The Miraculous Hope of Climate Realists – EcoWatch
Source: The Miraculous Hope of Climate Realists – EcoWatch
By Erika Spanger-Siegfried . (abridged version here. See Link for full edition)
We're stepping into a new year in the climate fight. The turning of the year is a milestone both for stoking our resolve, and for noting how deep we now are into climate overtime. In 2018 there was a lot of talk of diminishing odds and despair, and not without reason. So if, like me, you're heading into 2019 discouraged or even despairing, I have three things to say: you're not wrong; the fight from here on out is not the one you signed up for; but there's more to hope, even your own, than meets the eye.
Awareness to Anguish. I don't have some hopeful gospel to preach to you; I'm not even going to encourage you to be hopeful. But since my teens, through my work and personal passions, I've been wandering a path from climate awareness to climate anxiety to climate anguish and I couldn't help but learn something about the true nature of hope after all these years of running it over with a bus. That knowledge not optimism or determination, or any virtue on my part has become my superpower over climate despair. In recent years, in fact, I've realized that I'm just immune to it; it lands but can't stick. You may be the same, though you might describe it differently or not even know it yet.
You're not wrong: it's bad. There's this great, intricate weaving the one we're all walking around on and someone's been snipping intermittent threads that attach it to the loom. Things are starting to unravel in obvious, abrupt patches, sending us scrambling. Other changes are coming through gradual but widespread loosening of strands. We race about hastily tying threads back together, but we're not as good as the weaver. The patterns are starting to become disorderly. How many more strands can be cut before they're unrecognizable? And why haven't we taken away the scissors?
Science. But who needs metaphors when we have science. As 2018 wound down, science walloped us. The IPCC 1.5 degree report, the U.S. National Climate Assessment and other scientific works were released with stark assertions about the things that are all but lost, the things we can fight for if we bring our strongest ambitions to bear, and the waning gap between such ambitions and where we are headed. We saw the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) come and go in Poland with progress made, but vastly insufficient to the long-term goals.
Grief. At some point in our climate awareness many of us begin to grieve. (And maybe to rage or panic; more than once, I've had this momentary visceral urge: how do I get off this ride?) And the grief we feel cycles between the poles of acute anguish and resignation, but it never really lifts. Many of us, understandably, have felt our hope grow thin. At some point, we lose a climate fight we really needed to win and we feel hope tear. And at another point, we reach for its comfort and we don't feel it at all. It's gone, sublimated like vapor from ancient Antarctic ice. We might think the despair we feel has taken its place. But here's the thing: it's not that easy to lose hope.
Nature of Hope. The True and Gritty Nature of Hope When people think of hope, personified, it's usually a butterfly, or a dove or a sapling sprouting from the ground. Yes, and. That's not the hope we're talking about. Bring it along, but it's not the kind of hope we'll be using so much where we're going. In Finland, there's a word, "sisu," which gets crudely translated as determination, grit and courage. The Finnish side of my family liked to celebrate it. But it's meant to be more; something like extraordinary resoluteness and perseverance in the face of extreme adversity.
Discipline of Hope. In English we say, "Hope springs eternal." In Russian it's, "Hope dies last." They're different vantage points on the same human impulse: if you love something, you hope. You move. You keep.You don't even get to decide. However poorly we tend it, however fragile we think it, this hope thing will not really, cannot quit. We might feel anguish, but despair just won't stick because it's not over. Maybe it's an evolutionary impulse to save our own skin and our loved ones'; to quote a friend, "Hope is a discipline for survival." But I'll call it love. I'm not sure they're different. And therein lies hope's unstoppable power: if you love anything you hope.
The Fight We Didn't Sign Up for
It's no longer the same fight we signed up for however many years ago. But you knew that. And we're not bearing the same hope we started with. I struggle to neither over- nor understate the fight. Today, the only thing we need to ask of ourselves whether it's defeating the fossil fuel industry, winning pro-climate elections, defending climate science, or getting out in the streets in demonstration is that we're still in.I think we've got that. At the same time, no generations have ever had to question and concede the future quite like this. And we've never had to fight quite like this, against an enemy that both opposes us and is us, over and over, and without clear hope of winning. There's no simple "winning" when so much is lost. Not gone, but condemned.But look: it's still beautiful, isn't it. I'll fight for that.
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