{"id":77905,"date":"2024-10-15T15:59:54","date_gmt":"2024-10-15T15:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com"},"modified":"2024-10-18T23:18:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-18T23:18:28","slug":"its-time-to-give-up-hope-for-a-better-climate-get-heroic","status":"publish","type":"wpm-article","link":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/its-time-to-give-up-hope-for-a-better-climate-get-heroic","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate &amp; Get Heroic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;<em>All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.&#8221; \u2014 Julian of Norwich<\/em><\/p><p>&#8220;<em>For whom is it well? For whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well.&#8221; \u2014 Igbo funeral song in Chinua Achebe\u2019s \u201cThings Fall Apart\u201d<\/em><\/p><p>In the mid-1940s, American bureaucrat John Collier surveyed the moral and ecological wreckage of the Western world and pronounced upon it bleakly. \u201cOur race,\u201d he wrote in the introduction to his 1947 book, \u201cThe Indians of the Americas,\u201d \u201cwith all its lost values and values not yet lost, is wavering on the verge of self-destruction.\u201d<\/p><div>\n    <iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"noa-web-audio-player\"\n            style=\"border: none\"\n            src=\"https:\/\/embed-player.newsoveraudio.com\/v4?key=n0e13g&#038;id=https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/its-time-to-give-up-hope-for-a-better-climate-get-heroic\/&#038;bgColor=F3F3F3&#038;color=6D6D6D&#038;progressBgColor=F7F7F7&#038;progressBorderColor=6D6D6D&#038;playColor=F3F3F3&#038;titleColor=383D3D&#038;timeColor=6D6D6D&#038;speedColor=6D6D6D&#038;noaLinkColor=6D6D6D&#038;noaLinkHighlightColor=039BE5\"\n            width=\"100%\" height=\"110px\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><p>Coming after two world wars and the Jewish and atomic holocausts, Collier\u2019s was not a unique or probably even unusual appraisal. What was unusual, especially coming from a member of the U.S. civil service, were the causes to which Collier ascribed this racial self-destruction: individualism, industrialism and capitalism \u2014 \u201cthe law of the free market \u2026 considered to be the law of human life \u2026 [even] if it wrought havoc upon societies, heritages, ethical and esthetic values, family and community life, <em>and even the natural resources of earth itself<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><p>Equally unusual, for its time and place, was the solution that Collier proposed. The antidote to the predations of industrial capitalism, he believed, was for non-Indigenous Westerners ultimately to come to understand that they must emulate the Navajo, Hopi and other tribal nations in cultivating \u201cthat passion and reverence for \u2026 the web of life and the earth which the American Indians have tended as a central, sacred fire since before the Stone Age.\u201d<\/p><p>It is worth noting that Collier offered this not as a casual purveyor of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/paradise-lost\/\">noble-savage trope<\/a>, but as an incisive thinker, a writer of remarkable facility and a man of action in a position of power. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s Bureau of Indian Affairs commissioner from 1933 to 1945 and the chief author of the &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/prologue.blogs.archives.gov\/2015\/11\/30\/indian-new-deal\/\">Indian New Deal<\/a>,\u201d he almost single-handedly reversed the U.S. policy of Native American assimilation, put an end to the religious persecution of American Indians, and allowed many tribal nations to return to self-governance.<\/p><p>It was from his complex understanding of cultures in which harmonious relationships with the planet existed that Collier arrived at his core belief: If the Western world could \u201crecapture this power\u201d born of collectivist living within a sacralized nature, \u201cthe earth\u2019s natural resources and web of life would not be irrevocably wasted within the twentieth century, which is the prospect now.\u201d He termed this renewal of reverence for the Earth \u201cthe long hope,\u201d and emphasized, \u201cIt is our only<em> <\/em>long hope.\u201d<\/p><p>At roughly the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, J. R. R. Tolkien was viewing the same slide toward ecological devastation with equal grimness. In his masterworks, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/7332.The_Silmarillion\">The Silmarillion<\/a>\u201d<em> <\/em>and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.tolkienestate.com\/writing\/the-lord-of-the-rings\/\">The Lord of the Rings<\/a>,\u201d Tolkien condemned the industrialist defilement of the planet and the growing human separation from nature. The antagonists of his created world of Middle Earth were, without exception, nature-haters and \u201ctree-killers,\u201d powerful men with minds \u201cof metal and wheels\u201d who \u201c[do] not care for growing things, so far as they serve [them] for&nbsp; the moment.\u201d He joined Collier in grieving a world where, in Collier\u2019s words, \u201cthe core-values of the Industrial Revolution [were] made utterly regnant and its postulates as to human nature \u2026 wholly true.\u201d<\/p><p>Where Tolkien differed was in what he thought we should do about it \u2014 or, more accurately, what he thought could be done. While Collier held out his \u201clong hope\u201d that Westerners might ultimately reject Christian-capitalist individualism and return to the kinds of animistic social beliefs held by Native Americans, Tolkien saw us as called upon to fight a valorous but never-ending and ultimately futile battle against the world-destroyers.<\/p><p>He termed this ongoing battle \u201cthe long defeat\u201d and set the immortal elves of Middle Earth to fighting it through all \u201cages of the world,\u201d bent on forestalling what they could not prevent: the day when the forces of power-lust would indeed be utterly regnant and the original genius of the living world snuffed out.<\/p><p>Some 80 years after Collier and Tolkien laid out their visions, the question of how best to respond to the devastation of the known and semi-known world has become the topic of our time. Within this discussion, hope is in high rotation and might even be seen as the main rhetorical mode of the crisis-response debate. Collier\u2019s long hope for planetary reclamation through Indigenous-modeled spiritual reform appears in a large body of books written by, for example, environmentalist David Suzuki and scientist Leslie Sponsel.<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;The traditional rhetoric of hope, long used in distorted and dishonest ways within the environmental movement, is proving unfit for our current omnicrisis.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/77905\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"The traditional rhetoric of hope, long used in distorted and dishonest ways within the environmental movement, is proving unfit for our current omnicrisis.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>A shorter-term, call-to-action style of hope appears even more often, including in books by primatologist Jane Goodall, activist Rebecca Solnit and political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon. Defeat, in the meantime, makes its customary appearance as the bogeyman, the comminatory \u201cor else\u201d of future days that will result if we let our hope fail; it is otherwise left out of most considered discussions.<\/p><p>It is safe to say that this dispensation isn\u2019t working. Events have, as they say, overtaken us; the End Times are piling on. Yet despite the many thousands of articles, books and media segments giving voice to the self-appointed valedictorians of our time, the populations of the Western and Westernized worlds remain static, overwhelmed and obdurately hopeless.<\/p><p>The traditional rhetoric of hope, long used in distorted and dishonest ways within the environmental movement, is proving unfit for our current omnicrisis, and Collier\u2019s more distant vision,&nbsp;appealing as it is, has no place in an era when the future turns out to have been dying back from the leading edge for decades now.<\/p><p>It\u2019s clear the messaging needs to shift. David Wallace-Wells, in his climate change book, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/41552709-the-uninhabitable-earth\">The Uninhabitable Earth<\/a>,\u201d suggests that messaging has stayed in default trope-of-hope mode because we have no narrative to accommodate disaster on such a scale, but this is not so.<\/p><p>Tolkien\u2019s story of the long defeat could be considered a bespoke oratory instrument for our era. In containing time scales from the cosmological to the organismic, it reflects at scale the deep-time cataclysms expressively upon us.<\/p><p>And in describing human-level battles against a series of diffuse antagonists, Tolkien\u2019s story offers us ways to respond to them: Evoking heroism rather than hope, and courage rather than comfort, are central to this response. So too is involving people in a story instead of hectoring them with information. And, most importantly, we must take inspiration from a colder truth: We may not be able to prevent the end, but if we are willing to fight the long defeat, perhaps we can make a better one.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-failure-of-the-hope-rhetoric\"><strong>Failure Of The Hope Rhetoric<\/strong><\/h2><p>Which of the evidence before us suggests that the rhetoric of hope has failed? Rounding up slightly, all of it. There is, to begin with, the fact that hope rhetoric enables us to soft-pedal the impacts of climate and ecological crises, thereby helping to create an urgency gap of mock-epic proportions between what is happening and what is widely known.<\/p><p>Those whose job it is to see in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/tolkienfans\/comments\/ikqgdn\/how_do_elves_perceive_time\/\">elfspan<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the climate scientists, the historical ecologists \u2014 report of a war that we have come to realize is upon us <em>in medias res<\/em>. It is one in which we have lost most of our ground before we even knew there was a problem, and I believe our only chance of preventing what Wallace-Wells calls the \u201czero earth\u201d scenario of an uninhabitable planet is to fight a desperate rearguard action.<\/p><p>Any faithful rendering of their vision for the near future must perforce be quasi-apocalyptic. The outcomes of a two-degree post-industrialism rise in temperature \u2014 now considered the <em>best<\/em>-case scenario \u2014 include, as Wallace-Wells puts it, \u201cflooded cities, crippling droughts and heat waves, a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons.\u201d And this scene omits the potentially more catastrophic effects of biodiversity loss, which the <a href=\"https:\/\/thebulletin.org\/2016\/04\/biodiversity-loss-an-existential-risk-comparable-to-climate-change\/\">keepers of the Doomsday Clock<\/a> rank as a planetary threat equal to climate change and nuclear war.<\/p><p>In transmitting news of this five-million-alarm fire, the hope-centric environmental authors and science writers who popularize scientific data for the masses employ the core syllogism of magical thinking \u2014 we should, therefore we must; we must, therefore we can; we can, therefore we will \u2014 to issue a raft of ought-is wafflery that would hardly prompt anyone to change out of their bathrobe.&nbsp;<\/p><p>For example, Suzuki wrote in \u201cThe Sacred Balance\u201d: \u201cthere is hope. Each of us has the ability to act powerfully for change; together we can regain that ancient and sustaining harmony, in which human needs and the needs of all our companions on the planet are held in balance with the sacred, self-renewing processes of Earth.\u201d<\/p><p>Hoper-in-chief Goodall, in \u201cThe Book of Hope,\u201d wrote, \u201cIf everyone\u2026starts to think about the consequences of what we do \u2026 if we all start to ask whether [an item\u2019s] production harmed the environment \u2026 well, billions of these ethical choices will move us toward the world we need.\u201d<\/p><p>Here is political scientist Homer-Dixon, in \u201cCommanding Hope\u201d: \u201cwe need to actively create together from our diverse perspectives a shared story of a positive future \u2026 [and] fully mobilize our extraordinary human agency to produce that future.\u201d<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;Tolkien\u2019s story of the long defeat could be considered a bespoke oratory instrument for our era.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/77905\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"Tolkien\u2019s story of the long defeat could be considered a bespoke oratory instrument for our era.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>The primary problem with these lines of reasoning is not their reliance on textbook question-begging: \u201cIf we do everything we need to do to save the world, we can save the world!\u201d It\u2019s not even that the odds of the involved parties taking timely and sufficient action can most charitably be described as not non-zero. It is the willful omission of the fact that even if they did \u2014 <em>all <\/em>of them, right now \u2014 things would continue getting worse, just (perhaps) more slowly.<\/p><p>Here&#8217;s the sorry truth. With\u00a0the global mean temperature of our planet on track to rise by 2.5 degrees Celsius, as many scientists predict,\u00a0 up to six million animal and plant species are <a href=\"https:\/\/w.wienslab.com\/Publications_files\/WiensZelinka_GCB_2024.pdf\">projected to go extinct<\/a>, according to some estimates, due to climate change over the next 50 years.\u00a0<\/p><p>The fact is, a large degree of failure is a <em>fait accompli<\/em>. It\u2019s done. Therefore, any message of hope that depicts more than a fractional victory, at least within the next semi-infinite number of incarnations, is simply a falsehood. The destruction currently being wrought represents the consequences of our actions from the irretrievable past, like a bad-news letter to ourselves left long unsent. As environmental journalist Arno Kopecky writes in his book&nbsp;\u201cThe Environmentalist\u2019s Dilemma\u201d: We are \u201cliving on borrowed time. The worst is yet to come.\u201d<\/p><p>The hopeists\u2019 refusal to admit the backdated nature of our crisis, even though this lies at the heart of our challenge and causes much of our paralyzing despair, reflects a longstanding tradition within environmentalist rhetoric of turning a blind eye to both systems-level causation and the systems-level reality of discrete-seeming consequences.<\/p><p>Since the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20200420-earth-day-2020-how-an-environmental-movement-was-born\">rise<\/a> of the modern-day environmental movement in the 1970s, old-school activists have relied on a kind of Action-Hero Hope, accessorized with a judgy brand of expectations and employed in a precedent-based manner to suggest, \u201cWe stopped <em>that <\/em>clearcutting, therefore we hope [read: expect] that you can stop <em>this <\/em>clearcutting.\u201d \u201cOur generation got DDT banned, therefore we hope and expect that yours can get single-use plastics banned.\u201d \u201cWe largely neutralized the nuclear threat, therefore you should not give up hope that you can reverse the thinning of the ozone layer.\u201d<\/p><p>This pair-and-compare tradition, which omits the inconvenient reality that consumerist capitalism has generated crises of ever-greater scale at an ever-greater pace, has always been essentially dishonest. Still, activists may have considered it the best form of messaging for Western audiences with a nodalized view of history and an aversion to systemic change.<\/p><p>Now that systemic consequences have fully decloaked, though, this pretense has become farcical. More to the point, it has become rhetorically disqualifying. For one, when exhortations to keep our chin up by remembering past victories come with expectations that we will devote our thusly bucked-up selves to saving the world, resentment is bound to arise. And it is indeed arising, in force, especially among youths who have essentially been nominated to do most of the work. This only adds to the inaction that hope is meant to overcome.<\/p><p>Isabel Drury, writing for the newsletter Gen Dread, <a href=\"https:\/\/gendread.substack.com\/p\/please-stop-saying-my-generation\">noted<\/a> that when people from older generations say, \u201cYounger people\u2019s dedication to the climate crisis gives me hope,\u201d what she hears is \u201cYeah, I know we fucked up the planet pretty bad \u2026 but I can\u2019t do anything about it now. It\u2019s your problem. Good luck!\u201d<\/p><p>Adding to the offensiveness of coerced hope is the false equivalency between, say, saving one piece of a rainforest from logging and saving the entire world from climate collapse on multiple fronts. These writers may as well say, \u201cYears ago, I rescued a fly from a windowsill. Now, using the same technique, you can keep the Hindenburg from crashing.\u201d<\/p><p>The unprecedented quality of our current crisis \u2014 different in both degree and kind \u2014 is evident on its face and much commented upon, yet the hope-writers continue to base their arguments on inapplicable references. More than a few, for instance, mention political scientist Erica Chenoweth\u2019s treatise claiming that all you need is 3.5% of the population engaged in a <a href=\"https:\/\/commonslibrary.org\/ted-talk-the-success-of-nonviolent-civil-resistance\/\">civil resistance<\/a> movement for it to succeed. In \u201cThe Environmentalist\u2019s Dilemma,\u201d Kopecky remarks in response: \u201cSo far as I know, none of Chenoweth\u2019s case studies succeeded in overthrowing human voraciousness.\u201d<\/p><p>Why do these established environmental writers hold onto hope rhetoric and resist modifying it even as it becomes clear that the whole-integer hoped-for outcomes that they promise fly in the face not only of future probability but also of current-day reality?<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;We may not be able to prevent the end, but if we are willing to fight the long defeat, perhaps we can make a better one.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/77905\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"We may not be able to prevent the end, but if we are willing to fight the long defeat, perhaps we can make a better one.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>We can only assume that this is a mass instance of streetlight argumentation: Like the person who looks for their keys under the streetlight not because it\u2019s where they dropped them but because it\u2019s where it\u2019s easiest to look, the orators of our day may simply be using the rhetoric of hope because it&#8217;s the only kind they know.&nbsp;<\/p><p>To deflect from the fact that hope is, in Emily Dickinson\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poems\/42889\/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314\">words<\/a>, \u201cthe thing with feathers\u201d and arguably should not be in the galvanizing business at all, the writers use yet another rhetorical fallacy, namely, persuasive definition: beefed-up descriptions of hope\u2019s qualities and powers.<\/p><p>Goodall, for instance, wrote, \u201cPeople tend to think that [hope] is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I\u2019m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement.\u201d<\/p><p>In a 2023 interview with climate journalist Stella Levantesi, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit agrees that hope is more than passive wishful thinking: \u201cHope for me,\u201d she <a href=\"https:\/\/www.desmog.com\/2023\/02\/21\/rebecca-solnit-interview-climate-crisis-activism-hope\/\">declares<\/a>, \u201cis just recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality.\u201d<\/p><p>Those with dictionaries synchronized to a more conventional standard will find the verb \u201cto hope\u201d defined as \u201cto desire with expectation of fulfillment; to wish; want.\u201d In short, it means wishful thinking.&nbsp;<\/p><p>Added to the gerrymandered definitions are inflated tales of hope\u2019s past achievements. For instance, in \u201cThe Book of Hope,\u201d Goodall\u2019s co-author, Douglas Abrams, relates what is meant to be an inspirational anecdote used by Holocaust survivor and psychologist Edith Eger. Eger <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2irzZ5cNZs8?feature=shared\">talks of<\/a> a young prisoner in Auschwitz who keeps herself alive on hope based on the rumor that they will be freed by Christmas. When Christmas arrives and liberation hasn\u2019t come, the girl immediately dies. As a depiction of the triumph of hope over reality, this story is a powerful example of exactly the opposite, but by tendentiously drawing his conclusion from the middle of the story instead of the end, Abrams makes it serve his rhetorical purpose.<\/p><p>A more honest portrayal of hope\u2019s role in such situations comes from former Vietnam War Navy Vice Adm. Jim Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war. <a href=\"https:\/\/hbr.org\/2002\/05\/how-resilience-works\">Asked to characterize<\/a> who failed to make it out of the Vietcong camps alive, he replied: \u201cOh, that\u2019s easy. It was the optimists. They were the ones who said we were going to be out by Christmas. And then they said we\u2019d be out by Easter and then out by Fourth of July and out by Thanksgiving, and then it was Christmas again \u2026 I think they all died of broken hearts.\u201d<\/p><p>More realistic yet is the speculation of naturalist Ben Gadd, who, in a 2007 university <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.ualberta.ca\/~ewn\/MP\/F\/Despoilers.pdf\">lecture<\/a>, leaves hope out of the matter altogether and attributes survival to \u201cthe ability to look the other way.\u201d He notes that this ability helped \u201ceveryone at Auschwitz, prisoners and gas-chamber attendants alike\u201d get through the days, leaving \u201csurprisingly large numbers of both parties still alive\u201d at the end of the war.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-long-hope-an-unaffordable-luxury\"><strong>The \u201cLong Hope\u201d: An Unaffordable Luxury<\/strong><\/h2><p>If the messaging of garden variety hope has an array of problems, Collier\u2019s long hope \u2014 namely, that Western and Westernized populations will solve the problem of ecological destruction by reforming their worldview along an Indigenous model \u2014 introduces a different set of problems. To begin with, a near-infinite amount of time is needed to fulfill this vision, while the current planetary emergencies call for immediate action \u2014 not to say time travel to an earlier point in ecological history. This isn\u2019t stopping a growing number of writers from extolling long-hope solutions.<\/p><p>For instance, Sponsel wrote in his book \u201cSpiritual Ecology\u201d: \u201cThe time is long overdue for the world to listen to the wisdom of Indigenous people and to do many things quite differently from the pathology of the dehumanizing and desacralizing obsessions of Western capitalist materialism, consumerism and greed that even endangers the home planet as a whole.\u201d<\/p><p>Likewise, community organizer Dennis Martinez <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/books\/abs\/traditional-ecological-knowledge\/redefining-sustainability-through-kincentric-ecology-reclaiming-indigenous-lands-knowledge-and-ethics\/C03B18872FA44EE1312B5B212ED64DCC\">extolled<\/a> \u201cthe relevance of traditional Indigenous peoples as an alternative modernity.\u201d Biologist and philosopher Fulvio Mazzocchi, in a 2020 paper published in The Anthropocene Review, <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1177\/2053019619898888?journalCode=anra\">wrote<\/a> about the need for gleaning the \u201cinsights that indigenous knowledge may provide, [and] analyzing the principles which oversee indigenous relationship with nature, like reciprocity and caretaking\u2026[which] move from a profound sense of unity and interconnectedness and put emphasis on the importance of giving back to nature.\u201d And perennial hope-promoter Suzuki wrote: \u201cWe need a new kind of science that approaches the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities; the search for it has already begun.\u201d<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;Hope rhetoric enables us to soft-pedal the impacts of climate and ecological crises, thereby helping to create an urgency gap of mock-epic proportions between what is happening and what is widely known.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/77905\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"Hope rhetoric enables us to soft-pedal the impacts of climate and ecological crises, thereby helping to create an urgency gap of mock-epic proportions between what is happening and what is widely known.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>One is tempted to say, along with the movie version of Tolkien\u2019s Saruman, \u201cWhat time do you think we have?\u201d&nbsp;<\/p><p>As with the imaginings of shorter-hope outcomes, the temporal self-indulgence of these long-hope visions betrays an underlying lack of integrity about the nature, scale and root causes of our crises. Let\u2019s set aside that becoming spiritually enlightened on a deadline is tricky and doing it for transactional reasons contains its own contradictions.<\/p><p>The gravamen of the issue is that the necessary condition for forming collectivist societies centered around animistic beliefs, namely, the overthrow or elsewise-engendered absence of the Christian-industrial-capitalist complex, is no closer to existing now than it was in Collier\u2019s day. In fact, it is much further away. Even Collier saw animism as replacing, not existing within, this complex \u2014 though it is true that, with rather touching naivete, he imagined that we might be propelled to make this shift sheerly out of spiritual starvation.<\/p><p>Presumably, if it were possible for collectivist animism to co-exist with the Western worldview and economic system, it would already be doing so. Or rather, it wouldn\u2019t have stopped doing so in the first place and most of the peoples of the world who are neither Indigenous nor Judeo-Christian would continue expressing their reverence of nature within the religions they already have, rather than feeling the need to adopt Indigenous ones. After all, nearly half of the world\u2019s 8 billion people espouse a religion with more or less animistic belief systems that, as comparative religion scholar Karen Armstrong points out in her book, \u201cSacred Nature,\u201d contain belief systems that sacralize nature at their core: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism.\n          <div class=\"eos-subscribe-push\">\n            \n            <a target=\"https:\/\/shop.noemamag.com\/?utm_source=MiddleCTA&utm_medium=website\" href=\"https:\/\/shop.noemamag.com\/?utm_source=MiddleCTA&utm_medium=website\" data-wpel-link=\"internal\">Read Noema in print.<\/a>\n            \n          <\/div>\n        <\/p><p>Yet the Earth-sacralizing elements of these powerful belief systems have not been able to withstand the twin forces of Judeo-Christianity and techno-industrial capitalism. As historian Lynn White, Jr. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/~gflomenh\/courses\/ENV-NGO-PA395\/articles\/Lynn-White.pdf\">noted<\/a> in his 1967 essay, \u201cThe Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,\u201d the first of these separates us from and putatively raises us above the rest of the living (and non-living) world, while the second exploits this spiritual detachment for individual gain. Forcibly imposed by and steadily exported from the West, these machine-like forces have overwhelmed all others and hollowed out the nature-worshipping elements that might resist it. Nor is it yet done doing so: A 2023 study <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.org\/en-us\/what-we-do\/our-insights\/perspectives\/indigenous-lands-development-risk-solutions-study\/\">showed<\/a> that industrial development threatens more than 60% of the Earth\u2019s Indigenous-held lands, an area almost seven times the size of India.&nbsp;<\/p><p>Until we find a system where, as the 19th-century English judge <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oxfordreference.com\/display\/10.1093\/acref\/9780191826719.001.0001\/q-oro-ed4-00002015\">Lord Bowen might put it<\/a>, the unjust stop stealing the just\u2019s umbrella, the chances of the long hope being realized remain deep in the negative integers.<\/p><p>There is, in fact, an element of cruelty to the long hope\u2019s promise of saving the world through a mass resacralization of nature. A return to a closer relationship with nature is arguably the hope most deeply held in the human heart and the atavistic human brain. Biophilia, the human tendency to connect with the natural world, is a powerful force that arguably comes second only to our need to be social.<\/p><p>The long hope speaks to the sundering of human nature and the human spirit; it whispers to us that we might yet reunite the two. This hope is the reason for Westerners\u2019 envy of Indigenous peoples \u2014 as ironically unjust as that emotion may be in historical terms \u2014 and for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uwosh.edu\/sirt\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/86\/2020\/04\/Cunsolo-and-Ellis-2018.pdf\">grief<\/a> over environmental destruction, an emotion that is also <a href=\"https:\/\/atmos.earth\/ecological-grief-climate-change-mental-health\/\">growing<\/a> more prevalent.<\/p><p>But fulfilling this hope has become more unachievable even as it has become more needed. Economically enforced urbanization has been accelerating in all parts of the world since the start of the Industrial Revolution and continues to do so. By 2050, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.un.org\/development\/desa\/en\/news\/population\/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html\">nearly 70%<\/a> of the human population will live in cities, many of them because they have no choice.<\/p><p>For environmentalists to say that we can save ourselves and the planet by being more in touch with our animal selves seems little more than a taunt by an entitled caste who can forest-bathe on their glamping trips, deer-watch while at their country cottage or spend months in the wild monitoring their latest biology project.<\/p><p>For most of us, even in rich countries, renewing our internal sacred flame would do little more than add a burn wound to the point of amputation. In practical terms, it\u2019s hard to see how this reformation would work even as applied to the apartment building next door, never mind to all 4.4 billion people living in cities today.<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;The long hope speaks to the sundering of human nature and the human spirit; it whispers to us that we might yet reunite the two.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/77905\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"The long hope speaks to the sundering of human nature and the human spirit; it whispers to us that we might yet reunite the two.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>There is a hypocrisy, too, in touting the hope that we will take a less hubristic view of humanity, achieve a greater sense of reverence for the planet, and through this, be spurred to change our unsustainable ways. Even while this vision preaches species humility, the expectations it carries could only be met through godhood outright and the denial of our species\u2019 limitations.<\/p><p>As writers from Wallace-Wells and Bill McKibben to Timothy Morton and Rob Dunn point out, seemingly hardwired species traits, or what Dunn <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/57356060-a-natural-history-of-the-future\">calls<\/a> \u201ca set of lawlike biases,\u201d can hamper our ability to respond effectively to overwhelming prospects such as mass extinction, ecological destruction and climate change. Perhaps the best-known of these tendencies is <a href=\"https:\/\/theecologist.org\/2019\/jan\/02\/climate-justice-and-bystander-effect#:~:text=Many%20factors%20have%20been%20shown,of%20uncertainty%20surrounding%20the%20situation.\">bystander apathy<\/a> in conditions of diffused responsibility, which is at the very core of our multiple global crises.<\/p><p>Kopecky underlines this when he <a href=\"https:\/\/thenarwhal.ca\/opinion-federal-election-2021-voting-climate\/\">writes<\/a>, \u201cI can swear off the internal combustion engine, renounce meat, cover my roof in solar panels, touch no plastic, and plant a hundred trees a day for the rest of my life, and none of it will bring the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide any closer to 350 parts per million, nor ease the world\u2019s biodiversity crisis. Those things will only happen when hundreds of millions of people change their consumption habits.\u201d<\/p><p>And bystander apathy is only one item on a nearly endless list of psychological barriers to action, many of them individually insuperable. Wallace-Wells starts in the As of this list of cognitive biases that make action difficult \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pon.harvard.edu\/tag\/anchoring-effect\/\">anchoring<\/a>, the ambiguity effect, anthropocentric thinking, automation bias \u2014 and moves on to the Bs without even touching on the <a href=\"https:\/\/escholarship.org\/content\/qt74m0k7cp\/qt74m0k7cp_noSplash_d389874952f51c5b6876fe3e658f9b98.pdf\">availability heuristic<\/a>, which leads us to skew our thinking toward the most easily seen and understood events at the expense of ineffable impacts, like ecological and climatic disturbance.&nbsp;<\/p><p>Then there\u2019s normalcy bias, which inhibits us from believing in, and therefore makes us underestimate or fail to plan for, disasters that we\u2019ve never experienced before. Shifting-baseline syndrome means that \u201cthe world as we know it\u201d can become increasingly devastated without us perceiving it to be so.<\/p><p>The phenomenon of \u201cinattentional blindness\u201d keeps us from noticing even the most flagrantly dramatic events when we are focused on something else (for instance, whether we can afford to put food on the table). In typical <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo&amp;t=50s\">experiments<\/a> on selective attention, subjects consistently fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit casually dancing their way past a group of basketball players.&nbsp;<\/p><p>Change blindness is when a person fails to notice a change in their environment after an interruption, like reading a text message while driving. This is compounded by \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/perception.yale.edu\/Brian\/demos\/CB-CBB.html\">change blindness blindness<\/a>\u201d: our refusal to believe that we could possibly have failed to notice something so dramatic.<\/p><p>The list goes on and on and on. Distance bias, similarity bias and \u201ccompassion fade\u201d incline us to disregard the plight of others. Quality-of-life, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2022\/07\/13\/1111300716\/lifestyle-creep-definition\">lifestyle creep<\/a>, prompts most people who can afford it to consume more, not less, and makes us highly resistant to giving up what the Brits call \u201cmod cons\u201d; as McKibben puts it in his book \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/billmckibben.com\/end-of-nature.html\">The End of Nature<\/a>,\u201d \u201cA voluntary simplification of lifestyles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably beyond our desires.\u201d<\/p><p>These are just a few of the perceptual distortions that our human-species brains tend to create in the face of threats outside the ones we evolved to cope with. They disarm us for many of the actions that hopers exhort us to take. Do the hope-promoting environmentalist writers <em>really <\/em>believe that we, as humans, are members of the animal kingdom and part of the living world? Or are they, in fact, according us some special status as a species, the same anthropocentric belief that got us into this trouble to start with in the first place?<\/p><p>Nor is the hope for effective government policies much more realistic. Governments, too, are bound by laws, and in this <a href=\"https:\/\/sketchplanations.com\/chickens-and-pigs\">discussion of ham and eggs,<\/a> they are the pigs, committed to the project until their deaths, and the rest of us merely chickens. As Homer-Dixon notes, governments are caught between the horns of the \u201cenough vs. feasible\u201d dilemma: actions they might take that would be sufficient to avert catastrophe are unfeasible, and actions that are feasible for them to take are insufficient.<\/p><p>And since democratic governments, by definition, operate on short-term election cycles, any government with the courage to enact long-term pro-environment policies is likely to accomplish little beyond hastening its own political demise. In many instances, an environmentally courageous government simply results in the subsequent <a href=\"https:\/\/www.americanprogress.org\/article\/the-nexus-between-green-backlash-and-democratic-backsliding-in-europe\/\">election<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/international\/2023\/10\/11\/the-global-backlash-against-climate-policies-has-begun?utm_medium=cpc.adword.pd&amp;utm_source=google&amp;ppccampaignID=18798097116&amp;ppcadID=&amp;utm_campaign=a.22brand_pmax&amp;utm_content=conversion.direct-response.anonymous&amp;gad_source=1&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQjwsJO4BhDoARIsADDv4vBJaTINER50a82Jk1-eWS1DHKrc1n3dUbwIzVPDrrfVaAFK8GenOyAaAg3zEALw_wcB&amp;gclsrc=aw.ds\">anti-environment<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.boell.de\/en\/2024\/04\/29\/anti-environmental-backlash\">autocrats<\/a>.<\/p><p>Despite this multitude of problems both logical and logistical, the rhetoric of hope remains not only in play but a dominant oratory pattern that\u2019s sheltered by the assumption, as unchallenged as it is unexamined, that, as Goodall states: \u201cWithout hope, all is lost.\u201d<\/p><p>But is it? Or does this claim effectively retcon human history, which is full of battles fought sans hope? Many even among the living will speak of reasons for going into the trenches with no thought of hope \u2014 unable, in fact, to afford such an emotion. Most go because they must. Others talk of honor and duty, of love of family and country, of allegiance to a higher cause, an urge to test their mettle, or simply a desire for the world as they know it to continue. The argument that we need hope to go on does an injustice to the sacrifices of those who have gone on regardless of it, and it gives short shrift to all we can be.<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      \u201c&#8217;Without hope, all is lost.&#8217; But is it? Or does this claim effectively retcon human history, which is full of battles fought sans hope?&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/77905\"\n        data-a2a-title='\u201c'Without hope, all is lost.' But is it? Or does this claim effectively retcon human history, which is full of battles fought sans hope?\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>What little science exists on the subject suggests that it\u2019s tricky to study causal relationships between hope and action in climate change. For instance, psychologist <a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/36502586\/\">Maria Ojala\u2019s 2023 research review<\/a> of the role of hope in the climate-change era found that differing definitions of hope led to contradictory or inconclusive results.&nbsp;A few studies she looked at showed that constructive hope had a positive relationship with engagement, but hope based on climate denial was negatively related to engagement with climate change.<\/p><p>In the field, there seems to be every sign that this is the case. By conflicting with increasingly publicized and incontrovertible evidence, the claim that there is still hope and still time appears to push some people further into denial and others into a higher level of cognitive dissonance \u2014 both psychological states that come with immense emotional and energetic costs and add to our general state of paralysis.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-greater-wisdom-of-the-long-defeat\"><strong>The Greater Wisdom Of \u201cThe Long Defeat\u201d<\/strong><\/h2><p>In fairness, no one has succeeded in motivating the inert masses, including the so-called \u201calarmists\u201d and \u201cdoomers.\u201d As Kopecky notes, neither scaring people nor not scaring them is working \u2014 if by \u201cworking,\u201d we mean to say giving them a way to cope psychologically with the overwhelming nighness of it all and helping them break out of the resulting paralysis.<\/p><p>For any mode of argument, it\u2019s a heavy lift. Wallace-Wells observed that for a climate-change catastrophe that is already costing roughly the equivalent of \u201can annual Holocaust\u201d in human lives and that stands, in the two-degree-rise scenario, to potentially kill 25 Holocausts\u2019 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/energy-and-environment\/2019\/2\/22\/18188562\/climate-change-david-wallace-wells-the-uninhabitable-earth\">worth of people<\/a> by the end of the century, from air pollution alone, \u201cThere is simply no analogy to draw on, outside of mythology and theology.\u201d<\/p><p>So why not go to mythology? Are we saving the heroic storylines for something else? Tolkien\u2019s long defeat is at hand, forged over 60 years and a miracle of aptness for our times. Whether the rhetoricians\u2019 reluctance to take up this tool stems from the intellectual hypoxia of the academic left or some sort of interdisciplinary <a href=\"https:\/\/allyouneedisbiology.wordpress.com\/2018\/12\/09\/crown-shyness-trees\/\">crown shyness<\/a>, we can\u2019t afford to overlook Tolkien\u2019s gift for much longer.<\/p><p>For all the reasons that hope rhetoric fails to meet the occasion, the long defeat succeeds. It is uniquely applicable to our current battle, with its multiple timelines, because Tolkien\u2019s elves are immortal and thus can view history on both ecological and evolutionary time scales. This allows them to understand even the great victory in the War of the Ring as merely a temporary stay in the long defeat.&nbsp;<\/p><p>Among other merits, this <em>truly<\/em> long view has the potential to provide immediate psychological relief. Conceiving of history as serial rather than episodic re-amortizes time \u2014 stretching out the past to take the weight off our present \u2014 and makes it incremental enough that the future seems almost manageable.<\/p><p>In this conception, it should be said, Tolkien was merely accurate, not prescient. Those keeping an eye on the overall trajectory of the planet, so long as they were not egoistically invested in presenting individual environmental successes as meaningful systemic victories, would have arrived at the long defeat as a simple description of reality.<\/p><p>In fact, quite a few people already have: Tolkien has plenty of company in depicting history as a downward curve. Christians date our slide from the Fall of Man, many historians from the rise of Christianity. Author Ronald Wright speaks of the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/thetyee.ca\/Analysis\/2019\/09\/20\/Ronald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap\/\">progress traps<\/a>\u201d in which technological innovation permits a civilization to grow to the point of needing more innovation, in an upward-spiraling game of catch-up that continues until civilization collapses.<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;Why not go to mythology? Are we saving the heroic storylines for something else?&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/77905\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"Why not go to mythology? Are we saving the heroic storylines for something else?\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>Groundbreaking biologist E.O. Wilson goes even further back, to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2019\/04\/14\/e-o-wilson-on-human-nature\/\">what he calls<\/a> evolutionary autocatalysis: a self-caused acceleration of changes, each change adding to existing ones to increase the rate at which new changes are created, in a kind of evolution-compounding effect.<\/p><p>For humans, autocatalysis played a definitional role in our species\u2019 identity and our alienated status. We began living on the ground and walking upright, which freed up our hands so that we could create and use tools. This, together with our sociability, prompted us to hunt collectively, enabling us to successfully hunt prey larger than ourselves. Soon, we were the dominant predator of the plains and in our uneasy position of suspension over the rest of the world, largely let off the leash but still dependent on nature\u2019s larder. Continued autocatalysis solidified our alienation from the rest of nature; subsequent developments such as civilization, the advent of agriculture, industrial capitalism and Judeo-Christianity, added multiple reinforcements.<\/p><p>These variations on humanity\u2019s fallen status tell much the same story as Tolkien\u2019s long defeat, with one crucial difference: They aren\u2019t stories. Or rather, Judeo-Christianity is, and one of the greatest \u2014 but it belongs to the other side, the species-exceptionalist version of humanity that has underwritten the desecration of the natural world.<\/p><p>Yet story \u2014 one of our original and most critical survival tools \u2014&nbsp;is what we need now. The human brain evolved to be <a href=\"https:\/\/neuroleadership.com\/your-brain-at-work\/the-neuroscience-of-storytelling\/\">captured by<\/a> and retain stories specifically to let knowledge (\u201clions over that hill\u201d) shape action (\u201clet\u2019s take a different route\u201d). Our primeval species\u2019 response to story may alone be capable of short-circuiting the relatively newer evolutionary traits that hold us in paralysis.&nbsp;<\/p><p>It was largely the narrative and vividly imagined imagery in Wallace-Wells\u2019s \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth\u201d that shocked the public into awareness of the disaster looming. To combat story with data and lecturing, or even epic with anecdote, can only leave the world\u2019s populations frozen and leaderless and lead us all to a very short defeat.<\/p><p>Envisaging ourselves within the story of the long defeat restores poetry and power to our story. It shows us that any acts of personal sacrifice and heroism are part of our journey. Used well, this rhetoric of the long defeat could encourage people to engage in battles to save species and habitats and do what they can to slow climate change.<\/p><p>It can also remind us that we have many ways of responding to the prospect of defeat and to the reality of it, even in the absence of hope. Between the poles of the species arrogation that has caused our catastrophe and the species shame now arising in response to it, lies our genuine species greatness, with things to be found there that are neither hope nor despair: courage, valor, humor and love; a capacity for self-sacrifice and hardihood; camaraderie and a deepening of self; transformation and, in some cases, faith. Instead of waiting on hope to trigger a miraculous sea change, we can use the story of the long defeat to move on the tide of our strengths.<\/p><p>There is, too, consolation in the thought that we are part of a continuum of defeat \u2014 in good company, rather than isolated in history and facing a chunk of time that contains an impossible task and demands an unachievable victory. The long defeat shows that it has always been thus, that living with the outcomes of the past is nothing new and our predicament not unique.<\/p><p>We are not alone in our inadequacy, nor the first to lose before we begin, though we may well be the last. As one leader in the War of the Ring says to a disheartened and frightened companion, all who live to see such times wish they hadn\u2019t, but \u201cthat is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.\u201d<\/p><p>And in this story, defeat comes with important qualifiers. First, it is the <em>long <\/em>defeat, which reminds us that although the case may be terminal, it is not yet palliative. There is hope \u2014 just a different hope, for small victories and courageous battles. Secondly, we are summoned to \u201c<em>fight <\/em>the long defeat,\u201d not lie down and let it roll over us.<\/p><p>We need that call to heroism, which is sorely missing from the rhetoric of hope. Who wants to fight the dark forces, even in minor ways, without the possibility of recognition and perhaps even glory? Who wants to make sacrifices knowing that these are taken for granted?<\/p><!-- Quote Block Template -->\n\n<figure class=\"quote\">\n\n  <blockquote class=\"quote__container\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__text\">\n      &#8220;Instead of waiting on hope to trigger a miraculous sea change, we can use the story of the long defeat to move on the tide of our strengths.&#8221;    <\/div>\n\n    \n    <div class=\"quote__social-media\">\n      <div\n        class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_35 a2a_default_style\"\n        data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wpm-article\/77905\"\n        data-a2a-title='\"Instead of waiting on hope to trigger a miraculous sea change, we can use the story of the long defeat to move on the tide of our strengths.\"'\n      >\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\"><\/a>\n        <a class=\"a2a_button_email\"><\/a>\n      <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  <\/blockquote>\n<\/figure><p>Tolkien\u2019s King Th\u00e9oden, vastly outnumbered and facing almost certain annihilation at the Battle of Helm\u2019s Deep, models the mindset of the long defeat when he says, \u201cThe end will not be long. But I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. I shall ride forth \u2026 Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song \u2014 if any be left to sing of us hereafter.\u201d<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-a-call-to-the-storytellers\"><strong>A Call To The Storytellers<\/strong><\/h2><p>It is odd, on reflection, to see so many writers and thinkers argue that accepting the end will inculcate fatalistic inaction when this is rarely our human experience. When a loved one learns that their diagnosis is terminal, we don\u2019t walk away or sit around in a paralysis of inaction and escapism.<\/p><p>In fact, counselors, clergy and medical professionals tend to observe that facing the end calls up the best of humanity. People confronting their death often \u201cfind their courage,\u201d as Tolkien writes of one battle-shy character. They make meaning of their end and access strength they didn\u2019t know they had. The people who love them can catch their first glimpses of grace.<\/p><p>The human capacity for connection, love and compassion \u2014 part of our species advantage that has allowed us to dominate the planet \u2014 can be harnessed for positive ends by a mutual acknowledgment that we are fighting our last battles. This allows the grief and fear that many feel to be salved by the compensations of wisdom and maturity.<\/p><p>Paradoxically, accepting that we face certain defeat would also be the first step toward the spiritual and ontological reformation needed to fulfill Collier\u2019s long hope. It speaks of species humility, a key element of Indigenous perceptions of the world. Where hopers such as Goodall continue to rely on the supposedly \u201cindomitable human spirit,\u201d accepting that we might lose this fight and even be extinguished acknowledges that we are, in fact, eminently domitable. We may never fully reintegrate with the rest of nature (unless we are forced to), but accepting the limitations of our species-hood begins to lower the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Great_chain_of_being\">Great Chain of Being<\/a>, until we may come within touching distance of the web of life.<\/p><p>It has not gone unnoticed that the messaging of the climate and biodiversity crises is so far failing utterly. Those who collect and pass on the data seem bewildered by the fact. In May, when The Guardian <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/ng-interactive\/2024\/may\/08\/hopeless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in-despair\">asked 380 top climate scientists<\/a> how they felt about the future, the responses were of depression layered with confusion.<\/p><p>\u201cI find it infuriating, distressing, overwhelming,\u201d said one. Replied another, \u201cThe world\u2019s response to date is reprehensible \u2014&nbsp;we live in an age of fools.\u201d A third described the most recent IPPC report&#8217;s writers as being \u201cat the end of their rope.\u201d<\/p><p>We should not be surprised that the story of the state of the world and our role in it is being so ineptly told. The activists and academics who have served as the scientists\u2019 main scribes insist on clinging to a message of hope that is increasingly a message of dishonesty and cowardice. Unable to understand the difference between what inspires people and what disheartens them, they are unsuited to tell the story of even the best of times; it is certainly far beyond them to forge a rhetoric for these urgent ones.<\/p><p class=\"add-symbol\">If they continue to refuse to grasp the nettle of truth, we will need to turn, and soon, to storytellers who can. We need to be listening to those with the courage to treat in reality, those who understand that our task now is to delay the end by fighting these last battles of the long defeat against the earth-and-sky destroyers. In that delay, we may make such an end as may redeem, even if it cannot save, the human species.<\/p><p class=\"remove-symbol\"><strong><em>Corrections: <\/em><\/strong><em>On Oct. 18, 2024, this essay was edited to make clear that the estimated loss of 25 Holocausts&#8217; worth of people is a potential possibility that could occur by the end of the century, rather than annually,\u00a0and solely due to air pollution. Additionally, the essay was edited to make clear that the possible loss of up to 6 million plant and animal species is a finding from a study that looked at a scenario where there was a 2.5-degree Celsius increase in the global annual mean temperature over roughly 50 years, not the immediate halting of CO2 emissions<\/em>.<\/p>\n          <div class=\"eos-subscribe-push\">\n          \n            <a target=\"https:\/\/shop.noemamag.com\/?utm_source=BottomCTA&utm_medium=website\" href=\"https:\/\/shop.noemamag.com\/?utm_source=BottomCTA&utm_medium=website\" data-wpel-link=\"internal\">Enjoy the read? Subscribe to get the best of Noema.<\/a>\n            \n          <\/div>\n        ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":6297,"featured_media":77910,"template":"","wpm-article-type":[3],"wpm-article-topic":[22,19,39,23],"wpm-article-tag":[],"class_list":["post-77905","wpm-article","type-wpm-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","wpm-article-type-essay","wpm-article-topic-climate-crisis","wpm-article-topic-future-of-democracy","wpm-article-topic-geopolitics-globalization","wpm-article-topic-philosophy-culture"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.0 (Yoast SEO v25.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>It&#039;s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate &amp; Get Heroic - NOEMA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For humanity\u2019s fight against climate change to gain real momentum, we need to find the selfless courage that comes when our time is inevitably nigh.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/its-time-to-give-up-hope-for-a-better-climate-get-heroic\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"It&#039;s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate &amp; 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