Feature: Shifters

In a world that is quickly sinking into despair.....a revolution of HOPE, emerges...

"This says very directly that you can reach out and change the state and its institutions, which we recognize as revolution, or you can make your own institutions beyond the reach of the state, which is also revolutionary. This creating -- rather than simply rebelling -- has been much of the nature of revolution in our time, as people reinvent family, gender, food systems, work, housing, education, economics, medicine and doctor-patient relations, the imagination of the environment, and the language to talk about it, not to speak of more and more of everyday life. The fantasy of a revolution is that it will make everything different, and regime revolutions generally make a difference, sometimes a significantly positive one, but the making of radical differences in everyday life is a more protracted, incremental process. It's where leaders are irrelevant and every life matters."Copyright 2008 Rebecca Solnit

"The last time Rebecca Solnit camped out on rebel territory, she was an organizer for the Western Shoshone Defense Project that insists -- with good legal grounds -- that the Shoshone in Nevada had never ceded their land to the U.S. government. That story is told in her 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, but the subsequent inspiration of the Zapatistas is most evident in the book Tom Engelhardt helped her to bring into being, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities." She is 11 chapters into her next book. check out the article @ http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174881

Rebecca Solnit's Secret Library of Hope:
Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People;

Aung San Suu Kyi, The Voice of Hope;

Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves;

Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations;

Richard Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area;

Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

William Morris, News from Nowhere;

News from Nowhere Collective, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism;

Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina;

Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007;

Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All;

Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage, editors (introduction Bill McKibben), Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement.
Copyright 2007 Rebecca Solnit