Status Updates From The Beginning Comes After t...

Depressing and yet optimistic ... the pendulum is still swinging, folks. I tried the audiobook, but felt more comfortable reading Solnit's words rather than listening to her.

'You could not live for more than a few minutes without taking a breath, and the oxygen your lungs extract from the air you breathe is there because blue-green algae emitted it through photosynthesis all those billions of years ago, and plants continue to make our earth inhabitable by sequestering carbon and emitting oxygen.' p.78

'Donald Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again," I always thought of as code for "Make America 1958 (or perhaps 1858) Again." Like all fascism, it promises to restore a lost majesty, a lost hierarchy [...]. Fascism claims the past, or a fantasy version of it, as paradise while it tries to strangle the future and insists that order only comes through repression and the reinstatement of inequalities.' p.16

'Our world has changed more than almost anyone imagined, in ways both wonderful and terrible, often in ways no one anticipated, and the sheer profundity of change in the past guarantees that this change will continue, that stability is not an option, but participating in directing change might be, if we recognize it.' p.5

“The stories we tell about what nature is are the stories we tell about who we are or should be.”