On hope....

I am obsessed with conservation messaging. I like a challenge...

The time I took my kids on holiday to the Jim Bridger coal fired power station in Rock Springs, Wyoming

I have been a long-time believer in the fruitlessness of hope as a conservation tool. Sarah Wilson writes eloquently about the subject and she and I have discussed it (we chat occasionally about how everything is fucked). Sarah’s great strength is in understanding it practically and emotionally and how to deal with life when you remove the idea of hope from the equation. Something I have achieved by simply blocking it, so that it doesn’t ruin my everyday life. But then isn’t that what we all do?

We are not designed to cope with existential threats as large as the climate crisis. We’re not designed to cope with the amount of news we’re bombarded with. I have stopped watching and reading it. It’s a path to ignorance of course but it’s also a path to misery. I have instead, adopted the idea of reducing my understandings of the world and current affairs, to the macro.

Take the environment. All the problems – climate crisis, biodiversity loss, pollution, etc; they can all be reduced to a single cause – there are too many people on the planet. It’s that simple. Too many people, requiring too many resources. I’ve heard arguments – ‘If we lived more efficiently and consumed less, then the planet could easily sustain this number of people’. But of course, like most conservation messaging and narratives, it’s ideology.

Humans behave in a certain way and changing that is almost impossible. Governments can change behaviour and so can economics, but if I start suggesting... ‘well if we did this and if we did that’ then I would be falling into the same trap of ideology. The cogs of capitalism were formed well before we understood the true cost of them and they aren’t suddenly going to change, and neither are we. So, we can wash out all the Marmite jars we like and put them in the recycling bin, but we’re still all fucked. Now that doesn’t mean we’re all going to die, but a shit load of us will.

If you haven’t ever actually considered what we’re facing... It doesn’t look good. Just in a nutshell, we are reaching a tipping point, in fact we’ve probably already gone over it, that will cause an unstoppable and exponentially rapid release of natural greenhouse gases, which will warm the planet even faster and have a devastating effect on the land and seas. It’s hard to imagine, and of course that future is almost never described in the media, as it’s too terrifying and we need to give people hope...don’t we..

At the end of every wildlife film presenting our ‘Eden state’ planet there’s a bit designed to give us hope. It’s the same in stories I’ve done for National Geographic magazine; the editor will often say, can we have a positive spin on the end? I have argued with lots of colleagues, and also my mother about it over the years. I always listen to Mum as she is wise but, on this one, I think she’s wrong. “People need hope” she’ll say. “You can’t leave them with nothing.” But my question is - why not?

I’ve always joked that conservationists will tell the public one story - with hope, while at home they’re all crying into their soup. The lie seems to be so institutional that the idea of presenting real understanding is offensive. I’m sure some people will find reading this offensive.

Give people hope or they’ll give up and nothing will change, is the basic wisdom. But as nothing has happened and things have got cumulatively worse, hope obviously isn’t working. In fact, I’d suggest that hope has the reverse effect; it’s not just a platitude we use to help us from considering the terrifying truth but it actually allows us to carry on doing what we’re doing.

The great problem of conservation messaging is that we all now individually burden a responsibility for something we can’t individually do anything about. Hope has allowed us to shy away, given us an excuse for our collective apathy, and most importantly allowed those in charge of the wheels of economics and industry to continue destroying the planet. Whether by conspiracy, design or just luck, the corporate world has achieved that whopping victory; those ‘Merchants of Hope.’

Hope has allowed us to ignore our future and instead put it in the hands of market forces - we have electric cars now and lots of windmills, but market forces were always going to arrive at the party too late and, let’s face it, they created the problem in the first place. We have reached a point where nearly everything we do is destructive. And some of us live with the guilt of that and it lurks behind us with every decision we make.  I can’t tell you how many discussions I’ve had with friends in the last year or two about whether they should bring a child into the world.

Ok so what is the solution? I’ve poked holes, perhaps cynically, into the problem; so surely I must have a solution. I don’t. In fact, I don’t think there is one. I certainly don’t think individual change in privileged western societies is going to make any difference to anything. But I still put out my recycling and I still feel guilty when I get on a plane, but I still get on a plane, because I’m human just like you and I don’t have to look very far to consider what it is to be human and how hopeless we are at changing our behaviour, even when we know it’s hurting us.

Consider this – we know smoking, drinking, eating sugar, eating red meat and processed foods is bad for us. But most of us still do some of those things, if not all of them. If we can’t, with all the evidence, consider our own individual health, then how can we be expected to burden something as existential as the health of an entire planet? That’s what governments are for and they have let us down.

I’d love your thoughts