Getting Beyond Hope: Facing up to the climate crisis together
If we want to survive the hard times to come together, in a way that upholds our values, we need to stop investing our faith and energy in institutions that are demonstrably failing us.
The trouble is that choices concerning energy strategy are made by institutions that are inaccessible to the ordinary person, and which are, in any event, very heavily incentivized to keep on doing just as they have done. Unless you yourself, personally, are a large shareholder of an energy company, or the autocratic ruler of a fossil fuel–producing country, your ability to effect any meaningful change in how the global economy is powered is virtually nonexistent. Until the parties who do have the power decide otherwise, then, the mining, the drilling, the pumping and the burning will continue unabated—and with them the unrelenting accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, the heating and the terrible consequences for all human and nonhuman life.
This is the point at which our sense of helplessness really starts to feel overwhelming, because none of the mechanisms for change that are available to us feel like they’re up to the task of addressing these increasingly distressing circumstances. In liberal democracies, electoral representation is the dominant, and only formal, theory of change on the table. But can we vote someone into office for whom robust action on the climate is an overriding priority? We would have to find someone like that, first of all. They’d have to win the election. We’d have to hold them to whatever commitments they made on the campaign trail, against the influence of extractive industries that are boundlessly wealthier and better resourced than we are. And then we would have to trust that a large enough number of voters around the country had managed to do the same in their own constituencies, such that the caucus for change is the dominant force in the legislature.
As improbable as all of this sounds, it’s the only game in town. And so many of us still troop off to the voting booth every few years, and cast our ballots for those candidates we think will advance our concerns in the halls of power. For the most part, that’s where the matter remains: the ambit of public action many people are willing to take is confined to what happens on Election Day, whatever misgivings they or anyone else may harbor about its effectiveness or consequence.
For many of us, of course, registering our concern for what is being done to the climate as an indirect signal every few years feels ludicrously inadequate to the scale and urgency of the crisis. But what’s left to us consists largely of our own choices. So we give up the car and take the bus instead, or ride a bike to the market. We cut red meat from our diet, reuse our shopping bags and are diligent about sorting the packaging for recycling. Maybe we go so far as to give up flying, or we forgo having children ourselves. And all the while we do the things we think will give voice to our rising sense of unease. We march and we sign petitions, we make displays of our worthiness and unity and number and commitment in the hope of influencing those who make the laws.
When these things begin to feel irrelevant or pointless, we block highways. If we’re feeling particularly brave, we chain ourselves to the doors of the closest oil-company headquarters.
But none of that seems to move the needle, either—not on legislation, not on policy, not on any of the decisions made by those whose decisions actually matter. No matter what we do, the figure for atmospheric ppm carbon dioxide ticks ever higher. It often feels like all we can do is look on in horror as the line on the graph continues its relentless upward sawtoothing, bursting through every successive threshold at which we’ve been told livable conditions might still be preserved on the planet. We scan the news, and it’s full of dust storms and receding glaciers, fracturing ice sheets and catastrophic floods. Or someone’s shared video of a runaway wildfire to our neighborhood chat group—we glance at our phone and see trees older than America consumed by flame and the skies a hundred miles away gone an uncanny orange with the smoke of their dying.
And then we walk out the door into a world where people are still placidly driving their cars, commuting to work, taking vacations, having kids, buying stuff. What we feel in moments like this is more than disorientation. It’s something closer to reality shear.
The findings accumulate, the careful lawyerly precision of interim reports and white papers gives way to more urgent and emotive language. The gentle drizzle we’re used to more and more often comes on instead with the suddenness and violence of the monsoon. The bodies of refugees fleeing the devastation continue to wash up on the shore. One day we find the supermarket shelves empty of the things that have been there in such abundance our whole lives. And we wonder why nobody seems to be doing something about any of it.
And so we hope. We hope, variously, that carbon offsets, cap-and- trade schemes and all the other market-friendly paraphernalia of soft mitigation work as we have been promised they will. That our elected representatives turn out to be wise enough in the ways of legislature to get a Green New Deal with teeth enacted. That the unaccountable transnational elites who really call the shots will eventually insist on decisive, coordinated action to protect the climate, for reasons of raw self-interest if for no other. That a party of the poor and downtrodden will rise in righteous glory, to end the age of oligarchic plunder and impunity and set the world to rights. That there’s a garage somewhere, inside of which a genius tinkerer is even now perfecting the technology that will siphon carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it safely somewhere it can’t threaten us again. Maybe even that an artificial sentience is gestating, in the anonymous racks of some distant research center, that will somehow be able to seize control of the economy entire, and in that way rescue us from all our errors and mistakes.
What I think we badly need to get our heads around is that all of these varieties of hope are killing us, and everyone and everything we care about. Whatever energy we might invest in the conventional mechanisms of change, they are plainly failing to prevent the burning of fossil fuels at scale. But worse, every hour we dedicate to them is an hour we haven’t spent in material preparation for the conditions we will live with for the rest of our days on Earth. Our trust in these processes is getting in the way of our dedicating time and energy to the efforts that might actually work to cushion ourselves and our communities from everything coming our way.
If we want to survive the hard times to come together, we need to stop investing our faith and energy in institutions that are demonstrably failing us. We need to admit that we’ve reached a moment at which we can no longer afford to wait for some external process to save us, whether mechanism, movement or deus ex machina.
What we need, in other words, is to get beyond hope. We’ve got to stop waiting for someone else to do something and start doing for ourselves. And not simply in a way that reproduces all the values and structures that led us into our current predicament, but in a way that places concerns for care, dignity and the achievement of justice at the heart of everything we undertake together.
— An edited excerpt from Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield.
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