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Anne-Marie Brest's avatar

I can't help but reflect that the word "hope" in French has two translations "espoir" and "esperance" giving the nuances of dream vs. active hope that you touch on, and that the latter translation shares the same root with the word "aspiration", one of Dr. Lertzman's three As - Anxiety, Ambivalence and Aspiration. Furthermore, while you could "perdre espoir" i.e. lose hope, become hopeless, you cannot lose "esperance". So again this is the brilliance of Joanna Macy's progressive narrative of the Great Turning, reclaiming this time as a New Beginning.

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Dr. Renée Lertzman's avatar

Thank you for such a thoughtful and rich essay! There is so much here to unpack. I wanted to share a couple of links on this theme that resonate:

A few years ago, I wrote about blowing up the hope/despair binary for Sierra: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/how-can-we-talk-about-global-warming

And more recently, this New Yorker essay touches on the theme: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-other-kind-of-climate-denialism

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