The Roots of Doom

Week after week, year after year I was confronted with distressing news of devastating droughts and supercharged storms. These recurring crises were not just unleashing dangerous weather – shattering scientists’ most sophisticated predictions – but exacerbating unjust systems, and driving entire communities into desperation. Worse yet, the poorest and most vulnerable populations, those who had done the least to contribute to the problem were the most affected. These images heralded a future where the impacts of climate change would become more personal and immediate. That vision would turn into reality shortly after my group touched down in Panama, where the country was in the throes of a record-setting drought. In my host-community, campesinos had limited options as their animals weakened and their dust-covered crops struggled to stand. My first lesson at site: In many regions of the Global South, where a family’s struggle with nature for survival is so finely balanced, unpredictable weather begets food insecurity and long-term economic strain.

Watching the continued amplification of climate change but lack of largescale solutions felt like living in a nightmare where running was required but reflexes were gone. Confoundingly, trade, travel, and technology connected the world more than ever yet countries lacked the unity, political will, or outright belief needed to fix our shared atmosphere. My heart swam in in a sea of questions and drowned in despair when no answers came. Questions like, “How do we halt the momentum of extracting fossil fuels when everything we use relies on them? How do we feed the world without devouring our planet? How do I bear the responsibility of activism and climate awareness while preserving my internal peace? And what use is any individual effort against such a monstropolus problem?”

With brutal news cycles bombarding us with graphs that get more and more red, it’s no wonder many of us feel locked inside a cage of doom and denial. Climate change and its consequences can trigger chronic fear, fatalism, anger, and exhaustion – a condition that psychologists increasingly call “ecoanxiety”. Such anxiety is well-founded. Global human population and consumption are increasing at the same time as essential resources, such as freshwater and fertile land are in decline. All while trillions of dollars are lavished on weapons of war. The inconvenient truth of our current circumstance overwhelmed me and made the future seem bleak. But as I read stories of climate disruption, I also encountered triumphs of human healing. Frontline communities – like the one I found myself in – were fighting back, and winning. Alongside local leaders I was learning techniques, behaviors, and practices that feed people while transforming agriculture from a carbon source into a sink. These “new” ways of cultivation had deep roots in Afro-Indigenous communities and were what we needed to nourish ourselves and call the exiled carbon back into the soil where it belonged. And gently, like a seed lifting its head out of the darkness, a tender hope sprouted inside of me.

The Need for Radical Hope

You have to act as if it were radically possible to transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

Angela Davis

Hopelessness is destructive because it causes apathy, apathy that steals the precious time we need to fix the problem. Paradoxically, feelings of despair and pessimism can feel safer than their opposites because when we hold on to hope we open ourselves up to the vulnerability of disappointment and failure. Contrary to popular belief humanity is not doomed, but if we descend into apathy then it will be. If we absorb fatalism, the belief that we’ve already lost, we consign ourselves and countless future generations to a worse world. And that world could be big.

Even if humanity only lasts as long as the typical mammalian species (one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of all humans who will ever live have yet to be born. On the scale of a typical human life, our species is the equivalent of a 5-month-old infant. If we are able to live longer than average, then we are a newborn taking its first breath. Therefore, we are the ancients. In the eyes of our decedents, we live at the very beginning of history, in the most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people so we need to act wisely. And if we do, our great-great-great-grandchildren will look back and thank us, knowing that we did everything we could to create a world that is abundant and beautiful. To me, the responsibility to protect our planet is not a burden. I believe we were chosen for this job because we are the ones who can make it happen. It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much.

So how do we break the shackles of hopelessness and apathy? How do we answer the cry of the Earth and her inhabitants? Responding to the challenges humanity faces with hope is a radical act, and it is crucial to revolutionary climate action. Radical hope is not a pie-in-the-sky hope, one that ignores the bad or waits to be saved. It doesn’t dismiss the systems of oppression and inequality that surround us. It is an aspiration grounded in action, gifting us the courage to look all of these destructive systems in the eye and in defiance envision a world of liberation and possibility. It’s the hope of an underpaid elementary school teacher who still encourages each student to dream; the hope of a young mother crossing the Darien Gap with her three children; the hope of a Guna Yala fisherman casting his nets at dawn; the hope of the many Peace Corps volunteers who cross continents in order to spark positive change overseas. It is a hope each of us must chose.

Some believe hope and optimism are naïve and delusional, citing the billions of dollars blocking climate progress or a fundamentally flawed humanity, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Hope is a powerful force because the extent to which we’re likely to try and create a better world is largely contingent upon us believing that a better world is possible. When we wield radical hope, we gain a tool that helps us unbox our imagination for ourselves and the world we want to live in. By choosing to be courageous we can be pivotal in putting humanity on the right course. Understanding the need to find hope shifts our attention from inaction and focuses it on the strong revolutionary winds that are gaining strength as we speak.

Hope is All Around

Argentina’s Shamballa Permaculture Project, Borneo’s How to Restore a Rainforest, Burkina Faso’s The Forest of Lilengo, China’s Zhejiang Green Rural Revival Development, The Hopi Nation’s Raincatchers Climate Resilience Program, Mexico’s Greening the Chihuahuan Desert Initiative, Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, The United States’ Restoring the Redwoods, and Panama’s Mamoni Valley Preserve.

Wherever you look you will find communities of people working hard to heal the Earth – and countless groups are still waiting to be born. Although the climate movement still lacks critical mass, the call to invent, develop, and scale climate solutions has been answered by individuals from virtually every field. Even better, those who are closest to the problem are necessarily closest to the solutions meaning that resistance and innovation are springing from the same frontline communities that are most affected. I feel hope to know that somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a lawyer is defending the rights of nature in court. That somewhere today, in this world, a climate protester awaits the brutality of her government but still dares to march on. That somewhere today, a father facing punishing poverty, weary from a day’s work, takes the time to plant a tree because he dreams of the day when his children will find shade beneath its branches.

Did you know that the number of oil spills per year has decreased from more than a hundred in 1973 to only five in 2016? Or that the country of Honduras banned open-pit mining? Did you know that the proportion of the Earth’s land set aside as national parks, wildlife reserves, and other protected areas has nearly doubled since 1990 – representing an area twice the size of the United States? At the same time, the rhino population in Nepal has reached the highest it has been in over twenty years due to habitat regeneration.

How many times have you seen a breaking news story that started like this, “I’m reporting live from a country where war has not broken out.”? The truth is that we never hear about the less visible, organizing, educating, agitating, groundwork, or underground work that were going on for years to create a wave of change. Though the news would have you believe otherwise, across the world, community by community, people are retrieving ways of living that have been sidelined and suppressed. They are building microcosms of the systems and societies we need to reverse the tide of catastrophic climate change, and transforming our planet into a place that respects the rights for people and Mother Earth. Resistance is rising and systems are changing prompting us to ask not how some silver bullet solution with save us but rather how do we scale the transformation that’s already underway. 

The most common reason why people feel hopeless is because they believe that the level of change required is completely unrealistic. But with this growing hope I have learned to see the world with more nuance. Yes, the systemic change needed is daunting, but what is truly impossible is upholding a system based on infinite growth on a finite planet when experts have been telling us for years that this is incompatible with continued life on Earth. Why should a world of sustainability, justice, and prosperity for all be so far-fetched when ideas like liberalism, apartheid, and capitalism were once utopian blueprints constructed in the imaginations of past leaders. Labeling the changes we need as impossible ignores what a radically transformed world we already live in. The systems we live under are not set in stone. They are human-made therefore they can be remade.

Sustaining Radical Hope

I know what I’m asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand – and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history… for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.

James Baldwin

The climate crisis is the largest challenge humans have ever faced. But this also means that solving climate change is the biggest opening humanity has ever had to repair our relationship with the Earth and envision our societies in ways that are not just sustainable but also make our lives better. What if we saw fracking of tribal lands or clear-cutting of the Amazon rainforest not as a movement-ending defeats but rather as the opening skirmishes of a broader multi-generational battle? What if we looked at the piles of policy changes needed not as an insurmountable challenge but as the greatest opportunity to promote social justice and planetary well-being?

Sustaining radical hope is an exercise in reframing and a practice rooted in action. This grounding gives us the wisdom to withstand the storm of negative news that would otherwise erode our resolve. It allows us to understand that dire scenarios are just predictions, not our fate; to remember that even a wounded world is feeding us; to see that even a world being devastated is replete with beauty and life.

The future is likely to demand more of us than we know how to give. But in this fight, as in every fight there is always one essential ingredient: hopeful people who are willing to work backwards from goals that seem impossibly ambitious from the start. We don’t have to have all of the answers to make a difference. Rewrite your preconceived notions. Recognize that change starts with imperfect people who hold hope for a better tomorrow. A group of caterpillars might not see flight in their future, but it’s inevitable.

So, what can we do? Reject lazy fatalism. Cultivate the courage to act without the assurance of a happy ending. Kindle radical hope. Spread good news. Take a stand with the land, because there is joy in acting upon your love for the Earth. And remember to take care of yourself because burnt-out people aren’t quipped to serve a burning planet.

Radical hope can help us to prove the predictions wrong despite how serious and urgent things are. If we want the world to change, we first have to believe that change is possible, and we have an abundance of evidence that it is. Radical hope is an alchemist because it embraces the difficult emotions that come with climate change awareness and transforms them into action. In a few decades, when we look back from a place of relative comfort and safety, I think we will remember millions of people who saw the unprecedented danger and didn’t look away, who connected with their power and used it to lead change from the ground up. Taking action, however small, is worth it for our lifetime and the many who will inherit the Earth. Despite our differences, humanity can create a future that our descendants will thank us for. In fellowship with people across our planet, we can be good ancestors. Moving forth with broken-open hearts, seeking truth, summoning courage, focusing on solutions, and finding balance with the biosphere, we can bestow a world of freedom, joy, and beauty for generations to come.