Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

we need stories that don’t gloss over the ugly damage out there but that don’t portray it as all there is either.

You are part of the system, and you need, we all need, to change that system. Nothing less than systemic change will save us.

One way to define the global justice movement of our time is as a global movement in defense of the local—of local food, local jurisdiction over labor and resources, local production, local culture, local species, domesticated and wild, of the protection of environments that are by definition local.

The answer to most either/or questions is both; the best response to a paradox is to embrace both sides instead of cutting off one or the other for the sake of coherence.

The question, then, is not so much how to create the world as how to keep alive that moment of creation, how to realize that Coyote world in which creation never ends and people participate in the power of being creators, a world whose hopefulness lies in its unfinishedness, its openness to improvisation and participation.

The philosopher Alphonso Lingus says, “We really have to free the notion of liberation and revolution from the idea of permanently setting up some other kind of society.”

The term “politics of prefiguration” has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed.

Stories move in from the shadows to the limelight. And though the stage presents the drama of our powerlessness, the shadows offer the secret of our power.

Violence is the power of the state; imagination and nonviolence the power of civil society.