It seems the world is coming to realize what Environmental Studies folks have been saying since I first became a Master’s student in that field 34 years ago: that humanity risks careening off the rails into a species-wide, if not planet-wide, smash-up unless it profoundly reorients the way it functions on this planet.
That three-decade time lag — characterized by disbelief by most, and systemic denial and obfuscation by some (especially vested interests like Big Oil) — has given much greater punch to the pessimism of that message, a pessimism that media are recognizing as “existential” for the current generation of young people. Today’s episode of On Point on “The Pessimistic Generation” was all about that. Host Meghna Chakrabarti’s response to a question about how she deals with news about climate change is revealing: “I read less of it.” That’s the response of someone whose job it is to read more than the rest of us. (Wow.) But her interlocutor turns it into the real point here: that we are all vulnerable to PTSD (exactly I’ve been saying about climate trauma) and that it’s a matter of survival to be selective about what we take in.
Given that my field has had 34 years to think about this issue (33 if we date it to Jim Hansen’s Congressional testimony about climate change) — the issue of how to come to grips with an apocalyptic prognosis for humanity — what have we come up with in response?
To answer that, I fall back on Antonio Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” To be able to move forward, we need to build the capacity to face the reality of the situation. Not everyone is in a position to do that, but even those who are will need support for doing that. The optimism arises when we come to see that there is a global movement to overcome the challenges of climate change, which are also the challenges of social injustice (that message has finally sunk in), that we can align with that movement, and that it feels good to do that.
What I’m describing can feel like a religious conversion, but a conversion that happens to be backed, in its essential contours, by contemporary science. This means it has the character of a “revolutionary beauty” (needless to say, a different revolutionary beauty from the one that drove Gramsci; the times have changed and we need no longer be haunted by the limitations of that one). But it is a beauty that requires abandoning some of the comforts and conveniences we may have gotten used to.
Fortunately, the most important of those comforts — the comforts of community, of health and sustenance, and of meaning in life (which happen to coincide with the things Epicurus argued 2300 years ago were essential for human happiness) — are all still available to us. So visions of a good life — a Buen Vivir, or Sumak Kawsay, as articulated by South American indigenous communities — can and should be part of any “willful optimization of the pessimistic intellect.”
In the On Point episode, Doug Abrams, who recently co-authored The Book of Hope with Jane Goodall, describes hope as a survival mechanism that evolved alongside language, problem solving, and prosocial morality, and that requires four things to be effective: realistic goals, realistic pathways, a sense of agency and confidence to realize those goals, and social support for that. That’s where the best Environmental Studies curricula take their students.
And it’s why the youth-based organizations that have mushroomed around the world to articulate the message of climate justice, and who are mobilizing now to bring that to policy makers at next week’s COP 26 conference — organizations like “Youth vs. Apocalypse” (thus my title) and many others — are among the most hopeful developments in today’s political landscape.
They are worth supporting as the COP 26 climate summit begins.
