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Climate Change and the Right to Hope

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2876509

2164-0041

Anna L. Peterson,

Environmental law and policy

most people in the united states genuinely care about the environment, and yet collectively we are still filling landfills with plastic, guzzling gas, supporting factory farms, investing in unsustainable companies, and electing officials beholden to energy lobbies.Why do people so rarely act in ways consistent with their ethical commitments? As an environmental ethicist, I am especially interested in this gap between values and practices. Most people care about nature and about the prospects of future human generations. Most people also know that in order to make these prospects brighter, it is necessary, especially for Westerners, to reduce our collective consumption of resources, to restore ecosystems, and to live differently with nature and with each other. Holding values and knowing what they demand, however, does not seem to provoke the necessary behavioral changes.This gap between values and practices has multiple, complex causes, including economic and political structures, as well as more personal factors. One of the most important reasons people fail to act is that they do not believe their behavior can make a difference. The problem is too big, or the situation is too far gone, for individual changes to matter. This issue takes on new urgency in the face of climate change and the impending ecological and social crises it threatens.Regardless of how much we care and how much we know, we rarely act on our commitments if we do not believe that we can affect the outcome — in short, if we lack hope. Hope is crucial to social change as well as to individual well-being. It is what makes effective action possible and keeps us going in the face of disappointments, obstacles, and opposition. However, philosophers and theologians, along with activists and advocates, rarely think about what makes hope possible or what sustains it. There is no science of hope, no serious attention to its nature or to the shape it takes in different settings, especially not to the particular kind of hope that can make a difference in social change.After the great political disasters of his time, including Nazism and Stalinism, Paul Tillich dropped the language of utopian expectation that he had used his work in the 1930s. In the post-war era, he began to speak of “genuine hope,” which was smaller and more realistic, though no less radical. In 1965, he clarified the distinction in his talk “On ‘Peace on Earth,’ ” published in The Theology of Peace: “utopian expectations have no ground in the present.” Indeed, he argued, such expectations draw us away from the here and now, as we imagine a perfect resolution of our problems. Genuine hope, on the other hand, is based on the already existing presence of a fragment “of that which is hoped for.” Tillich compares genuine hope to a seed, in which the mature plant is in some sense already present.The notion of genuine hope suggests that, in our present lives and communities, we can find seeds or fragments of the alternative world we hope to build. As Tillich wrote in an essay titled “The Right to Hope,” these pieces exist “here and now in every act of love, in every manifestation of truth, in every moment of joy, in every experience of the holy.” They are our best, and only, reason to believe that a different future is possible. To ground hope in the face of climate disaster, we need to identify the evidence, embodied in practical experiences, that humans can live in a more sustainable way. We also need to expand these experiments so that they feed not just private but public hopes and dreams.Every individual and every community will locate hope in different places. While possibly cliché, it is still true that among the most profound sources of hope are children — not just our own but also those we care for or teach. The noninstrumental love and pure joy that children make possible offer a glimpse of what we hope for, at the same time as their vulnerability frightens us. This is true in my own life, although I often experience sharp fear and sadness when I think about the uncertainties of the future. The same is true of experience in special wild places. Every moment of feeling “this is right” seems to be counter balanced by the realization that all that we value is at risk.At best, we will see incremental evidence that our efforts are working. These moments of grace, fleeting and partial, have to be enough to sustain our hope that we can do better. We cannot wait for evidence that our efforts will work, which may arrive too late or not at all. We have to act on the basis of hope, without any certainty that our efforts will come to fruition. The moments of grace, seeds of an alternative future, make possible “the right to hope,” as Tillich put it, “even against hope.”What does the right to hope mean in the face of climate change, perhaps the most pressing humanitarian and environmental disaster of our time? What are the seeds and beginnings that can ground our hope for a more sustainable world? In order to find the “seed-like presence” of an alternative future that can give shape and weight to our hopes, we need to look not for “a beautiful vision to impose from above” but rather for “critical resources to apply from below,” as the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder put it in his book For the Nations. We need to seek, in everyday experiences, relationships, and practices, the resources that give us a right to hope and provide a shape and direction for that hope.In the face of climate change, the most important resource for hope may be the fact that we can still experience ourselves as part of larger natural processes. Special wild places, creatures, and trees continue to enrich our lives, both from afar and close at home. I find hope, for example, in the sandhill cranes who arrive every fall, having made the trip from the upper Midwest to north central Florida. Seeing these remarkable, ancient creatures go about their business in the roadside fields reassures me that at least some ecological processes go on as they should. It also inspires me to work for a world in which their annual rituals will continue.Nature’s processes continue despite the destruction we have wrought, despite losses that cannot be recovered. The natural ecosystems in which we are now embedded are less rich and expansive than those that existed before mass extinctions and other anthropogenic changes. Climate change currently threatens coastal communities, alpine ecosystems, and arctic species, but they are far from the first or the only victims, and they will not be the last. Grief is a natural response, but we may also want to heed Joe Hill’s advice: don’t mourn, organize. Or perhaps, do not merely mourn.We rightly feel sadness and even despair in the face of environmental devastation. However, if we notice only loss, we will have no ground for hope and perhaps no reason to struggle against future destruction. We also have to notice — and take joy in — the ongoing life of what David Abram terms the “more-than-human world.” We experience this world in myriad ways, from solo hikes in the High Sierras to strolls through the neighborhood at night, from glimpses of charismatic whales and elephants in the wild to moments of communion with family pets. All these sensuous experiences, to use Marx’s phrase, remind us that we are part of something much larger than us. They also remind us that not everything is about us, for us, or even very interested in us. This should be not disheartening but liberating. The fact that the world is so much more than us is a form of transcendence that inspires humility and also gives us a reason, even a right, to hope against hope.