Rebecca Solnit

“There’s enough food in this world. There’s enough housing in this world. There’s enough shelter in this world. There’s enough clothing in this world. There’s enough teachers, there’s enough universities for everybody’s needs to be met, and the reasons they aren’t is not because of lack of resources. It’s because of distribution, and that’s the politics of hate, which is why this is a movement against that. It’s a politics of love. So of course this is a crisis whose answer is love.”

Rebecca Solnit is a San Francisco-based author, environmentalist, journalist, activist and historian who writes on a variety of subjects including ecology, politics, place, community, disaster, hope, memory, reverie and art. She has worked on campaigns focused on climate change, human rights, Native American land rights and against war for over three decades.

Growing up in California, Solnit traded high school for an alternative education in the public school system. She studied in Paris as a teen and received her Masters in Journalism from Berkeley. She credits her education in journalism and art for her critical thinking skills.

Solnit is the author of thirteen books and numerous essays. Her books include Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; Storming the Gates of Paradise; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Wanderlust: A History of Walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which won five awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the Mark Lynton History Prize.

Making her living as an independent writer since 1988, Rebecca is a contributing editor to Harper’s, a columnist for the environmental magazine Orion, and a regular contributor to the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch political daily newsgram. She has also written for, among other publications, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Review of Books.

Rebecca Solnit is the recepient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan literary fellowship as well as two NEA Fellowships for Literature.

In 2010, Utne Reader magazine named her as one of the “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”

Visit her website:
http://www.rebeccasolnit.com/

Books by Solnit:
http://www.rebeccasolnit.com/books

Quotes by Solnit:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/15811.Rebecca_Solnit

A conversation with Rebecca Solnit, (Live from the NYPL excerpt, 4.5 min)

On her book A Paradise Built in Hell (Santa Monica Update, 4 min)