For and Against Hope

In a hard essay in this month’s Orion, Derrick Jensen argues forcefully against hope.

But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don’t care.

Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

This sounds to me like the logic of despair…and violence.

Jensen points out that we don’t hope for what matters most to us–breath, food, family, life itself. We act. When we stop hoping, he figures, we’ll start acting.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.

But this ducks the central difficulty, which is the gap between the royal environmental "we" and the populace at large. To pretend that "we" enviros can save the grizzlies, or the salmon, or the loveliness of our current climate, without the backing of the larger populace is absurd. That’s why most effective environmentalists I know–such as Alisdair Coyne and Dave White, of Keep the Sespe Wild–remain adamantly focused on public support as a strategy for environmental preservation.

But worse, Jensen’s bitterness hints at what Marxists used to call "direct action," which in practice often meant violent acts. 

Perhaps–to be fair–Jensen is thinking of people like Julia "Butterfly" Hill, who saved an enormous redwood from being logged by the personal risks she took to preserve it. Let’s hope so. But he didn’t specify what sort of actions he had in mind, and with words like "whatever it takes" one can easily imagine more spectacular and less popular actions.

Infinitely more persuasive on this subject is a poem published last month in Poetry by the Nobel-prize winning Wislawa Szymborska. It’s called "Consolation," and it’s about Charles Darwin, of all people.  Szymborska writes at the start:   

     Darwin.
    They say he read novels to relax,
    But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
    If anything like that turned up,
enraged,
    he flung the book into the fire.

   True or not,

    I’m ready to believe it.

    He’d earned the right to happy endings,

    at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

This is the truth. All of us–even Charles Darwin–need hope. We can no more revoke our need for it than we can revoke our desire to breath, to eat, to love.

Hope, like hyperventilation, can lead to giddiness, but it is as essential for our spirits as oxygen for our bodies.