Hope Matters. Elin Kelsey
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People trust each other less in the US today than forty years ago. Indeed, the US ranked the lowest in the most recent barometer reading, positioning it as the country with the least-trusting informed public. Decline in trust between Americans is coupled with a reduction in trust in their government, which, according to the Pew Research Center, is at historically low levels.18 Distrust is growing fastest among younger Americans.
Not surprisingly, trust is actively undermined by fake news and gaslighting. Gaslighting is when someone manipulates the facts so often, it leaves you second-guessing your reality. It causes you to question your own judgment. If gaslighting had a mantra, it would be “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” This is especially true when the person gaslighting is in a powerful position. I imagine you can think of a few prominent politicians that fit that description. The more a gaslighter fuels our mistrust of others, the more cynical we become of other people’s motives, and that spirals into pessimism, distrust, and disappointment more generally.
While intelligent skepticism is warranted—after all, one is wise to distrust untrustworthy sources—the double whammy of rising rates of kneejerk cynicism about human nature, combined with apocalyptic forecasts about the future of the planet, leaves many with the helpless feeling that the world is too broken to fix. We may become so overloaded with worries that we disconnect from the suffering of others or lose motivation to lend support, a condition psychologists call compassion fatigue. We detach, withdraw, and disengage. Fear and despair mute our ability to find creative solutions. They cause us to self-isolate. Hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Are you feeling eco-anxiety?
If you picked up this book because you are personally experiencing eco-anxiety, or climate grief, or deep worry, I hope this chapter reminds you that you aren’t alone in these feelings. You aren’t crazy. Lots of people feel the same way, and psychologists confirm that it makes sense. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), fear is a reasonable, even healthy response to the enormity and urgency of the planetary crisis.
Dr. Courtney Howard speaks on behalf of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment when she says, “The intersection between the climate emergency and mental and physical health will become one of the world’s major issues.” The CMHA labels the climate emergency as a mental-health emergency. More than a thousand psychologists signed an open letter endorsed by the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK demanding immediate and effective action on climate change in light of the enormous mental-health impact of the climate crisis.19 Tackling climate anxiety and tackling climate change are inextricably linked.
Your feelings are real. But the point I want to keep driving home is that they are also inflamed by a flow of information in which positive developments are almost entirely missing.
You feel deeply about the environmental crisis because you have a deep love for this magnificent planet. That love is a strong and wonderful quality, and it’s empowering to find a way to excavate it from beneath all your fear and anger and grief and disappointment. When you look through the research at what triggers and sustains personal environmental behaviors, it’s things like compassion rather than shaming. It’s showing empathy when someone does something that they know they shouldn’t do—reminding them that we’re all human and mistakes are just a normal part of life. It’s finding meaningful purpose in the actions. It’s getting support from important relationships.
All of us experience a vast range of emotions, and it is the interplay of these feelings that enables us to move toward the world as we would wish it to be. Acceptance of what is is not the same as fatalism about what comes next. We need to be wary of seeing climate demise as a foregone conclusion. A 2018 study of fifty thousand people from forty-eight countries, reported in the journal Climate Policy, found that people who believe climate change is unstoppable were less likely to engage in personal behaviors or to support policies to address climate change.20 Conversely, according to a 2014 study by leading climate change communication researchers, when someone understands that climate change is a truly dire problem and they have a sense of the effectiveness and feasibility of the ways people are collectively acting to solve it, then they are more likely to take action themselves. Recognizing both the threat and the potential solvability of the climate crisis is paramount to mobilizing action.21
Fatalistic forecasts are also being co-opted and used for ulterior motives. Climate doom, according to Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, is the new climate war—and it’s just as dangerous as the old one, which focused on the denial of the science. If people aren’t causing climate change, as the deniers purport, then there is no reason to limit the use of fossil fuels or make the societal-level transformations necessary to achieve a zero-carbon economy. Likewise, if it’s already too late to make change or we’re past the point of no return, as those expressing climate doom say, then there’s no point to policy reform or for the largest emitters to change their ways. In a 2019 interview for the Guardian, Mann says that propagating frightening environmental narratives “leads people down a path of despair and hopelessness and finally inaction, which actually leads us to the same place as outright climate-change denialism.”22
Dire predictions and apocalyptic claims from the past are also being used to undermine the need for urgent climate action now. President Trump did just that when he dismissed environmental activists as fearmongering “prophets of doom” in his 2020 speech to the World Economic Forum: “They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s,” he said. “These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform, and control every aspect of our lives. We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty.”23 It’s a clear example of how alarmist rhetoric can backfire and give ammunition to deniers.
WHEN YOU CHOOSE to reject doom and gloom you are caring for your own well-being—and standing up for badly needed changes. As we’ll see in the next chapter, hope is not complacent. It is a powerful political act.
3
HOPE IS CONTAGIOUS
My daughter, Esmé, was my last good egg.To my utter surprise, I went into menopause immediately following her birth.
On Midway Atoll Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, is over sixty years old. She continues to lay one good egg, each year, from a nest amid the plastic of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Against all odds, good things come from good eggs.
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