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“One of the greatest cures for despair and depression is to do something, and to do something with the people who care,” says Rebecca Solnit. In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with Solnit about hope, backlash, political memory, and why history can help us understand our own power. Their conversation explores feminism, climate grief, authoritarianism, misogyny, interdependence, and why the right’s push to roll back hard-won freedoms is also a reaction to how much movements have already changed the world.

Music: Son Monarcas, David Celeste & Sarah, the Illstrumentalist

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we are talking about hope, backlash, political memory, and what history can teach us about fighting for a better world amid so much crisis and loss. We’ll be hearing from longtime climate and human rights activist Rebecca Solnit. Rebecca has written more than 25 books, including Hope in the Dark, A Paradise Built in Hell, and her latest, The Beginning Comes After the End. Across her work, Rebecca has challenged people to think beyond cynicism and despair, and to recognize long, complicated arcs of collective struggle. In this conversation, we talk about backlash as a reaction to real gains, why our enemies sometimes understand our power better than we do, and how people can stay grounded when crisis and catastrophe are everywhere. We also talk about climate grief, misogyny, authoritarianism, interdependence, and why the stories we tell about change matter so much in moments like these.

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KH: Rebecca Solnit, welcome to Movement Memos.

Rebecca Solnit: Thrilling to be with you, Kelly. Hello, Chicago.

KH: I’m so glad to be in conversation with you today. How are you doing?

RS: I’m a bit euphoric, because not only am I in San Francisco, but the most San Francisco thing that could possibly happen to a person happened to me. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, at their annual Hunky Jesus Easter extravaganza, canonized me as a saint whose name, which I helped with a bit, is Esperanzapedia.

RS: And so, what better than to be canonized lovingly by the most flamboyant drag queens in service of the community, on a hot summer day in Dolores Park with 10,000 San Franciscans hooting and cheering, and trying to stay hydrated in the hot sun. Which of course gave way to fog this morning.

KH: Yeah, none of my recent stories can top that.

RS: Yeah. Well, this doesn’t happen to me every day either.

KH: Well, I’m really glad that happened. You deserve every recognition.

RS: Bless you, my child.

KH: Thank you. That’s a blessing I will gladly accept.

RS: I’m not sure how to be a saint, but we’ll get back to you about that.

KH: Well, when you figure that out, we can circle back and do another episode, because I feel like people need to know.

RS: Yeah, well, so do I.

KH: Well, I’m sure many of our listeners will be familiar with your books, including A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and your latest, The Beginning Comes After the End. But for those who haven’t had the chance to engage with your work, what would you want them to know about who you are and what you do?

RS: Oh my gosh, I’m a San Franciscan. I’m a feminist. I’m a climate activist. I’ve worked on Indigenous, and lots of other issues, over the years. And really, being an essayist to me means an invitation to dive into what do things mean? How do they matter? How are these things connected? What are the relationships between them? How did we get here? And how do we retrace the steps to understand how to go forward?

I’ve been thinking lately that my formative years as an exceptionally unpopular kid were probably really helpful to me in leaving me room to not belong, by having my own opinions, positions, thoughts. And I’ve often felt like I’m swimming upstream against a certain kind of white left habit of despond, despair, defeatism, and in climate doomer-ism. I started writing about hope when people really felt all those things, when the war on Iraq broke out in 2003, and it’s been part of my work ever since.

KH: I was in my early 20s when Hope in the Dark was published. It was a brutal political moment, and for a lot of people who were trying to keep their bearings, that book helped make hope feel intellectually honest. I’m grateful for that. Because people often treat cynicism or pessimism as the more informed stance. And sometimes, it just isn’t.

In your new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, you write about the importance of understanding where we have been, not only to measure what has been lost, but to recognize what people have already changed. What do you think people are missing when they look at this moment without that sense of history?

RS: I saw something on social media yesterday that was just a graph of Japanese people recording when the first cherry blossoms bloomed going back, I think, to the 10th century. You can’t chart change if you don’t have what scientists call a baseline, a starting point. What were things like then? And I often feel when we talk about where we are, people don’t really have a baseline. I’ve been told half my life that feminism didn’t do anything, or feminism failed, by people who have no idea how bleak, marginalized, repressed, excluded, the condition of women was in the world into which I was born. And I’m 64, so I’m a little older than second-wave feminism. And my God, the world I was born into no longer exists.

So a lot of what I wanted to do with this book is give people back the baselines, first to see that we have changed the world profoundly, the we that believes in universal human rights, the rights of nature, inclusion, equality. I might as well say DEI, although that’s become such an acronym. Can we do JEDI, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, which is a much more fun acronym? And something that I think isn’t visible if you don’t have the baselines is what the right is basically doing internationally, and especially with Trumpism in the USA, is trying to make history run backwards. I always picture old men trying to push the rewind button on a video cassette player, because that seems like the right technology for them.

Because if you listen to what MAGA, and Trumpism, and the right is saying, they’re telling us five things. The last two will sound super familiar to everyone, but I don’t think people are hearing the first three clearly enough. So here’s my little list. You all are very powerful, number one. Two, you’ve changed everything. Three, all those different things you do are actually all connected. All the queer rights, human rights, anti-racism, feminism, environmental, climate, anti-colonialism, et cetera. Those are the things we don’t hear clearly enough, maybe because they’re shouting so loudly, “You did all those things and we fucking hate it,” that’s four. And, “We want to change it all back.”

Because if you look at what their agenda is, well, I’ve said for a long time that Make America Great Again really means make America 1958 again, and sometimes 1858 again. They really want to return to their gilded, fantasy version of a world in which queer people, people of color, women, are not equal to white men, especially straight white Christian men. They want to go back and forget everything we’ve learned since Rachel Carson about the natural world, that everything we do has consequences, that nothing we do goes away. There is always downwind and downstream bioaccumulation, and all the rest, so that they can pollute and destroy nature unhindered.

And I don’t think that’s a successful program. There is no rewind button on history. And once people have power and agency, and have seen what it’s like to have rights, voting rights, reproductive rights, they’re not interested in going back. And we are the majority. So we’re in this epic struggle. And in the short term, we have lost a lot of things. Roe v. Wade could be an example, but in the long term, it’s all pushback against what we’ve gained, including Roe v. Wade. Women had no reproductive rights, pretty much. In that world I was born into, people forget, for example, that Griswold v. Connecticut gave not all women, just married couples, the right to use birth control. More struggle had to happen for single women to have access to birth control not interfered with by the state. Roe v. Wade came about in 1973, because abortion rights were not among our rights.

So we have changed the world profoundly. They want to change it back. Our job is to not let them, partly by remembering how powerful and successful we’ve been in changing it. By celebrating our victories, our heroes, understanding the forces of change, and that begins with having a baseline.

KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying about having been born into a different era, and how that shapes your perspective. I was born in 1981, and as a child, I never would have imagined that queer people would win some of the rights and freedoms we’ve seen realized in my lifetime. I just wouldn’t have imagined it, because the weight of homophobia, and homophobic policies and violence, was so crushing. If you had told me then that, eventually, mainstream TV shows would have gay and trans characters who came out to their families and were embraced with love and respect, and that this would be fully normalized, that would have blown my mind. Same sex marriage is another thing that I just wouldn’t have begun to dream about, because it seemed so far outside the scope of anything that might be possible.

Of course, the right is actively working to dismantle the rights people have won and take away the freedoms people have now—and they’re trying to censor the media landscape as well. But when I was a scared kid who couldn’t tell anyone I had a crush on a girl, I couldn’t imagine that the terrain of contestation would include so many people who know what it’s like to access the care they need, to love openly, and to invoke legal rights that people had long been denied.

When I was a teenager and young adult, homophobia was normalized virtually everywhere. The most progressive people I was exposed to used “gay” as a pejorative and made gay jokes all the time. So while we have never gotten where we deserve to be, in terms of sexual freedom, safety, or what I would regard as liberation, we have seen that massive changes are possible, and that they can happen more quickly than we might imagine.

And on the subject of how things have changed over the course of our lives, in The Beginning Comes After the End, you wrote, “In some ways, 2025 was wilder than 1965.” What did you mean by that?

RS: I think I meant that 1965 could not have imagined or comprehended 2025. In 1965, it’s late for the civil rights movement, the official civil rights movement, but of course it also begat Latino, Asian American, Indigenous and other civil rights movements. The feminist movement was just gearing up, and the world is just so radically different than anybody anticipated. And I was a voracious reader as a kid, and I read one of my older brother’s sci-fi books, when he was very into sci-fi. And it was always spaceships and interstellar travel with completely conventional racial and gender stuff, it was easier to imagine inhabiting Mars than imagining women as equals for some of those unimaginative sci-fi writers. Which is why people like Elon Musk are such fans of their essentially retrograde visions of the future. And people really didn’t imagine how much things would change in so many ways.

And that’s something that’s easy to forget. That’s why I talked about baselines. If you don’t have a thousand years of when cherry blossoms bloom, you don’t know that they bloom earlier now because of climate change. If you don’t know what things were like then, you don’t know how we’ve changed them. I love that you brought up marriage equality, because something I find incredibly exciting, first that we liberate each other, that all these movements as the right believes and we sometimes forget are related. I think the reason why marriage equality, as in equal access to marriage for same-sex couples or couples of whatever gender was possible, is because feminists had in the decades before transformed marriage itself from a legally and culturally instituted, unequal relationship in which the husband was essentially the master, the wife, essentially the chattel, servant, subordinate.

And that came to me when I was thinking, “Why is the right so upset about what we call marriage equality?” And I was like, “Oh, they don’t want marriage equality of the kind that we officially talk about, because they’re deeply committed to marriage inequality, which is a subordinate wife and a dominant husband.” And I think that marriage equality in the legal sense was made possible by feminists creating marriage equality in the sense of equal relationships. There was this glorious moment when Terry Gross asked Gloria Steinem this question. She said, “So, you didn’t get married until your 60s?” And Gloria Steinem laughs and says, “Yeah, first I had to reinvent the institution of marriage.” And then she describes, if she had gotten married when she was young in the 1960s, she would have given away so many of her rights, including bodily self-control. Marital rape only became illegal in all 50 states in this country........

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