Humanity and kindness in the face of change
“In the new science, the new worldviews, we are not nouns, we are verbs.”
Rebecca Solnit’s book “The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change” (Haymarket Books, 2026, 149 pages) is something of a scholarly study and a personal prophesy. Is Solnit’s title for her book right that there may be a new beginning following a time of cataclysm, or are we at the beginning of the “end times” as prophesied in the Bible?
No matter which of these predictions may be true, her book is a tour-de-force of research, observation and contemplation on profound shifts since 1960 that should be taken seriously and paid attention to.
In short, Solnit’s title tells it all, yet she expands on this metaphor in a variety of ways. Or as the front matter quote by Martin Luther King Jr. states: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” These themes are also mirrored in the book’s Table of Contents in metaphorical chapter headings such as “Swimming Upstream,” “Shadows of the Past,” “Winged Seeds” and “The River Widens.”
After stating that “the beginning — the next era — comes after the end of the last one, and in between comes a lot of falling apart,” Solnit starts, early on, speaking of Indigenous peoples, their histories and cultural values and the idea of interconnectedness. “These ideas of interconnection emerge from many sources, from new economic models and new scientific ideas about biology and psychology, from Buddhist and Indigenous worldviews,” she writes, leading up later to the statement that “after all the hoopla and celebration by the colonial governments are over, the Native voice will prevail. Many Indigenous Peoples and local communities around the world have views, structures, and practices aligned with generating a just and sustainable world.” All this comes after citing the disconnectors of “brutal politics,” “conservative values,” “business dominance” “industrial agriculture” and “climate denial.”
But in the end, amid all the “disconnectors” and warnings about global capitalism, Solnit continues with her march toward a more hopeful and positive outcome. “Amidst a possible future of scarcity, fear and greed, also emerges the possibilities of non-violence and integration,” she says. She writes of “a beloved community” which she describes as a community-based love, a public love, an inclusive love and ultimately a divine love without limits. “We can rescue for ourselves some of our old evolutionary grandeur when we recognize our species not as lords but as partners,” she writes.
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“Behind every ending is another beginning, another story,” she proclaims. And we get many stories both past and present related to people who are the connectors in this march toward wholeness and unity. Names such as Greta Thunberg, Rachel Carson, Gloria Steinham, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Arundhati Roy, Joanna Macy (do we see an obvious feminine pattern here?) appear throughout the book to support her theories on a communal evolution. There is also a vibrant list of male voices throughout the book in support of the feminine perspective, such as Barry Commoner, Thich Nhat Hanh, Bill McKibben and Martin Luther King Jr. These voices of process, progress and positivism reverberate throughout the book, balancing and maybe even superseding the notion of divisiveness and separation, turmoil and possible earth-based tragedy.
Solnit, in the chapter called “Shadows of the Past,” brings up the topic of films and how many films in the past were about the invasion of Indigenous homelands or the conquest of nature and about domination and control as key elements of masculinity. But then she balances these negatives by going on to emphasize the importance of the word “kindness” in the words of a Native American elder who states, “We are fighting for a world in which everyone matters.”
But just as things collapse, the river widens. In Solnit’s chapter “The River Widens” we get her version of how this will happen and is happening. In this final section of the book, she talks at length about forests and ecosystems and about Asian and American Indigenous cultures appearing in increments and subtle shifts. This subtle process is creating a kind of redirection for a humanity that one might call “new natives” (my term) — replacing the mindset of the past and “organized forgetting” with an entirely different way of living and being with the world. Here, she talks about “how we do things, or don’t do them, when it comes to the destruction of nature, species, places, the climate, through greed, heedlessness, and indifference. She writes about “how we replace these with a practiced process called “processual biology” as a process of forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing into each other.”
“Change is constant,” she writes. “We have our work cut out for us. It’s good work, and it’s everyone’s work. Countless people are doing it with whatever love, devotion and brilliance they bring to the task; it needs more of us and more from us. The beginning will come after the end. We face the past to remember, we face the future to dream.”
(Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of more than 30 books, including the award-winning nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods,” and is a longtime resident of Jackson County.)
