Reflections on Issue Fifteen

Bedfellows of Hope

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Thank you to everyone who had a chance to read Issue Fifteen over the past week. For those who have yet to read it, the reflections from other readers below may be a good starting point, or you can read “Bedfellows of Hope” first.

The Understory reflections between issues are intended to share thoughtful comments from subscribers that expand upon and challenge parts of the previous issue. I am immensely grateful for the comments added this week, and hope they provide further value in thinking about the significance of hope in the struggle for a healthier living planet.

As Shared by Renée Lertzman

“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 in Sierra, “How Can We Talk About Global Warming?” (2017). And more recently this essay in The New Yorker, “The Other Kind of Climate Denialism” (2019), touches on the theme.”

Peeling back the layers of Renée’s research and writing about the climate emergency over the past couple of months continues to help me understand the psychological complexities at play in how we acknowledge, ignore, deny, and respond. As one article notes, “We are in psychological terrain, whether we like it or not.” The two cited articles mention the following terrain of emotions in grappling with climate change: love, overwhelm, belonging, fear, hope, hopelessness, creativity, despair, frustration, aliveness, shame, happiness, anxiety, bravery, guilt, fatalism, and paralysis. While that reads like a laundry list of human emotions and therefore difficult to comprehend, this is why climate change is such a complex issue for the human psyche. To cultivate any one of those emotions is challenging. To deal with many of them simultaneously can be debilitating.

I have come to realize that we must deal with them simultaneously. Not just because our current situation requires it, but also because many of these emotions are relational to one another as described in both Issues 14 & 15. For many of us, these emotions have formed our own rubber band ball, intertwined in what feels like infinite layers. I began to think of this ball as a metaphor for our myriad emotions that embrace the circumference of the earth.

Instead of trying to removing the bands one by one to arrive at the centre, we need to hold on to the ball (and the earth) in its entirety. As Renée says, it is a “classic both-and situation...it helps us move through the harder stuff much faster and more readily than if we deny or keep at bay the scarier feelings that can come up.” As she suggests, the next time someone frames climate change with a binary choice, embrace the “yes-and.” By doing so, we can offer “fierce compassion and bravery” to others. Not only will this avoid the climate change movement getting stalled out between the two poles of despair and hope, but it will also be a more authentic and human way to build relationships that ignite the motivation for action within each of us. Thank you, Renée. 

See Renée’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers

As Shared by Peter Tavernise

“David Orr has said:

‘Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. You can't go to despair, that’s a sin. And ‘optimism’? You just don't know enough. Hope is the sweet spot. If you're hopeful, you have got to be active. You've got to be DOING stuff.’”

I smiled when reading this turn of phrase by David Orr after wrestling with the dilution of hope when used as a verb. We need hope to be a noun, and by so doing, it implies action. As Bill McKibben mentioned in the previously cited New Yorker article, “the only cure for climate agita is activism.” The same sentiment is echoed in the writings of Hannah Arendt who spent decades considering the philosophical implications of what transpired during World War II. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt distinguished between two possible lives: vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and vita activa (active life). She describes vita activa as consisting of three fundamental categories that make us human: work, labour, and action, with action being the highest realization of the active life:

“To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, “to begin,” “to lead,” and eventually “to rule,” indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere).” 

According to Carrie Rogers in “Being and Becoming,” a crucial element of action for Arendt is the fact that the end is unknown at the time of acting. In action, the end is “not pursued but lies in the activity itself.” Action is a process of beginning and embracing the unknown.

If action is one of two essential elements that comprises hope, and action is the critical element to help us move through our emotions around climate change, hope is essential to how we mitigate a warming planet. 

“I recall having a specific academic difference of opinion with another earnest Zen practitioner fifteen years ago, when he asked ‘Where in all of what Buddha taught is our instruction to hope?’ He felt it was anathema to what Buddha instructed about the pervasive nature and root of suffering. In his view of Buddha's teaching, there was no room nor role nor reason for hope. However, Roshi Joan Halifax has written and spoke frequently about what she calls ‘Wise Hope,’ arising out of her friendship with Rebecca Solnit and their mutual conversations and writing. From just one example:

‘As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what will actually happen. Not getting what we hoped for is usually experienced as some kind of misfortune. Someone who is hopeful in this way has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. This ordinary hope is a subtle expression of fear and a form of suffering.

Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of suffering—both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It’s when we realize we don’t know what will happen that this kind of hope comes alive; in that spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act…

The Czech statesman Václav Havel said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.’

Again I am left with the Not Knowing, and the avenue of compassionate action arising from bearing witness and not knowing—with wise hope.”

To better understand the context for Peter’s comment, as well as the interrelationship being made between knowing and hope, I went to the Three Tenets of Buddhism as explained by Wendy Egyoku Nakao Roshi in “Hold to the Center!” (2017). Each Tenet—Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action— “reflects the others; they are seamlessly embedded in each other, flowing as center, circumstance, and action in an ever-unfolding and endlessly varied circle of life.”

While not intended as linear, the Three Tenets are relational. So the ability to cultivate Not-Knowing prepares you to Take Action without the desire to predict such actions or the results from them. “The underlying intention is that the action that arises be a caring action, which serves everyone and everything, including yourself, in the whole situation.” This is the “wise hope” that Joan Halifax and Peter are referring to.

Perhaps the contrast Halifax draws between “ordinary hope” and “wise hope” is whether the person has cultivated all Three Tenets of Buddhism. With the addition of Arendt’s framing of action as a beginning and embrace of the unknown, we come back to the courage to act (despite not knowing what the outcome will be) as hope. 

See Peter’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his

As Shared by Anne-Marie Brest

“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.”

This is such a beautiful addition to the conversation from Anne-Marie, and a semantic framing that helps distinguish in a single word the different types of hope we have been discussing. ‘Esperance’ is that inextinguishable spark within us, as Charles Eisenstein said “ready to be fanned into flames.” As Renée Lertzman wrote, 

“Rather than trying to motivate and inspire people to act, which sets us up to push against a tide and which frames our work as persuasion, I take as a starting point that people already care a lot but may be caught up in complicated dilemmas or ‘tangles’ that make action hard to take.”

Instead of viewing inaction as a lack of hope within someone, Lertzman helps us to understand that it is the complexity of emotional tangles that can sometimes obscure their hope. It is there. We just need to cultivate it within ourselves and others.

See Anne-Marie’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers

I hope this week between issues provides the space for further discovery and reflection. Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. See you next Saturday with Issue Sixteen.

Adam

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Why I Write The Understory

We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The scale of the issue demands not only continuous focus but also the courage to take bold action. I've found that a persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause. 

The Understory is my way of organizing the natural and human-made curiosities that capture my attention. Within the words, research, and actions of others lies the inspiration for personal and organizational journeys. I hope that my work here will help to inform not just my persistent consciousness, but yours as well.