Our conversation
How hopeful are we right now?
Having hope when you realise that the world is heading for climate disaster can seem impossible. However, trying to live, in any conditions, without hope, is despairing.
When we looked at a scale of hope with one end representing hopelessness, i.e. “we’re doomed “ at one end and “it’ll be fine” at the other, we all felt at the “we’re doomed” end.
We discussed how we felt about this. These are our thoughts:
“There has to be mitigation. We are already at 1.5% increase and we see no signs of anything slowing down. However, it is a mainstream issue.
We’re doomed and I can’t see any government doing anything.
People’s behaviour isn’t showing a willingness to make small changes.
Another aspect is social justice. People in poorer countries are affected, but then poor people in richer countries are also suffering as they can’t afford to buy heating.”
Radical hope, constructive hope and active hope: three different ways of understanding hope in the climate crisis
Next, we looked at three definitions of hope.
Radical hope
First, radical hope.
“On the other end of the spectrum is radical hope, where you move to an unknown future and don’t even know how to get there, but you are willing to show up for all the difficult conversations on the way. “
Susanne Moser
“you are not at all convinced that there is a positive outcome at the end of your labors. It’s not like you’re working towards winning something grand. You don’t know that you’ll able to achieve that. But you do know that you cannot live with yourself if you do not do everything toward a positive outcome.”
Susanne Moser
This struck a chord with all of us, especially the last sentence. It is a good philosophy. It is important to show up for the important stuff. Someone mentioned that at a rally recently someone said that when things get really bad people will feel guilty because they haven’t done enough in the past so it’s important to do as much as you can.
Constructive hope
Next, was constructive hope.
- Compare what is probable with what is preferable and come up with grounded realistic possible futures.
- Combines utopian hope (dreams of a better future we want, regardless of whether it is realistic) with critical hope (starting from a clear assessment of the reality of the current situation).
- Doesn’t ignore the real limits imposed by living in the current system.
- Encourages concrete goals and pathways to achieve them.
- Hope based in trust helps young people gain the strength to act. It helps when we reach the limits of our own agency and face uncertainty.
Hope and anticipation in education for a sustainable futureby Maria Ojala
Some of the group felt that this was more of a philosophy and useful if you haven’t got a plan to start with.
Active Hope
“Active hope is a practice, like Tai Chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have.”
Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone p 4-5.
Active Hope involves:
- Take a clear view of reality
- Identify what we hope for – the direction we’d like things to move in.
- Take steps to move ourselves, or the situation, in that direction.
“Since active hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless”
Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone p 4-5.
We talked about the similarities and differences between all three. Ultimately it is the fact that you can’t live if you don’t try to do something.
What makes a good foundation for hope?
Finally, we thought about hope as a spectrum1Susanne Moser describes hope as a spectrum: “On one end, there’s the passive, Oh, somebody else will take care of it, kind of hope. It’s all going to turn out fine and I don’t have to do anything to help. That to me is not a realistic, nor a sustaining, hope, and it’s certainly not how I want to live my life.” “On the other end of the spectrum is radical hope, where you move to an unknown future and don’t even know how to get there, but you are willing to show up for all the difficult conversations on the way.”
. We had 5 possible foundations for hope to look at and discuss. We took a different foundation each, wrote some notes and then discussed it.
These are the questions we used to help us:
- How does it make you feel?
- Does it help us act (individually and collectively) or not?
- Does it help you cope when things are bleak, or not?
- Does it help you to engage with reality or avoid it?
- Fiction – An imaginary, utopian future.
This is something with which I can really identify. I have a vivid imagination and love to drift off dreaming of a better world and things that would make it better. It makes me feel relaxed, but not necessarily hopeful. It doesn’t make me act, my ideas are too whacko, and I don’t think that it would even help people act collectively. (Since the meeting I have thought more about this. I recently read a novel called “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins. Although a book of fiction, it is based on reality and I think that if a lot of people read it, it could collectively make people act.) It’s helpful when things look bleak, but I am very aware that nothing has changed. It’s a bit like drinking to blot things out, and it definitely avoids reality.
Someone commented that there is something to be said about fiction. Good things happen in life and you don’t always know why. So living like there is hope means that you are able to recognise it.
- Unhappiness with how things are and wanting them to be different.
- It can make us interested, focused and connected.
- It might have ways to create problem-solving with a clearly defined situation.
- Possibly we can make an action plan with achievable steps
- We can engage with reality by changing it. It gives us something to aim for.
- It’s better to know what’s going on and where you stand with it.
- Agency thinking. Understanding that we’re not powerless. We can think and act for ourselves.
Thinking and speaking for yourself. Identify your power. It makes you feel really good when you act and speak with your own authority. It can be frustrating because other people might not care. It comes into play when something has to be done.
Obedience could be the opposite and the concept of disobedience has a weight to it in a way that agency doesn’t. It does help us to act, but probably more individually. It can help if things look bleak because you are in control of your own decisions.
It’s authentic, but it can be lonely and unhappy.
- Realism. A critical understanding of how things are now.
- It can make you anxious.
- It doesn’t help to change things.
- It doesn’t help if things look bleak
- You can engage to an extent but then it can lead to despair and avoidance.
- Optimism. A belief the future will be okay, or that things will get better.
If you are an optimist then it’s hard to change. But people concerned with climate change don’t like positive thinking. Optimism gets a bad press because it’s seen as avoidance. However, when approached with realism, you can easily see that things won’t be ok. We felt that as a definition it was too certain.
When we looked at these things on the spectrum of hope, we felt that it was too linear and maybe there’s more to it than just lining up the foundations.
Sources
Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy. Novato, Calif: New World Library, 2012. 🧭
Mazur, Laurie. “Susanne Moser On Facing the Biggest Challenge of Our Times.” Earth Island Journal, Autumn 2023. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/susanne-moser-on-facing-the-biggest-challenge-of-our-times/. 💻
Mazur. “Despairing about the Climate Crisis? Read This.,” 2019. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/despairing-about-climate-crisis/. 💻
Ojala, Maria. “Hope and Anticipation in Education for a Sustainable Future.” Futures 94 (November 2017): 76–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2016.10.004. 🎓
Pihkala, Panu. “Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions.” Frontiers in Climate 3 (2022). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2021.738154. 🎓
Pihkala, Panu. “The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief: A Narrative Review and a New Proposal.” Sustainability 14, no. 24 (January 2022): 16628. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416628. 🎓
Wray, Britt. “How to Take Breaks from the Climate Crisis without Living in Denial.” Substack newsletter. Gen Dread (blog), January 25, 2023. 💻https://gendread.substack.com/p/how-to-take-breaks-from-the-climate.
🧭= self-help/ how-to
💻= blog or newsletter
🎓 = academic work