where they now sore over rematriated Native land on wings that span 3 metres.” —Rebecca Solnit

I loved this book, the latest in Solnit’s series of small and powerful books for Haymarket Press, which I especially enjoyed for its cohesiveness, the way it renders the chaos of our current moment as something that might be laying the path for better things ahead. I so admire and appreciate Solnit’s vision and perspective, how her experience in decades of environmental activism offers texture to our understanding of right now. We don’t know what’s ahead, but there is so much possibility.