Kids take their cues about the state of the planet from adults and the media. Ironically, the ways in which we talk about the environment—chronicling its demise, making threatening forecasts about the future, blaming others, framing things in terms of “never” and “always,” and telling others what they should do—parallel the dysfunctional ways we so often communicate in our most intimate relationships. Curating the bad stuff into a display of hopeless futures is just as useless when it comes to engaging people with the planet as it is with affairs of the heart. Badgering someone you love to change will not fix things. Nor can we save the world by continuing to focus on what people are doing wrong.
Yet the narrative of gloom and doom continues to dominate how we think, feel, and relate to the environment the world over. That’s because so many people fear that focusing on solutions could unintentionally fuel complacency or give politicians an out, or that we might champion a solution that isn’t letter-perfect. So we continue to reproduce this culture of hopelessness in spite of the mounting evidence of how damaging it is to our personal health and well-being—and to our collective capacity to respond to urgent environmental issues.
I often wonder why we treat the planetary emergency so differently than we do other terrifying events. Time and again, we see communities come together in response to a school shooting or mass flood. We see adults reassuring children that steps are being taken to make them safe or avoiding exposing young children to news items beyond their grasp. Even in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life, we have age restrictions on violence in movies. Yet when it comes to the environment, we bombard kids with horrifying content about the ruined state of the planet their lives depend on, without any support for how those messages make them feel. Within the context of environmental issues, we seem to flip the story: we shrug off our moral responsibilities as adults to help younger people through their suffering; instead we tell children that it is up to them to save the world.
Somehow, we’ve got urgency, crisis, and fear all balled up. Environmental issues are real, and they are at the level of global crises. But failing to separate the urgency of these problems from the fear-inducing ways in which we communicate them blinds us to the collateral damage of apocalyptic storytelling. We grow deaf to more inspiring and effective possibilities. By hammering children and adults with issues at scales that feel too large to surmount, we inadvertently cause them to downplay, tune out, or shut down. We are fueling an epidemic of hopelessness that threatens to seal the planet’s fate. The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope.
THIS BOOK SEEKS to right that wrong. Within these pages, I craft an evidence-based argument for hope that reflects the complex psychological, sociological, philosophical, and spiritual qualities of this phenomenon. I share insights about hope and the environment that have been honed through thousands of conversations with people around the world who have generously trusted me with their feelings. It’s an “eyes-wide-open” look at hope within the full recognition of the gravity, urgency, and vast entanglements of the planetary crisis.
The situation of hope vis-à-vis the environment is particularly tricky. Whereas a patient in hospital may experience hope within a realistic understanding of even limited treatment options, those suffering from hopelessness about the environment often have little or no notion that environmental successes exist. Because they feel hopeless, they believe the situation is hopeless.
In these pages, I argue that hope for the environment is not only warranted but essential to addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and the full suite of environmental crises we face. By focusing our attention so heavily on what’s broken, we are reinforcing a starting-line fallacy that makes it feel as if nothing useful has ever been accomplished and that all the hard work lies ahead. We need to pry ourselves free from this disempowering rhetoric and situate ourselves within the positive environmental trends that are already well established and yielding the successful results we need to grow.
Turning toward solutions is a tall order. For starters, environmental solutions aren’t easy to find. Environmental news is almost exclusively reported as “bad” news. When we do come across a positive environmental story in the media, it’s frequently presented as a one-off good-news story. Too often, this positions environmental solutions as rare exceptions rather than examples of major trends that have been building over time.
Furthermore, feeling empowered to act demands a sense of possibility that is being constantly eroded by the now-ubiquitous exposure to horrifying events happening around the world daily. The strains on human emotions are far greater than ever before thanks to social media, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and alerts on personal devices. Relentless exposure to widespread tragedy fuels emotional exhaustion, leading to desensitization, cynicism, and resistance to help those who are suffering.
FOR YEARS, I would ask every scientist I met what made them feel hopeful about the environment. They always had an answer. I mistakenly thought that the only way to increase exposure to under-reported successes would be for me to interview these folks and gather examples one by one. Luckily, in April 2014, I met Patrick Meier, a pioneer in the rapidly developing world of digital humanitarianism, while we were fellows together at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. When he described how he mobilized the Haitian diaspora after the 2010 earthquake to create and interpret a crisis map for rescue workers from the tweets, text messages, emails, and Facebook posts coming from people on the ground, I began to imagine ways we might use social media to gather specific cases of environmental successes from all over the planet and to make them easily shareable. We could try to crowdsource hope.
The result was #OceanOptimism, a social media campaign designed to crowdsource and share examples of ocean conservation successes and solutions. We launched it on World Oceans Day in June of 2014, and to the surprise of our tiny group behind the campaign, the tag went viral, reaching more than ninety million shares to date. Within seconds of logging onto Twitter or Instagram, users see current accounts of ocean successes: whales returning to New York City harbor, or the resilience of corals on a damaged deep-sea reef off Scotland. They find inspiring surprises, like the discovery of 200,000 cold-water coral reefs off the coast of Norway, or the recovery of groundfish along the California coast—some populations rebounding fifty years sooner than predicted.1
Knowing what works matters. These social media feeds make searching for replicable solutions or finding people working on similar issues much easier, which translates into successful actions being reproduced and tailored to other situations. And daily exposure to posts of conservation successes changes how people feel about the state of the planet. These successes empower us. Innovations and positive feelings, in turn, spread.
The mass accumulation of all these examples now represents valuable data sets, which enable researchers to look not only at specific examples but also at broader trends. In chapter eight I’ll point out some promising examples, inviting you to see how the issues you care about exist within much larger movements of positive change.
Social and technological revolutions surround us. Remote sensing, big data, and a suite of technologies provide new ways to understand the 8.7 million other species on Earth. Animal-tracking devices are becoming ever lighter, sturdier, smaller, cheaper, and better able to store and transmit large amounts of data. Scientists can now affix tiny solar-powered tracking devices onto the slim legs of songbirds, for instance, and use their personal devices to track how certain species “surf the green wave,” timing their migrations to the arrival of spring across continents.2 Precision conservation technologies pinpoint areas of highest biodiversity importance, charting areas of greatest vulnerability and providing evidence to support conservation protection.
We are living in an Age of Personalization where, thanks to eBird, Song Sleuth, iNaturalist, or other environmental apps on our personal devices, we can now identify those same birds with the touch of a screen. By holding our iPhones up to our binoculars, we can easily take a close-up photo, revel in the beauty of a bird’s colorful feathers, and post the image on Instagram. This enhanced capacity to see birds is fueling an international urban birding movement, especially among folks