{"id":8385,"date":"2015-09-11T12:45:28","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T17:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=8385"},"modified":"2015-09-11T12:47:02","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T17:47:02","slug":"not-just-waiting-for-godot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/11\/not-just-waiting-for-godot\/","title":{"rendered":"Not just waiting for Godot"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may take this as more optimistic blathering<\/a> from within the pessimistic morass, but here goes.<\/p>\n

Those of us who teach environmental studies — who teach impressionable young adults about the colossal challenges facing humanity in the coming decades, with the looming climate crisis, resource wars and (human and nonhuman) refugee crises, and\u00a0mass extinction<\/a>\u00a0on a scale unseen for 66 million years — have to come up with ways to keep our students from losing all hope and sinking into a nihilistic abyss. More knowledge can sometimes just be debilitating. “Nothing to be done,” as Gogo and Didi remind each other while waiting for Godot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Where do we find the hope\u00a0that\u00a0can\u00a0complement our students’ new-found pessimism about the current human situation?<\/p>\n

I find it in two places. One of them looks to the past and its\u00a0continuation through the present — in the tales told by elders<\/a>, storytellers, philosophers, and contemplatives, and those communities of practice that maintain those tales as living realities. The other looks to the future, or a future as envisioned by astrobiologists<\/a>, those who study the possibilities of life’s arising throughout the universe.<\/p>\n

One of the latter group, David Grinspoon, ends his wonderful 2004 book Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>positing that<\/p>\n

“We are at a curious and frustrating stage of our evolution. We can conceive<\/em> of a truly intelligent, sustainable, communicating society. But we don’t know if we can become<\/em> one.” [emphasis added]<\/p>\n

Which\u00a0he follows up with this statement of faith:<\/p>\n

“What do I really believe? I think our galaxy is full of species who have crawled up from the slime of their home worlds, evolved self-awareness and started to tinker, passed beyond the threat of technological self-extermination, and transcended their animal origins to move out into the cosmos. The vasty deep is thick with spirits<\/a>. The wise ones are out there waiting for us to join them.”<\/p>\n

The prospect of developing a science, a culture, and a spirituality that can get us through the sustainability bottleneck<\/a> gives me hope. (That may make me a dreamer but, as John Lennon said, I’m not the only one. Hope one day you’ll join us.)<\/p>\n

And if we fail? The impact on the other millions of living planets<\/a> in this\u00a0and other galaxies will have been minimal.<\/p>\n

But the effort — not to save the world (none of us will do that, so you can stop trying right now), but to find some thing we love to do and are good at, and others to do it with, that can contribute to the overall\u00a0goal<\/a> rather than to its negation — that effort is\u00a0worthwhile in itself. It may be the only thing that’s worthwhile.<\/p>\n

Once you have that part figured out, I tell my students, enjoy every moment of it.<\/p>\n

Here’s more Grinspoon, on the Anthropocene and the possibility of a “Sapiezoic” era beyond it:<\/p>\n