Hope In The Dark: The Untold History of People Power

Solnit argues that the 21st century didn’t arrive on the dawn of the year 2000 but rather that several birth pangs announced it in the 20th century. November 9, 1989, saw the Berlin Wall come down and the symbolic end of the Soviet empire. That wall was erected in 1961, the year of Solnit’s birth. In the same year as this act of oppression, revolutionary events occurred, such as Rachel Carson’s finishing of Silent Spring, a polemic against pesticides that led to the ban of DDT in the US, reversed extinction of many bird species, and began the ecological movement. Solnit writes that the decade of her birth, the 1960s, is an important legacy for the new millennium because “it opened everything to question, and what seems most fundamental and most pervasive about all the ensuing changes is a loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness” (36). Such questioning of authority was behind the 1989 destruction of the Berlin Wall.

On January 1, 1994, revolutionary fervor began in the shadows when a guerrilla group of Indigenous people from the Lacandon Jungle area in Mexico followed Emiliano Zapata to protest the North American