Hope, Despair, and Climate Action
Plus our upcoming café on the goal of life, a contribution from co-moderator Jasmine Tremblay D’Ettorre, suggested readings and resources, and more.
Introduction
By Adrian Ma
You’ve seen the headlines. We are hurtling towards, or have already arrived at, a climate crisis or emergency or apocalypse for which humanity is largely to blame. The last 10 years have been the hottest years on record. Weather-related events, exacerbated by climate change, have displaced an average of more than 20 million people annually around the world. Over 40% of the world’s population—3.6 billion people—lives in areas “highly susceptible to climate change.” According to a projection from the WHO, “[b]etween 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.” A recent report by the World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050 the crisis will result in “an additional 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in economic losses worldwide.”
Given its scale and its proximity, it’s no surprise that the looming crisis is perceived by many as an existential threat. In the face of the grim news, many have cautioned against succumbing to despair and argued for the importance of retaining hope. But some think hope has its dangers, too—and that fear, even despair, can galvanize the action it supposedly inhibits.
At our Curiosity Café last Tuesday, moderated by philosophy PhD student Jasmine Tremblay D’Ettorre and our very own Zachary Grey, we discussed the powers and the pitfalls of hope and despair in the context of climate action (or inaction). Below, Sophia and I will reconstruct some of the ideas you shared during our sometimes hopeful, sometimes apocalyptic discussion. But first:
Featured Content:
Curiosity Café Recap: Hope, Despair, and Climate Action
Upcoming Events
Community Survey
“Hope, Climate Change, and Friendship” by Jasmine Tremblay D’Ettorre
Arts & Culture: We Have to Talk by Ina Gouveia
Toronto Events
Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: Hope, Despair, and Climate Action
By Sophia Whicher and Adrian Ma
Accepting the reality of the climate crisis means accepting, as our moderators Jasmine and Zach pointed out, what many view to be the biggest existential threat that we collectively face. Either we must collectively partake in efforts to mitigate this crisis, or we will see, as the moderators write, “an increase of famine, heatwaves, flooding, biodiversity loss, mass forced migration, and resource wars” (just look at the stats Adrian gave us in his intro…).
In the first half of our café, we operated with these governing questions: When it comes to the climate crisis, do you feel hope or despair? How do these emotions connect to our motivations for action?
To start us off, our moderators provided us with some helpful definitions: Hope is most commonly defined as a feeling of expectation, desire, intent, or trust that something will occur. Despair is most commonly defined as the absence or loss of hope. Then, Jasmine and Zach took a quick poll with the first question above: when you think about the climate crisis, are you prone to feel hope, or despair? Each of us was then grouped with two other people who shared our tendency towards either hope or despair, and in our small groups, we were tasked with choosing and examining three of the following questions:
Why do you feel hope or despair about the climate crisis?
How do hope and despair either motivate or undermine resilience?
When it comes to the climate crisis, can we hope for some things and despair for others?
Are hope and despair adaptive emotional states? Can they help us adapt to changing circumstances?
Is hoping or despairing about something we care about inevitable, or is it sometimes irrational?
Afterward, each group joined with several members from the opposing camp to consider another set of distinctions. On one side was a distinction between true hope, which is characterized by a sense of control, morale, the imagination of better outcomes, and substantiation by justified probability estimates; and false hope, which is characterized by wishful thinking, complacency, fixation, and unrealistic expectations. On the other side was a distinction between episodic despair, a short-term attitude which is grounded in realistic thinking and the action-oriented desire to avoid loss and harm, and which leaves open the possibility of regaining hope; and fundamental despair, which is long-term and sweeping, and involves the loss of agency, a perception of the future as set in stone, paralysis, and negative emotional effects such as depression or anxiety.
With all that in mind, here are some of the ideas we explored in our small, medium-sized, and large group discussions in relation to the questions and distinctions above:
Hope and despair can coexist in the same person.
We can be hopeful about certain aspects of the response to the climate crisis, such as the private development of new carbon capture technologies, while despairing about other aspects, such as government inaction.
Some experience a kind of cycle between episodic despair and true hope in relation to the same aspect of the climate crisis: when confronted with a discouraging piece of climate news, we feel episodic despair. This despair can motivate us to search for a solution. Then, once we find a possible way forward, we can regain true hope.
Some people’s attitudes are even more precarious, and can swing between hope and despair depending on the latest climate news, or even how the news is framed. Is this something the media, or even social media users, should take into account before disseminating a story?
True hope and episodic despair are the most productive attitudes in the context of climate action, because they manage to evade the horns of complacency and despondency, and are the most responsive to evidence and logic. On the other hand, false hope and episodic despair are maladaptive states because they colour everything with the lens of blind optimism or blind pessimism.
Even if true hope is the way to go, perhaps despair, or emotions that tend in the direction of despair, such as fear or anxiety, can help moderate the excesses of hope.
Although hope is sensitive to probability, it doesn’t require the hoped-for outcome to be more probable than not. In fact, if the outcome is sufficiently probable (say, it has a 90% chance of materializing) then hope would not be needed, or even appropriate. This means there is room for hope even when the chances of success are very slim.
Hope is dangerous when it doesn’t involve a recognition of one’s agency and a motivation for action. Sitting back and just “hoping” things will get better, without recognizing that one has the ability to be part of what makes them better and then acting to do so, is not a productive orientation to take towards the climate crisis if we want to mitigate it or minimize its impacts. Given this, feeling false hope towards the climate crisis might be something we want to avoid.
It seems that emotions like hope and despair, at least in some forms, play an important—if not necessary—role in motivating us to act.
Being presented with scientific facts regarding the climate crisis is sufficient for triggering feelings of hope and despair.
Being presented with such facts is not sufficient for eliciting hope, despair, or any other feeling if one does not already see this issue as important. How can we get more people to see the climate crisis as important?
Climate action often happens from the ground up. The actions and policy changes taking place in communities give people working in climate research/action spaces hope.
After the break, we looked at various types of climate action and discussed whether and to what extent they can be motivated by hope or despair. Jasmine and Zach kicked things off with another helpful taxonomy:
Individual actions. These include consuming eco-friendly diets, reducing, reusing, and recycling, taking low-emissions travel options, and voting.
Collective actions, which can be compliant or disobedient:
Compliant actions include promoting institutional solutions, participating in community initiatives (such as community gardening), supporting NGOs, and participating in legal protests and boycotts.
Disobedient actions can be further divided into civil and uncivil forms of disobedience. Examples of civil disobedience include unlawful protests, sit-ins, and boycotts, which are characterized by features like communication, publicity, non-violence, non-evasion, and decorum. On the other hand, uncivil disobedience, which includes rioting, graffiti-spraying, whistleblowing, and leaking, tends to violate one or more features of civility, being characterized by covertness, evasion, violence, and offensiveness.
Here’s what some of you had to say in the second half:
Because individual actions do not make a tangible difference by themselves, it’s hard to find motivation to do anything as an individual. We run into a Free Rider collective action problem (check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on this).
In order to remain hopeful, I must be able to see or feel that my actions are making an impact. This is an area in which local, grassroots efforts may have the advantage over bigger, top-down approaches to fighting climate change. Participants are better able to see and to track the impact of their contributions on their local communities than on their country or the world as a whole.
Which individuals should we be concerned with organizing and motivating? It isn’t necessary for everyone, or even a majority of people, to get on board with the facts regarding the climate crisis and feel motivated to act. Perhaps we should focus on organizing those who are already on board with the facts and want to do something. Effective organizing will result in policy changes, and implementing these policy changes will compel or incentivize others to follow along.
However, creating lasting, large-scale change, especially political change, can only be achieved with the support of those in the middle. By extension, appealing exclusively to members of either wing, or to true believers, would risk alienating a crucial mass of potential allies and supporters.
Different people are motivated by different affective states: for some, cultivating a sense of despair might lead them into a state of fundamental despair where they are no longer motivated to act. For others, cultivating despair might be the most effective way to motivate them to act. And the same goes for hope: by making the project of mitigating the climate crisis seem possible, presenting stories of hope might motivate some people to get involved.
So, perhaps what matters is not that we choose to cultivate either hope or despair to motivate action, but that we make use of both emotions— and others—to appeal to a broader range of motivational landscapes.
While hope and despair can motivate individual and collective action, so can other things, like a sense of duty or responsibility, and love.
What prompts some people to act most effectively is self-interest. Certain measures, such as incentivizing the purchase of electric vehicles, are already gaining traction, but perhaps we should appeal to this motivation even more when it comes to encouraging climate action. For instance, we could come up with an app where people get “climate points” for sustainable actions for social clout (sidenote: something similar to this already exists! Check out Commons, an app where you can earn rewards for sustainable living!)
Thank you to everyone for coming out and spending your Tuesday evening with us! I (Sophia) don’t know about you, but seeing our little, mutually supportive community grow through our cafés makes me the tiniest bit more hopeful for our collective future. And if this café sparked your interest in climate action, I encourage you to check out the thoughtful reflection from co-moderator Jasmine below, and then scroll down more to our reading and resource recommendations, which include two from some of you!
Upcoming Events
Curiosity Café: Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, tickets below!
About: For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: Every two weeks, we invite members of our community (that includes you, dear reader!) to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about. After our scheduled programming, we encourage attendees to stay and mingle over food and drinks.
We will be hosting our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, July 23rd from 6:00-8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Please get a ticket using the button below the event description. If tickets are sold out, please contact us, either on Instagram @beingnbecomingorg or over email at sophia@beingnbecoming.org, and we will let you know if we are able to accommodate you. (Yes, this is new! We are so excited about our growing community; however, we also want to preserve the amazing quality of our discussions and ensure that everyone present has the opportunity to participate. As a result of this, we are working towards limiting numbers at our cafés. Thank you for working with us through these changes!)
The topic of our next café is, The Goal of Life: Why Do Living Things Do What They Do?
What is a goal? When we think of goals, we typically think of the traditional New Year's ritual. However, goal setting is much more ubiquitous than that. Some philosophers and cognitive scientists say there are goals underlying every one of our actions. From this understanding, even an activity as mundane as drinking water can be a goal. At the other end of the scale, they can be all-encompassing. For example, Aristotle claims, roughly, that the goal of life is to partake in the eternal and divine, so far as beings are able. In this café, we explore what differentiates successful goal setting from unsuccessful. In the second half, we extend the question to all living beings. That is, why do living beings do what they do? Is there a single goal that all living beings strive toward? What do you think? Join our two moderators, Alex Rose and Marybel Menzies, and have your say, at the next café!
Both the “Pay-What-You-Can” and "free" tickets serve as a ticket to our café! We ask that you consider making a donation by purchasing a “Pay-What-You-Can” ticket to help us make our work and growth as an organization possible. If you have accessibility-related concerns, please visit our Eventbrite Page—in the event description you will find some accessibility-related information about the venue and the event.
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
Hope, Climate Change, and Friendship
By Jasmine Tremblay D’Ettorre
When thinking about structural injustice (like climate injustice), it is natural to struggle with hope. This struggle can be directed not only at what we can do as individuals to mitigate a situation beyond our control, but also at political institutions to mobilize efforts against injustice, at popular culture to uplift underrepresented stories, and at news outlets to resist exacerbating misinformation.
When political hope comes under pressure, does it impact our more basic kinds of hope? Hope is a repetitive and ordinary tool for engagement with the world that can slip by unnoticed in our everyday interactions. I would not call my friends if I did not hope that they would pick up, and I would not make plans if I did not hope that I could fulfill them. However, if we consistently feel as though our broader hopes are misplaced or disappointed, maybe it becomes easier to believe that our friends won’t pick up, that making plans is less important, and so on. When any kind of hope is pressured, how can it be strengthened?
The common response to this question is community. I think this is right: we cannot be hopeful by ourselves. One of the places I find my hopes strengthened is in conversation with my friends. Here is an example. My friends and I often ask each other: “If society collapsed because of climate disaster, what would we do?” Usually, this topic devolves into a lighthearted exploration of some escape to nature where we build a self-sustaining and non-hierarchical society, allocate roles based on the skills we see in one another, and envision a seamless flow in our daily activities. This is a silly conversation, but one that we have consistently returned to and assessed in overzealous detail. Once, I reflected to my friend that these conversations felt like an exercise in radical imagination that strengthened my hopes even though the topic was incredibly grim. “Of course,” she said, “that’s the point.”
I think she was right. That is the point. When I feel the pull of despair, I turn to my friends who hold hope for me when prospects are dim. A good friendship is characterized by choice-making. We choose our friends and commit ourselves to mutual care (in part) because of mutual choice. Friendship is also a site of empowerment, support, accountability, and learning. We wish to see friendship reflected in other relationships. We want our lovers to also be our friends, and our families, workplace relationships, and communities to be sites for friendliness. Our best relationships are sites for care-based choice-making, collective imagination, and mutual expectation. If there is anything that gives me hope, it is that the fundamentals of these relationships are the kinds of things that are reflected in the world and can inform our broader political engagements.
Arts & Culture: We Have to Talk by Ina Gouveia
By Heidi Knechtel
For our Hope, Despair, and Climate Action café, I chose We Have To Talk by Brazilian illustrator and designer Ina Gouveia as the image to use on our posters and marketing materials. Rather than highlighting an interpretation of the work, I would like to emphasize the project that it is a part of.
We Have To Talk is part of The Climate Collection, a selection of works by the Artists for Climate initiative highlighting open-license digital art about climate change from around the world. Artists for Climate was organized by TED Countdown in 2021, in collaboration with Fine Acts. The call for submissions “sought awe-inspiring designs that depict a hopeful future around climate change, or have a clear message around the urgency for actionable change.” (ArtistsForClimate.org).
Artists for Climate received 2,222 submissions by 1,432 artists from 95 countries in the course of their initiative, selecting 96 artists to join The Climate Collection under an open license (ArtistsForClimate.org). Logan McClure Davda, Head of Impact at TED, writes this about the initiative:
Communication is one of the key pillars in the fight against climate change. How we articulate the impact of climate can make or break public opinion, and the ripple effect is seen throughout culture, business, education, media, and more. Together with Fine Acts, we’re pleased to be able to provide climate communicators with free resources to illustrate both the global impact of climate change and the solutions that make us hopeful.
Being and Becoming is very grateful to Artists for Climate for making artwork available to activists, grassroots organizations, and nonprofits (like us!), as a tool for raising awareness about climate change. I encourage you to check out the rest of the Climate Collection here, read more about Artists for Climate, TED Countdown, Fine Acts, and learn more about global initiatives for climate action.
Toronto Events
Chris’s Toronto Event Calendar
If you want more opportunities to connect, inquire and mingle with like-minded people, check out Chris’s calendar on Notion. Chris curates this calendar with events happening in Toronto. Events include thought-provoking lectures, group discussions, and workshops.
makeworld’s Calendar of Toronto Events
makeworld’s curated list of recurrent events in Toronto, which include tech meetups, lectures, unconventional comedy shows, and discussion-based events (like ours!).
Readings & Resources
If this café motivated you to get involved in climate action, some of our attendees provided some suggestions for how to get involved. Check out:
Toronto Climate Action Network, a network of over 70 climate action organizations located in and around Toronto. Check out some of their Events and Volunteer Opportunities!
Project Drawdown, a comprehensive resource for climate solutions, including this guide for how to make an impact in your life.
Sophia’s Recommendations:
Intersectional Environmentalist’s Resource Hub, including Leah Thomas’ book, Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People and Planet, an accessible guide to intersectionality, climate justice, and the links between environmentalism, racism, and privilege. This resource hub is incredible: it includes comprehensive educational toolkits (each with action items at the end), a podcast, and a mini doc series.
“So Much About Your Sustainability, My People are Dying” by Ayisha Siddiqa, read at the United Nation’s 2022 conference on climate change, in response to global inaction on the horrific flooding in rural Pakistan. This poem is a heart-wrenching reminder of how deeply intertwined the climate crisis is with colonialism. I really encourage everyone to check this and Siddiqa’s other activism work out.
“Even When Optimism has been Lost, Hope has a Role to Play,” by Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale. This title speaks for itself, except what it doesn’t reveal is that the article specifically discusses hope in relation to the climate crisis—appealing to a distinction reminiscent of the one Jasmine and Zach drew between “false hope” and “true hope” in our last café.
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit. Okay, I haven’t read this one yet—but here’s an excerpt from the back: “Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable.” (Plus, co-moderator Jasmine gave this one to me for my birthday—a testament to the genuineness of her piece above—so it must be good!)
Sustainable Baddie, an online platform founded by my favourite sustainable fashion influencer, Jazmine Brown (@thatcurlytop). This platform is dedicated to making sustainability fun and accessible by providing thoughtful reflections and sustainable fashion and lifestyle recommendations. One of my favourite articles, “Queering our Sustainable Future,” appeals to queer ecology as a tool for both self-acceptance and climate action (did you know there’s a thing called Queer Farming? whaaaat...), and a hopeful reminder of the potential for collective liberation.
Featured Quote
Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.
- Greta Thunberg
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