Why the future isn't lost? Rebecca Solnit has the answer.

In June 2022, the American Rebecca Solnit (1961) was unable to come to Barcelona, ​​where she was due to speak at the CCCB, and we had to settle for seeing and hearing her through a big screen. Three years later, this June he was there in person., in this case to share with us his latest published book, In Praise of the Unexpected Path, which links to Hope in the darkness, where he reflected on activism and confirmed its contribution to achieving results, beyond the often self-serving discourses that encourage inaction.

In Praise of the Unexpected Path brings together, in three parts, about twenty articles published in recent years on sites such as New York Times, he Guardian and the London Review of BooksAs we already know, Solnit's perspective on her surroundings is driven by her concern for climate change and by her staunch supporter of degrowth, a term still not widely understood. She also refuses to accept the unacceptable: "Wrongly considering destructive things, which are neither the one nor the other, to be inevitable or eternal."

In this collection of committed journalism, she emphasizes once again the usefulness of fighting for a better world and invites us to compare the present with the past to be aware of the progress made and not be fooled by false narratives about the futility of our actions. She speaks of taking a long-term view to see how changes occur and thus be able to demonstrate the extent to which mentalities have transformed over the last half-century. Who could have thought, for example, that same-sex marriage would be possible? No, we are no longer the same society we were just half a century ago, and this is the result of the work of many people, who have fought for values such as gender equality and respect for minorities.

Mapping the Paths to Change

This book emphasizes the routes to achieving a new paradigm, which the disastrous current situation makes both necessary and urgent. The author sought to "map the winding paths followed by change, the byways and secondary roads along which movements have been built and ideas flourished, when there is no path forward." She refers here to indirect procedures, often more successful than direct ones.

She adds reflections that are as lucid as they are necessary to hear, such as the fact that there is no symmetry between the far left and the far right, because today the threat is the far right; that everything is connected and that it is precisely the rejection of that interconnection ("the ideology of isolation") that makes the right deny climate change with such blindness; or that "deference to intolerance breeds intolerance," which is why we must be completely belligerent toward the intolerant. She also thinks, speaking of harmful fossil fuels, that "what drives our machines won't change until we change what drives our ideas."

Clearly, she rejects immobility, whether out of defeatism or excessive optimism: "If you want to believe that the future is already written, you don't have to do anything." And she tells us repeatedly throughout the book that it is we who build the future: "If we can recognize that we don't know what will happen, that the future doesn't yet exist but we shape it in the present, then we can motivate ourselves and participate in creating that future." What is the future? Well, what is yet to be made. As Rebecca Solnit says: "The future is not yet decided, because we are deciding it now."