Why Hope Matters - Because We have No Choice But to Hope

We can't control the larger forces shaping our world, but there are things we can do and one of them is to keep hope alive.

It is hard to write a newsletter about positive news about the climate on a day like today. Yet write it I must because for the same reasons why Trump won the election imho (because we’re clever tool-using apes yet we still have a brain that responds well to base appeals to people’s fear about ‘the other’ and ‘our territory’) is also the reason I will write today; because we always have the ability to generate hope, even when there is little else left to light the way.

"But in the end it's only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass" (Source)

We don’t have the luxury of doom as top climate scientist Professor Michael Mann noted; “I push back on doomism because I don’t think it’s justified by the science, and I think it potentially leads us down a path of inaction … And there are bad actors today who are fanning the flames of climate doomism because they understand that it takes those who are most likely to be on the front lines, advocating for change, and pushes them to the sidelines, which is where polluters and petrostates want them.”

We don’t have the luxury of doom and hope is renewable.

This article by Martha Crawford struck me;

There are forces that are more powerful than any individual on this planet. No one gets to stand in victory always.

Those who refuse to grieve twist themselves and others into knots, lash out, abuse reality. Mourning is a survival skill in an era of inevitable loss.

Hone your instincts, heed your intuition, and learn to discern between them.  

Our instinctive responses are designed/have evolved to support our survival in instances of clear and present danger. We leap out of the way of an oncoming car. We hide from a predator, or freeze, or flee, if possible, fight as a last resort.

But when danger is more abstract, complex, or remote in time our instinctive responses can entangle and endanger us. Herding instincts, mob psychologies, and the pathologies of swarms can lure us into thinking all is well as we race toward a precipice.

Here our subtler skills, pre-conscious pattern detection, our intuition, is often a better guide.

We do what we can, we survive to fight another day.

There’s a well-known story here in the UK of Robert the Bruce and a spider: Robert was a Scottish noble in rebellion against the occupying English forces. In the winter of 1306, Robert had been defeated and he was on the run, hiding out in a cave. While sitting in that cave he saw a spider trying to weave a web. Each time the spider tried, it fell. However it would climb up and try again. Again and again.  Eventually it succeeded and this inspired Robert to carry on with his fight. Eight years later in 1314 he decisively defeated the English forces at the Battle of Bannockburn and became King of Scotland.

So we will progress and these are the realities that will come to pass;

• Natural disasters will get worse and cost more, getting harder and harder to ignore.

• The cost of renewables will continue to come down meaning fossil fuels will be harder and harder to force into use.

• As the value of fossil fuels goes down, that industry will have less and less to fight the transition renewables.

• More and more people will want to see action, and act towards it.

• Victory here is not all or nothing, but every fraction of a degree we stop.

PS. This video is great from Katharine Hayhoe;

So with that in mind, some links of hope!