Hope, A Horizon
‘If the earth (mati) breaks so much, how do we stay manush (human)?’ — overheard by Naveeda Khan, along the Jamuna River,in rural Bangladesh (1)
‘Maatu hamru, paani hamru, hamra hi chhan yi baun bhi… Pitron na lagai baun, hamunahi ta bachon bhi. (Soil ours, water ours, ours are these forests. Our forefathers raised them, it’s we who must protect them)’ — Song of Gharwali women, Chipko movement
‘Life united will never be defeated’ — Gustavo Wilches-Chaux
Hope is both the recognition of possibility, but also the courage not to confuse today with tomorrow. In this sense, hope is the line we draw in the sand, the standard we set to prevent ourselves becoming inured to injustice.
We have become accustomed to too much: to a violently unequal world, to the systematic degradation of ecosystems and the constant theft of our future (2). Without the challenge of change, the indefensible blends into the unquestionable. We assume our temporary realities as certainties, and surrender our aspirations to a different future.
The cinematographer Fernando Birri was once asked at a public event, what is the purpose of utopia? Birri thought for a minute before replying: ‘[Utopia] she’s in the horizon. I step two steps closer, she takes two steps back. I walk ten steps, and the horizon moves ten steps further. As far as I walk I’ll never reach it. So, what is utopia for? For that — to walk’ (3).
As we try to walk, we may feel shackled by cynicism. Our predominant culture of hopelessness leaves people frightened, and despondent, if not antagonistic to change. We are convinced of our impotence, if not our own worthlessness.
The psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró, working with schoolchildren in El Salvador, noted:
‘Day by day they learn that their efforts in school get them nowhere; the street does not reward them well for their premature efforts at selling newspapers, taking care of cars, or shining shoes; and therefore it is better not to dream or set goals they will never be able to reach. They learn to be resigned and submissive… through the everyday demonstration of how impossible and useless it is to strive to change their situation, when that environment itself forms part of an overall oppressive social system’ (4).
This fatalism creates the futility of action. Fossil-fuel companies play on futility, describing our future as irredeemably dependent on fossil fuels, to ensure it stays that way. They portray ambition as unlikely, highlighting the obstacles to any alternative, to fortify them further (5). These visions of dire impossibility are articulated by many, from environmentalists to military authorities (6). The notion of cataclysmic collapse is alluring. We can easily develop a penchant for seeing the end of systems in everything, or for constantly despairing about prospects (7). That kind of perspective, though, not only obscures incremental gains, but also quickly draws us into impotence. Climate models and studies outlining our future depend on such assumptions of indifference. It is up to us to prove them wrong, and to rewrite the human limitations suggested for us.
Power is the ability to shape the future, to craft our memory. In the right hands, and used in the right way, power can open doors to freedom. It can give a person more ability to define their own life. But, used unjustly, power is perilous.
Our power to shape the world has never been greater, our weaponry has never been deadlier. We have played with enormous amounts of fire. The nuclear revolution broke open the nucleus of the atom, signalling the ability of humans to release one of the strongest forces in the universe.
We have become more powerful, but more impotent to the abuses of our power. It is this immense power, abused by the few, that has unleashed climate change, a bitter testimony to the might of mendacity. The dominant extractive economic system has been so destructive that it has been capable of derailing the earth system (8).
We are not helpless. We still wield enormous influence over the future. What human beings decide to do in the next few years will shape human destiny. The actions of the coming decades will shape the next few millennia. Although our power in an enormous universe may feel small, we should remember that complex systems, in physics and biology, have the property of emergence. The smallest entities can generate unexpected changes in larger entities. Simple objects can give rise to complex patterns. Microscopic processes can have macroscopic impacts. New configurations can emerge as old constraints break. All systems always have leverage points that can rearrange possibilities (9). In non-linear systems, surprises await us.
In history, we are neither plague nor pathology, protagonist nor pawn. The world has many sides. We are capable of unwarranted cruelties, of insidious callousness, of constantly eluding truths that hurt. But we also carry immense, spirit-shaking strength.
Humanity is hard to extinguish. Even in the darkest times of our past, the seeds of human dignity survived brutality. Soviet journalist Vassili Grossman, who followed the Red Army and stared into the bleak horrors of the Second World War, noted that ‘Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer’ (10).
Hope is not about obsessive optimism. It is a commitment to dream and affirm that change is possible. In part, we have a responsibility to hope. But we need a healthier hope that can be sustained in the face of relentless tragedy. We will not prevent everything. Tremendous pain is inevitable, seared into the future. But our actions can keep worst-case scenarios in the realm of nightmares, and not the realm of reality. There is at least a chance for us to avert, or at the very least allay, an unthinkable unravelling of pain. We must claim it.
Solace can be found in the solutions we know. We have a treasure trove of traditions, tested techniques, ancient ideas and rich philosophies that can guide us. People have spent millennia understanding our climate, the ecosystems that sustain us, and how we can thrive among them. We have a world filled with countless people devoted to dignity. Such is the hope we hold.
Life, our procession of memory, is deeply fragile. From the smallest cell to the largest star, all is mortal. Eventually, our nearby Sun will exhaust its fuel. In a hundred million years, there will be little evidence left of the human story.
We are destined to oblivion. But as the historian Howard Zinn wrote, ‘the future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory’ (11).
We all have gifts to give, abilities to use, people around us to inspire. We can interlock our passions with activism. Those fortunate enough to live in relatively free societies can put voices, bodies and hearts on the line. The botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer compels us towards the ideal of reciprocity, to acknowledge the gifts we have, that we can give in return for all that has been given to us is.’
Kimmerer asks:
‘What does it mean to be an educated person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift. And if one of those species and the gifts that it carries is missing in biodiversity, the ecosystem is desperate, the ecosystem is too simple. It doesn’t work as well when that gift is missing’ (12).
Ecology at its heart is love for all beings, a living acknowledgment of all that allows us to be: our solar system, and its unique capacity to shield our planet from threats; the precious swirling rock that is our Earth, and its exceptional atmosphere which allows for the gifts of breath, and nourishment; the efforts of ecosystems, fellow beings and ancestors that have brought us here. We exploit what we ignore and devalue. But we live for, we think for, we fight for what we love (13).
The infinite stakes rob us of patience. Left unchecked, climate violence spells a radical and regressive reconfiguration of our world. But if we unleash a real transformation that can slash emissions, improve public health and offer people more dignified lives, then we can pry open the possibility of achieving a more beautiful and just future.
As the anthropologist Fernando Coronil reminds us:
‘The embers of the past and the poetry of the future will continue to conjure up images of worlds free from the horrors of history. Politics will remain a battle of desires waged on an uneven terrain. But as long as people find themselves without a safe and dignified home in the world, utopian dreams will continue to proliferate, energizing struggles to build a world made of many worlds, where people can dream their futures without fear of waking up’ (14).
Climate change represents the memory we could be, the possibility of pain or prosperity. It is up to us to evict the certainties of suffering and craft a world that resembles the dignity of its people. Let us weave together the protections of solidarity. Let us suture the separations between culture and nature, between us and the other. Let us confront the poverties of humans, in all their layers. Together, we can build a home worthy of its name.
These few words are an edited excerpt from the Memory We Could Be: Overcoming Fear to Create Our Ecological Future, published in September 2018 by New Internationalist Books and New Society Publishers. More information can be found here.
References
1. Naveeda Khan, ‘Dogs and humans and what earth can be’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol 4, No 3, 2014.
2. The biologist Daniel Pauly called this ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, in Daniel Pauly, ‘Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol 10, No 10, 1995.
3. Cited in Eduardo Galeano, Las palabras andantes, Catálogos, 2001, p 230.
4. Mary Watkins & Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Palgrave Macmillan 2008, p 111.
5. Oil Change International & Greenpeace, Forecasting Failure, Mar 2017.
6. Nick Buxton, ‘Defying Dystopia’, Roar Magazine, No 7, 2018.
7. Jeremy Adelman, ‘Why the idea that the world is in terminal decline is so dangerous’, Aeon, 1 Nov 2017.
8. Mike Davis, In Praise of Barbarians, Haymarket Books, 2007, p 259.
9. See the work of Donella Meadows; Timothy Allen et al, ‘Mapping degrees of complexity, complicatedness, and emergent complexity’, Ecological Complexity, 2017.
10. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, Vintage Books 2011, p 394.
11. Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Beacon Press, 2002, p 208.
12. Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘The Intelligence in All Kinds of Life’, On Being, 24 Feb 2016.
13. Wendell Berry writes, ‘People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.’ Cited in David Bollier, Silent Theft, Routledge 2003, p 68.
14. Fernando Coronil, ‘The Future in Question’, Business as Usual, New York University Press, 2011.
