Not Too Late Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

Despair is the opposite of complacency, but both can lead to inaction. If you don't believe there's a fire or if you don't believe the fire can be put out, you don't join the firefighters.

The most essential equipment for surviving a sudden upheaval is the neighborhood, civil society, the people who will dig you out of the wreckage or start the soup kitchen with you or help rebuild the town or check on you in the heat wave or the blizzard.

Most victories are partial or compromised, nearly all of them are interim, because the story continues.

But beyond strategy, there is also just the simple, humble, profound task of being authentically alive on this planet in a time of collapse. Here, too, there is action, because there is more life in the taking of agency than in watching it flutter past us.

Despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy; it blocks us from taking agency, which makes it all the more likely that our worst fears will come to pass.

To live with hope in a world that seems determined to race off a cliff: this is the real radical choice.

To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.

Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best, and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it.