![]() At the climate summit in Paris 2015 (COP21), well-known environmental organizations such as Greenpeace made a point of delivering a bright and hopeful message, praising the deal as an important breakthrough. Even if emotions such as fear, anxiety, despair or depression may exist among activists, hope is still indispensible, mediating the other emotions so as to motivate action (Gardner 2017, Kleres & Wettergren 2017). In regard to climate activism in particular, researchers have pointed to the centrality of the emotion of hope in mobilizing and sustaining activism (e.g. As Klein points out in the quote above, pessimism should probably be "saved for better times" if you want to stop bad things from taking over entirely. Don't people need hope in order to become activists? It's a well-known saying that people don't join movements because of pessimism. In post-apocalyptic environmentalism we encounter a new paradox. Order to enable us to avoid it, Dark Mountain instead exemplifies what I've called a new post-apocalyptic form of environmentalism which sees catastrophe as something that's already here: as already having happened, as ongoing or as unvaoidable. Rhetoric, pointing to the threat of a future, global catastrophe only in Whereas much environmentalism until now has employed an apocalyptic … Giving up hope, to me, means giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be improvised, messy, difficult. They hope desperately that they can keep control of the way things are panning out. I find that people who talk about hope are often really talking about control. We need to imagine a future which can’t be planned for and can’t be controlled. This may sound a strange thing to say, but one of the great achievements for me of the Dark Mountain Project has been to give people permission to give up hope. In a debate with fellow enviornmentalist Wen Stephenson, Kingsnorth expresses it as follows: Instead, the group insists that accepting loss and honestly confronting the fact that the catastrophe can no longer be avoided is a liberating act. The fundamental gesture of Dark Mountain consists, I believe, in giving up hope that "the world can be saved". Dark Mountain is a hugely interesting group of writers, artists and activists who came together in 2009 to put words on the experiences of loss accompanying the decay and collapse of civilization. I'd like to use these remarks about hope as a way of approaching and making sense of two books I've read recently, Paul Kingsnorth's Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (2017) and Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times (2017), an anthology of texts produced by the Dark Mountain collective (of which Kingsnorth is a co-founder). To the extent that such statements are meant to induce a feeling of hope. ![]() Reflect on statements about optimism (and pessimism) as well, at least Yet despite this difference, the paradoxical quality of hope often seems to Hope, by contrast, is to see the future as openĪnd thus calling for action (Solnit 2006 also Ehrenreich 2009:3, Weber-Nicholsen 2002:183). Rebecca Solnit puts it well when she writes that both optimism and pessimism are set views of the future and both provideĮxcuses for inactivity. Hope is aįeeling not wholly under our conscious control, while optimism is aĬognitive assessment. I realize of course that hope isn't the same as optimism. L’optimisme, laissons le pessimisme pour des temps meilleurs.')” Optimism we’ll save pessimism for better times.' ('L’heure est à Here's what Naomi Klein wrote after Trump's election: ”To quote a popular saying on the French left, 'The hour calls for The curious thing is that both statements ring true, and that's the paradox. A seemingly opposite viewpoint is offered by the Salvage magazine: "Hope is precious it must be rationed". It is also the last resort” (quoted in Jensen 2004: 256). When asked by an interviewer if he had hope in view of the ecologicalĭisaster, Paul Shepard replied: "Of course I have hope. Perhaps there is no pure hope, no hope without an element of hopelessness? But conversely, isn't it true that one sometimes experiences how giving up hope can be a cure against hopelessness? In that sense, every incidence of hope is causeįor pessimism. Of something bad, something that we want to escape. Indeed, the very presence of hope testifies to the existence There is a logic connecting hope and hopelessness, two emotions that constantly seem to invite each other. ![]() Writing this I recall Walter Benjamin's words at the end of his essay on Goethe - “Only for the sake of the hopeless are we given hope”. ![]() No emotion lends itself so well to paradoxical formulations as hope.
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