Rebecca Solnit: Hope After the End
From Wonder Cabinet by Wonder Cabinet Productions
February 14, 2026 · 38 min · Season 1 · Episode 3
About this episode
Rebecca Solnit discusses the emotional toll of living in a time of dissolution and presents a case for hope amidst systemic collapse.
How do you deal with the emotional toll of living in a time of dissolution? Social scientists use the term "polycrisis" to describe the kind of cascading, overlapping failures that can lead to systemic collapse, and it’s hard not to see the symptoms of a dying world order in events unfolding around us. But maybe what we’re witnessing is actually grounds for hope. In a forthcoming book " The Beginning Comes After the End, " writer and activist Rebecca Solnit makes the case that something is dying, all right — because something better is being born. A rising worldview that embraces antiracism, feminism, environmental thinking, Indigenous and non-Western ideas, and a vision of a more interconnected, compassionate world. Solnit is an engaged writer and intellectual in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Sontag and George Orwell. Her new book picks up where her earlier bestseller “ Hope in the Dark ” left off — with an argument against despair and historical amnesia. In this conversation, we explore the extraordinary scale of progressive social, political, scientific and cultural change over the past century, the roots of Solnit’s stance of “pragmatic, embodied hope,” her…
People in this episode
Guest: Rebecca Solnit
Topics covered
- hope
- social change
- polycrisis
- progressive movements
- cultural change
- activism
Keywords
- polycrisis
- hope
- activism
- social change
- cultural change
- environmental thinking
- antiracism
- feminism
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: The Beginning Comes After the End, Hope in the Dark, AIDS Memorial Quilt
Places: San Francisco
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