The heating planet isn’t a distant abstraction: it’s a catastrophe unfolding right now, with disastrous consequences we’re only beginning to grasp. Even as eco-apocalyptic discourses and sobering statistics have predicted the end of the world as we know it, they haven’t yet inspired the individual behavioural or social change necessary to stop a species-wide suicide mission.
In response to the bleak and so far ineffective outlook that many label “doomerism,” some have turned to the rhetorical tool of hope to help people feel “unstuck”— and to spur them to actually do something. The journalist and activist Rebecca Solnit, for instance, has flipped the script of despair in her work, opting instead for a language of possibility. Similarly, the evangelical climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe emphasizes hope as a lever for human agency, a way of narrowing the gap between the solutions already at hand and the necessity for further action. This view is echoed by many...
Julie McGonegal is the author of Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation. She writes from Elora, Ontario.
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