Hope is essential for us to engage in efforts to solve the climate crisis. Some of us may be motivated by fear, anger, or even grief, but without hope it is virtually impossible to sustain an effective, active commitment to stopping climate change.
What does it mean to be hopeful when people around the world are already suffering and dying from the catastrophic effects of climate change? What does it mean to be hopeful when despite all the marches, speeches, scientific reports, and government goals, damaging global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising and the fossil fuel industry is still seeking to expand its climate-destroying business.
What is hope? Hope is not a conviction or prediction that things will turn out well. It is possible to be hopeful even when the odds are not in your favor. Hope is a decision. Hope is a decision to hold open the possibility of success regardless of the odds. Hope is a choice. When it comes to tackling climate change, hope is a decision that you will have a better life and experience greater integrity and sense of purpose if you work together with others to try to solve the crisis than if you turn away from the issue or declare the battle lost.
Vaclav Havel, dissident, playwright, and first president of the Czech Republic said: “Hope … is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced …
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
This is quite different from a Pollyanna notion that everything is going to be fine or a false bravado that of course we are going to win. Neither of those is accurate or true. For our actions to be most effective they need to be grounded in the fullest, most accurate picture of reality that we can get. And with regard to climate change that picture includes the bad news as well as the good.
It can be challenging to hold both the good news and the bad news in our minds without slipping into rigid optimism on one side or despair on the other. Holding both opens us up to a whole range of feelings, including feelings of despair.
Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement says, “Hope is not the absence of despair — it is the ability to come back to our purpose again and again.”
Even the most optimistic among us — even those of us who feel we’ve made a decision to be hopeful as described above by Vaclav Havel — can find ourselves emotionally worn down and pulled toward discouragement and despair by bad news. Most of us have a backlog of accumulated discouragement from earlier times in our lives when our needs were not met, other people didn’t understand us, or we couldn’t get things to go the way we thought they should. Bad news in the present can be discouraging in its own right, but also pulls up old, stored feelings of discouragement as well. Being hopeful is a decision not to allow that old, accumulated discouragement to run our lives, diminish our joy in being alive, or limit our actions.
Sometimes we simply need to cry to release our pain and fear. Sometimes we can use the remarkable ability we humans have of choosing where we put our attention. More and more of us are learning that when the despair starts to take over, it’s time for us to very intentionally put our attention on some good news. This can be different from denial or pretense. After spending some time with the bad news we can choose to shift our attention to something more positive so that when we act we can act with confidence and hope.
It generally lifts our spirits and reinvigorates us to have part of our minds on enjoying the good news and the good work that people are doing and the successes they are having. We can develop this as a personal practice that we use regularly.
We can take heart from the fact that the price of solar panels has fallen 90% in the last 10 years; that climate activists from the Philippines to Africa are organizing and demanding real action; that China’s carbon emission have fallen for the last four quarters; and that the new climate legislation in the U.S. is projected to achieve a 43% reduction in U.S. emissions by 2030.
We also build hope when we connect with other people and when we take action. As we develop our abilities to choose hope in these challenging times, we can hold out hope to others. Doing this for each other is a key step in building a sense of community and building an effective climate movement.
Russ Vernon-Jones of Amherst was principal of Fort River School for 18 years and is a member of the Steering Committee of Climate Action Now (CAN). The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached at russvj@gmail.com. He blogs regularly on climate justice at http://www.russvernonjones.org.