Maybe it’s just me – but I suspect it’s not just me – but hope seems in short supply at the moment. The weather certainly doesn’t help, but it’s not fair to just blame the Bradford rain when the day-to-day newspaper headlines repeatedly paint a picture of a world spiralling, which couples with the longer term, more insidious sense of heaviness, of unease.

But our book of the month is called Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, was written in 2003 and early 2004, “written against the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq”. I was born in 1988, 9/11 happened when I was 11 years old, the invasion of Iraq when I was around 13 – as a “millenial” Solnit is writing about a period of time that defined my own worldview and that of many activists my age. At the time – and, now I think about it, ever since – cynicism felt like a blanket, a buffer against a world that seemed content with hurtling over a precipice. “I can take the despair, it’s the hope I can’t stand…”

When so much is at stake, it makes sense to frame the world in binaries – either we win and the war doesn’t happen or the whales don’t go extinct, or we lose, and millions die. 

Solnit invites us to look at the world and where we should look for hope very differently – less in terms of outcomes (whether we win or lose), and more in the process, the relationships, the act of building something together. In her analysis of movements and organising over several decades, Solnit finds hope in the way our movements have adapted and changed, finding new ways to communicate and organise, a readiness to challenge “leadership cults”, the wide embrace of an anti-doctrinal plurality, and a rejection of “the static utopia in favor of the improvisational journey”.

She also sets out to remind us that cause-and-effect is often difficult to understand and recognise, and that we often fail to recognise or embrace the huge cultural impacts of activism – either historically or currently. Learning about what movements have achieved less in terms of their campaign “wins” but what they achieved in their organising. How did they empower their communities? What was the long term cultural impact of their work? What used to be “normal” that is now unthinkable? What transformation occurred in an individual, or a group of people, or a home, or a workplace, or…? In a 2016 reflection on her book ten years after it was published, Solnitt quotes Patrisse Cullors, a founder of Black Lives Matter, who said that BLMs goal was to “provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”.

Solnit invites us to look for hope in the cracks and the margins and the edges – not in a naive “everything will be ok” sort ofway, but in the future’s uncertainty, in the simple fact that no one knows what will happen next. That uncertainty is terrifying, but it’s also a crack in which we can place ourselves – and we can’t do that without a little bit of hope.