The tired old narrative of doom and gloom can no longer capture the changing global dynamics of life on planet Earth. The constant harkening back to fear does not serve us.
Far from keeping us from growing complacent, fear drives apathy. Indeed, there is growing concern that framing climate change as an impending catastrophe stokes the fires of “climate doomism”—the fatalistic belief that it is already too late to act, which, according to researchers, causes people to give up. And conversely, when we act from a positive feeling of meaning and purpose, we all benefit. In 2013, in the first study of its kind, medical researchers demonstrated that the happiness we derive when we act on behalf of the greater good shows up in our cells as a healthier immune response.4
Hope Matters is a timely, evidence-based argument for the place of hope and a celebration of the turn toward solutions that is emerging in the face of global crisis and despair. I hope you will share it with the people you love.
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THE POWER OF EXPECTATION AND BELIEF
What we pay attention to shapes our lives no matter what species we are.
Plant roots sense and sidestep rocks before they hit them.
Songbirds avoid tornados by listening for them from hundreds of miles away.
And elephants sneak their way into fields, by watching—then imitating—how the farmers cross the moats and fences they’ve built to protect the crops.
WE ARE LIVING amid a planetary crisis. “I am hopeless,” a student in an environmental study graduate program recently told me. “I’ve seen the science. I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless.”
It’s not surprising she feels so depressingly fatalistic. In his speech at the start of a two-week international conference in Madrid in December 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”1 And this student isn’t alone in her feelings. I often give public talks and no matter where I am in the world, I begin by inviting people to share how they are feeling about the environment with the person sitting beside them, and then, if they are willing, to call out some of the words that capture these feelings. I have done this hundreds of times, and every time, the answers shock me. When I look out at these audiences, I see bright, healthy, relaxed-looking people who have somehow found the time to come to a public lecture. Yet their answers convey an unnerving level of grief and despair: “Scared,” “Hopeless,” “Depressed,” “Numb,” “Apathetic,” “Overwhelmed,” “Guilty,” “Paralyzed,” “Helpless,” “Angry,” call out the voices. Whether the room is filled with adults, university students, or kids as young as grade three, whenever I ask, the words remain the same.
Not long ago, I found an almost identical collection of words. It’s a list published in a research journal by Johana Kotišová. The words describe the emotions that crisis reporters feel when they are covering horrific events such as the Haitian earthquake, the Brussels or Paris attacks, the war in Ukraine, the war in Liberia, refugee camps, 9/11, famines in Central African countries, or the aftermath of the Greek debt crisis.2
The same words. What I am saying is that ordinary kids and adults regularly describe their everyday feelings about the environment using the same words that journalists use to describe what it feels like to report on the worst imaginable crises.
The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope.
This crucial idea drives this book. My agenda is absolutely to spread hope. I believe the way to do that is to collectively challenge the tired narrative of environmental doom and gloom that reproduces a hopeless status quo, and replace it with an evidence-based argument for hope that improves our capacity to engage with the real and overwhelming issues we face.
The power of hope and beliefs
When everyone around you is shouting doom and gloom, actively choosing to be hopeful—and to do the hard work of seeking out and amplifying solutions—is difficult. But it’s also essential, because hope really matters.
It matters to your individual health and well-being. Many studies underscore the value of feeling hopeful in all sorts of situations. If you have hope, you’re better able to tolerate pain. You’re more likely to follow through with physiotherapy or other recuperative treatments following an injury or illness. Feeling hopeful leads to better recovery from anxiety disorders and cardiovascular disease.3 The capacity to hope has been shown to provide a therapeutic quality that helps refugees overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges as they move forward and resettle.4
Being hopeful also matters to how we collectively influence what happens on the planet. That’s because thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and beliefs are so powerful, they actually shape objective outcomes.
The placebo effect
I had the opportunity to think more about the power of expectations when I was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2018. A researcher named Parker Goyer at the Mind & Body Lab generously talked me through the breakthrough work the lab’s founder, Alia Crum, and her team were doing.
You’re probably familiar with the placebo effect. Though not named as such at the time, the concept dates back almost five hundred years. “There are men on whom the mere sight of medicine is operative,” wrote the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne in 1572,5 referring to situations in which a person experiences relief from pain, anxiety, or other symptoms because they believe they have taken medicine or received treatment, when in reality, they have not.
The placebo effect demonstrates the power of our minds to produce physical changes in our bodies. Clinical trials demonstrate that if we believe we are taking a real medication, then something as simple as taking a sugar pill can lower our blood pressure, reduce anxiety and pain, and boost our immune system.6
Placebos work by triggering a host of specific neurobiological effects. As Alia Crum explains it, “The power is not in the sugar. The power comes from the social contexts that shape our mindsets in ways that activate our bodies’ natural healing abilities.”7
Think of a mindset as a lens or frame through which we view the world. Our mindsets orient us to particular associations and expectations. Our mindsets don’t just color our reality. Rather, the way that we look at reality changes what we pay attention to, and what we expect. Believe it or not, those expectations and associations actually change that reality.
Mindsets impact objective reality
Take this study involving hotel cleaning staff. Early in her academic career, Alia worked with Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer on a study that involved women hotel-room attendants. Cleaning all day involves lots of physical activity, but the women doing that job didn’t think of their work as good exercise. The researchers divided the hotel-room cleaners into two groups. In one group, they did no intervention. But with the second group, they showed the women how the work they did cleaning actually more than met the US surgeon general’s recommendation for daily physical exercise: detailing, for example, how fifteen minutes of vacuuming burns fifty calories, fifteen minutes of scrubbing sinks burns sixty calories, and so on. They posted this information in the staff areas at the hotels where only those room attendants in the second group would see it.8
A month later, the researchers checked back. That simple intervention—no changing of diet or exercise regime, just promoting the mindset that “work is good exercise”—produced dramatic results. Hotel-room attendants in the second group lost weight and lowered their blood pressure on average by ten points.9
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