Everything is not okay and also everything is not totally doomed. And both of those things have to be true at the same time if we’re going to make it.
The loudest conversations happening about the climate crisis rarely suffer from nuance. These most prominent discussions usually ask us to choose one of two options: doom or hope. And neither choice is useful in isolation since we are most definitely kind of doomed, and also there is still a lot to be hopeful about.
In isolation, doom and hope ironically work in the same way; they anesthetize our fears and let us off the hook.
Of the two, doom is by far the more tempting choice in this crappy either/or fallacy because with great power comes great responsibility. If we are powerless to change the climate crisis, then we are also absolved of responsibility. Doom justifies our green-house-gas-emitting actions, our dependence on fossil fuels, our fast-paced and high-convenience lifestyles. If nothing can be done, then the Global North can continue business as usual. We can still eat and travel and shop however, whenever, and wherever we want, enjoying the convenience of single-use plastics, short flights, and fast fashion. Doom also keeps us from questioning the aggressive greenwashing campaigns of major petrochemical companies or their false narrative that an end to fossil fuel production would cause civilization to collapse.
A blurry hope that we will engineer and technology and resiliency our way through this thing also lets us off the hook, but not with the same absolution as doom. Vague hope still keeps us up at night, worried that we might be wrong and struggling with the scope of the wager we’re making. It requires a certain amount of (frequently performative) awareness and surface level interaction with current climate discourse. We share and retweet when necessary—usually after an unfathomable tragedy. We are appropriately appalled when conversation turns toward the climate crisis. But this hope is hollow and weak and only rooted in our fear of a future too monstrous to consider.
Hope like this—vague and performative—never feels good. It’s restless and fickle. Along with guilt and self-consciousness, it pulls us into the climate emergency engagement sporadically. And maybe we delve a little deeper at times, but ultimately, the size and liminality of the crisis gives us the existential creepies, and we again step back or look away out of self-preservation. And retreat is understandable because these thoughts and conversations are difficult and painful to have. The climate crisis was created by the most evil and most successful aspects of colonialism and capitalism like racism, violence, slavery, extractivism, exceptionalism, sexism, profane religiosity, bottom-line worship, greedy and inhumane dedication to efficiency, genocide…just to name a few. The communities most affected by fossil fuel extraction and environmental crises are usually rich in natural resources and therefore have a history of exploitation and poverty. Places and people that were “discovered” and stolen over the last five hundred years, and then subjected to the persistent trauma of capitalists’ demands for constant and infinite growth, no matter what.
So yes, comprehensive conversations about the climate emergency and its root causes asks us to wade in some uncomfortable and murky waters with a side of existential crisis. These conversations require a type of thinking and communicating that is so rare today, it’s almost revolutionary at this point. Genuine, pragmatic, solutions-based conversations require grace, the kind that allows its participants to really step in it every once in a while, to screw up, to ask stupid questions, to not see the (possibly burning) forest for the (possibly salt-water-inundated) trees. These conversations require the type of relationships that only exist within supportive communities. And the hyper-public nature of modern communication is driving the conversations and communities that allow people their curiosity and innate fallibility to extinction. Simultaneously, that same hyper-public communication allows us to give ourselves and others the illusion that we’re engaged with the climate crisis, even if we’re barely skimming the surface of the actual issues. Then we truly can’t see the forest for all the retweeted (re-x’d?) trees.
To have the type of hope we need to see us through the next few decades—a time that will bring about drastic changes to the way we live, for better or for worse—we must hold hope and doom in our brains at the same time. (TW: Pretty depressing statements about environmental collapse ahead; skip to the next paragraph if your boots are especially heavy today.) We must acknowledge that our relationship with fossil fuels and our obsession with development has changed the world irrevocably. We must recognize that there are entire places, and species, and cultures that are gone, wiped out entirely during our lives, ecosystems and communities that existed for hundreds of thousands of years destroyed in a dozen or so decades because of certain human activities. We must accept that even if we go cold-turkey on fossil fuels today, the unimaginable losses of the climate crisis will continue for decades, most certainly for the rest of our lives since the glut of greenhouse gases will need time to cycle through the atmosphere.
The first time I faced the reality of the climate crisis while allowing both hope and doom space in my brain, it really, really hurt. It was one of those epiphanies that cracked me open, and I gained and lost something important at the same time. At first, it seemed like an unfair trade where I’d gained only terror and grief while losing comfort in the present and excitement for the future. I’d spent my entire subconscious life characterizing doom and hope as opposites, separate sides of the same coin, unable to appear together like Superman and Clark Kent. So seeing them exist next to each other at the same time was disorienting. (Like Javert in Les Misérables kind of discomfort.) The seemingly solid ground I’d been standing on cleaved beneath my feet, and for a while, I teetered on the edge. But once I widened my stance, I regained my balance, and the ground felt solid again. However, at this point in the metaphor, I am left straddling an ominous and deep fissure of uncertainty, which also doesn’t feel very good. And since allowing hope and doom to exist simultaneously, that fissure hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s there right now.
I cannot lie and say that I never fall in and get lost in the depths of that uncertainty. I still get the existential creepies while doing this work, but now I can pull myself out of the despair and return to that cracked but still solid ground that lies above. And as long as I’m giving hope and doom the space they need, it’s relatively comfortable ground to stand on. (As comfortable as ground can get when you’re self-aware and facing the possible imminent extinction of your entire species.)
Psychologist and Environmental Communicator Renee Lertzman describes this mental space as ambivalence, which “presents the capacity to simultaneously hold competing, conflicting views” while also having the power to “fracture or divert [our] psychic energies in terms of adequately processing a loss” (108). In other words, we have to accept a level of uncertainty and plurality before we can access or control this “in the middle” mental space. Plural, subjunctive thinking is not easy for our brains that enjoy categorizing everything dualistically and definitely, brains that began recording the world by learning sets of “opposites.” I especially enjoy how Hanna Segal, revolutionary 20th-century child psychologist, thinks about ambivalence. Segal refers to ambivalence as an achievement, a marker of maturity, and “the recognition of reality, which is both gratifying and frustrating.” This achieved ambivalence keeps our thinking in a constant state of flux, which—again—doesn’t always feel good.
Yet it’s so important to push through that discomfort if we want to do meaningful work with the climate crisis. Ecophilosopher Timothy Morton refers to this mental space of being between ideas as “‘may’ mode” and compares it to the subjunctive verb form. In their book Being Ecological, Morton points out that “not being able to be in the middle is a big problem for ecological thinking…It edits out something vital to our experience of ecology, something we can’t actually get rid of:…feelings of the uncanny: feeling weird” (1-2). When we let go of our default all-or-nothing, yes-or-no thinking, we’re left in a weirder, squishier place. It’s more like a something than an all, more like a maybe than a no. And at first this something/maybe space can be awkward—even distressing—but the more time we spend there, the more comfortable we become. Eventually, we might even find relief in the softer edges and more feasible expectations of this space. (There’s a huge difference between “we must save it all” and “we must save something/s.”) Since our avoidance of these uncertain and uncomfortable mental spaces keeps many of us away from the proactive thinking, talking, planning, and community-building that the climate crisis requires of us, we need to push through that comfort sooner rather than later.
Once I pushed and stayed in that uncertain space, I was able to accept the startling reality of living during an extreme climate emergency, and that certain aspects of life as I know it are indeed doomed and—in some cases—already gone. And when I began the process of accepting and grieving that reality, I was shocked by the hope that began to take root. It wasn’t a vague hope that somehow the greedy corporations and tycoons that engineered us into this mess will eventually engineer us out of it. Or the blurry “don’t worry, be happy” hope that helps me sleep at night when my thoughts get too big for my brain. Instead, this hope is sturdy, rooted in reality, and nourished by grief and community. It’s the hope I feel every time I learn about or work with a grassroots environmental justice group fighting the governments, corporations, and individuals profiting the most off of fossil fuels. It’s the hope I have in the beautiful, stubborn, and incisive nature of adolescent and young adult minds, and in the younger generations of policy and decision makers who have a real chance of disrupting the Neoliberal oil cartel steering our politics.
It’s the hope that if we must continue to lose wetlands and oak groves and communities, may we also lose the corporations and practices and systems that doomed everything else with their violent and short-sighted greed.
Until we acknowledge our conflicted relationship with fossil fuels in the current moment, until we understand that the timeline of this emergency will certainly span beyond our lives despite our best efforts, until we accept and grieve what we’ve already lost and face what we’re set to lose, our hope—and our actions—will be an immature thing, without feathers.
