Climate Conversations 23rd February 2023
Hope, or rather the feeling that things are hopeless, has been a theme in the first few meetings of our climate support group. Hopelessness is difficult to bear and finding a way to feel hopeful again is important to us.
We started by completing the sentence ‘I need hope because…’. Our answers were:
I need hope because…
- Without hope there’s no point in anything
- No hope is overwhelming and awful
- Hope makes me feel happy
Then we took a look at what a climate scientist has to say about hope. In 2018, Kate Marvel wrote a blog post about hope. She describes how, when she gives a talk people are looking to her for hope, “Climate change is bleak the organisers say. Tell us a happy story. Give us hope. The problem is I don’t have any.”
How can the perspective of someone who says there is no hope help us with our feelings of hopelessness? At the end of her post Kate says:
There is now no weather we haven’t touched, no wilderness immune from our encroaching pressure. The world we once knew is never coming back.
Kate Marvel, On Being 2018
I have no hope that these changes can be reversed. We are inevitably sending our children to live on an unfamiliar planet. But the opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief. Even while resolving to limit the damage, we can mourn. And here, the sheer scale of the problem provides a perverse comfort: we are in this together. The swiftness of the change, its scale and inevitability, binds us into one, broken hearts trapped together under a warming atmosphere.
We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.
There’s a lot to unpick in this quote! The main ideas that we talked about were:
- The first couple of sentences were upsetting to read. Even though we already knew, it’s still a shock to think that everything is now already going to change one way or another.
- We’re not necessarily bound together because there’s so much inequality in the world. We won’t all experience climate change in the same way. As one person said “we’re all going through the same storm, but we’re not all in the same boat.”
- We realised that hope was very important. One person talked about how focusing on the present can help. For example noticing the buds breaking earlier in the break felt hopeful.
- On the other hand, what we see in nature can have the opposite effect. We had examples of a sapling dying in the park in the summer and the effect of drought on wild flowers in another park.
- Following on from the discussion of inequality we talked about how “hope can be a privilege” (Kate Marvel uses this phrase earlier in the post). We been able to hope up to now because we haven’t had to face devastating climate impacts personally.
- We could all identify with the emotional processes she mentions, like grief and courage and bravery. At some level, at some point in the past we’ve experienced grief before, or been able to find courage at a difficult time.
- Hopelessness can be completely paralysing. The blog post gives an answer by not seeing it as a either/or choice between hopelessness or hope. We can sidestep hope and concentrate on courage instead.