For novelist Jonathan Franzen, the future under climate change looks bleak. In September of 2019,
Franzen decided to pen an opinion piece for the New Yorker that was filled with despair.
The gist of the nearly 3,000 word proclamation was that humanity has no hope of preventing
climate change, so we should give up trying to mitigate it and instead accept our fate and adapt
to it. Looking at the daily headlines of wildfires and supercharged storms, this is an appealing
conclusion. It doesn’t ask anything of the reader except to lay down and accept the “inevitable.”
Jonathan Frazen’s essay is a climate doomerist manifesto through and through,
and he reveals the need for radical hope in the face of the climate crisis. It is precisely in
the final hours when the fate of the world seems to be balanced on a razor's edge, with one side
drawing us down into climate apocalypse and the other pulling us up towards a liberatory world,
that radical climate optimism is essential to imagining a just path towards climate liberation.
Which is why today, we will unpack why radical hope is crucial to revolutionary climate action.
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The Roots of Doom:
Before we can unpack what it means to embrace hope, we must first examine the roots of its
opposite: doomerism. Honestly, it’s no wonder that climate despair and doomerism can feel
so appealing right now. I often feel a sense of despair when I read headlines and do research for
these videos. Fossil fuel companies continue to extract and destroy our planet; natural disasters
are getting worse and more frequent; climate change drives ever more people out of their homes;
and the response from most people in power has been to maintain “business as usual” at any cost.
Feeling despair is a very real issue of mental health that is caused and exacerbated by the
perceived hopelessness of our current situation. But we have to fight against this trend in
climate discourse. Not only is this sense of hopelessness personally challenging to deal with,
it also benefits the status quo. What better way to stymie revolutionary climate action
than to crush us into apathy and inaction? Through endless work days, brutal climate news cycles,
and the anxiety of paying this month's rent, there is very little time to imagine what else could be
possible outside the walls of capitalism, much less put in the time and energy necessary to
build revolutionary potential. As author Ashley C. Ford so eloquently reminds us,
“The goal of oppressors is to limit your imagination about what is possible without them,
so you might never imagine more for yourself & the world you live in.”
We are trapped inside a cage of doom and denial constructed by the ecocidal capitalist class,
and the only way out is to imagine something different, to pay attention to the true
revolutionary wins that have taken place across the earth, and to foster a sense of radical hope.
Demanding Radical Climate Hope:
Holding onto hope in times of despair is a radical act. I don’t mean pie-in-the-sky
hope that ignores everything bad in the world and waits for some savior to magically fix everything.
The kind of hope that I’m referring to is one that doesn’t ignore the bad. It doesn’t ignore
the systems of oppression that surround us and crush us. It doesn’t ignore the chokehold that
the fossil fuel industry has on the world. No. It looks all these destructive systems in the eye,
and in defiance embraces a different world of liberation and ecological harmony. As organizer,
abolitionist, and author, Mariame Kaba asserts, “Hope is a discipline.” Adding in a podcast
that, “hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that
makes total sense.” In short, radical hope means embracing the very real emotions that come with
defeats or living under a racist, patriarchal, ecocidal capitalist system and having the courage
to channel them into a future that’s brighter. Climate change is not inevitable like Jonathan
Frazen seems to think it is. If we descend into apathy and let doom take over, then yes,
climate change will be inevitable. But if we foster hope. If we imagine what could be,
and struggle to make that world a reality then collectively we can build a better world.
The outlooks of both a life under capitalism and the timeline of the climate crisis are admittedly
bleak, but if we admit defeat before we even begin, then we’ve already lost. The climate
movement desperately needs revolutionary optimism. It needs radical hope, because
to shape the world for the better, as scholar and activist Angela Davis asserts, “You have to
act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
A History Of Hope: Stepping up onto the podium, Vladimir Lenin
readied himself to speak in front of a crowd of young workers in Zurich. The day was January 22nd,
1917–the twelve year anniversary of Russia’s Bloody Sunday, when imperial soldiers fired on
unarmed protests and uprisings shook the country. As Lenin addressed the crowd that day in 1917,
he looked back on Russia’s 1905 revolt and told the Zurich workers that the power of change lay
in the hands of the working class, and he ended his speech with a proclamation that a successful
revolution would come, but he would probably not be around to see it. A mere two months later the
first of the 1917 revolutions seized Russia, and the Tsar abdicated his throne. In a span of two
months, Lenin went from believing he wouldn’t see the revolution in his lifetime to witnessing it
with his very eyes. The history of change is one of fits and starts, which is why fostering radical
hope is essential in dark times, because, after all, revolution could be right around the corner.
Angela Davis is a prime example of revolutionary hope. After living through the Jim Crow south,
witnessing her childhood neighbors torn apart by a white supremicist terrorist bombing,
being hunted by the federal government for buying guns that were used to kill a judge, and living
through decades of political regimes that silenced and oppressed people of color, Davis says she is
more hopeful than ever today. The uprisings of 2020 that tie their lineage back to struggles
when Davis was still young, and the revolutionary fervor of young people today make her believe that
transformation is coming. Even through intensely dark times, Davis held out hope. This is the kind
of radical hope that the climate movement needs. Indeed, there are many reasons to be hopeful when
it comes to the climate. The rumblings of change have already begun. From the successful defeat
of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines at the hands of indigneous water protectors,
to the mass student and direct action campaigns across the world, to global divestment campaigns
siphoning money away from oil corporations, grassroots actions are obstructing the fossil
fuel industry every step of the way. Combined with the toll of the pandemic, scholars, journalists
and even a fossil fuel company says that demand for oil peaked in 2019 and will continue to fall
until it becomes obsolete. On top of that, the potential of current wind and solar technologies
exceeds global demand by a factor of 100 according to a report by Carbon Tracker. Which means that
we have almost all of the tools we need to make a just zero-carbon world, and if the massive climate
protests around the world are any indicator, the will to create that world is growing stronger.
The climate crisis and the pandemic are exposing the cracks in the system and uprisings around
the world are making those cracks wider. We’re beginning to break out of the cages of capitalism,
but remember: the struggle towards justice and liberation of both people and nature is a history
that ebbs and flows. Defeats are plentiful, yes, but so too are victories. What if the construction
of another oil pipeline or the opening of a new prison complex were seen not as movement-ending
defeats, but instead opening skirmishes in the broader course of revolutionary change.
Radical hope demands we take the long-view, because as Lenin reminds us, “there are decades
where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” Everything can change
in an instant, so we must be ready to turn our imagined worlds into a reality the moment it does.
Building radical hope:
Imagine a world that looks a lot more like Wakanda than the suburban sprawl of the United States,
imagine a world without cars where streets are green highways and farms, imagine a world
without the constant nine-to-five grind of a job you hate. Imagine a decolonized, anti-racist,
fossil-fuel free world. How do these worlds feel? You might think these worlds are science fiction,
but as adrienne maree brown writes, “I believe that all organizing is science fiction – that
we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in
an imagination battle.” Imagining better worlds and then figuring out how to create that world
even in a small way is essential to foster radical hope. Because hope is active. It looks like the
work of artists who rented out parking spots on the streets of San Francisco to envision what
the city without cars would look like. It looks like renderings of Solarpunk artists who show
us a world that blends nature with humanity. It looks like the Land Back movement. Hope requires
imagination, and radical action requires hope. So if you're an artist, if you're an activist,
a storyteller, or a dreamer, keep doing what you do. The struggle is constant but there will
always be light in the dark, especially if we can dream and hope for a better world together.
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