Last October, while in Bellingham for the launch of my book Teaching in the Rain I was asked several times whether I was hopeful about the future of the planet and the environment around us, and if so, what cause for hope buoyed me in these difficult times. I answered as best I could, citing the wisdom of my late esteemed colleague at Western Washington University, David Clarke, who spoke of his “catastrophic crisis theory of social change.” He had experienced the London Blitz in 1940 and observed that people were not willing to change normal behaviors even in the face of the threat of Nazi Germany until the bombs started dropping. Then, recognizing the threat to their very survival, which we call an “existential crisis” today, they did so. This last-minute change of heart was not very comforting since it suggested that things had to get very bad before people would respond. Still, at least it offered a ray of hope that people might change behaviors that currently threaten our world in various ways.
I have been thinking about these questions ever since, and when Adventures Northwest invited me to write an essay on hope in these fraught times, I decided to accept the challenge. I won’t elaborate on all the reasons behind the questions because the questioners know the challenges facing society and the environment today, which is why they asked, perhaps seeking solace and inspiration. I came across a quotation recently that captures the essence of our situation. Writer, entrepreneur, and environmentalist Paul Hawken offered the insight that “Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful.” Exactly! When things seem so difficult that one is tempted to feel despair and say, “Why bother, it seems so hopeless?” the need for hope is greatest.
So, what is hope anyhow? Is it optimism? Not exactly, because that involves believing that things will work out whatever we do. Optimism depends on faith, requiring nothing of us. Is it idealism, a belief that some ideal condition should and will be achieved? It is likely not idealism alone because nothing is achieved simply because one believes it ought to be achieved. So perhaps it is emotion, and to some degree, it is a feeling that things can get better. But there is more to it than that.
A. Thomas Cole, in his newly-published book Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch, writes that hope is “a discipline, a behavior, an intuition, a practice, a choice.” Cole’s definition struck me because when my environmental education students felt despair at all the bad news they encountered, all I could say was that they had a choice. They could choose to feel hopeless and give up, or they could forge ahead, realistically assessing what they could do to help the situation and forming a plan. And it would have to be a long-term plan because the positive effects of their choice would probably not be immediately apparent. All eventually chose to forge hopefully ahead because they realized that was what they had signed up for and the alternative was unacceptable.
Sometimes people say the world today is in a worse mess than ever, but as a student of history, I disagree. The world is always a mess, a mix of good and evil, moral progress and regress. Think of what it must have been like for many during the twentieth century’s world wars, or the bubonic plague, or for American Indians facing the juggernaut of colonialism and all that was being taken from them, including, very often, their lives. Those were indeed hard times, and not to make light of our current situation, but today, we have many tools to work toward hopeful outcomes if we choose to use them – and we have choices, unlike some of those earlier examples – so there is reason for hope.
I have studied the conservation movement in America, particularly the Pacific Northwest, for many years. Currently, I am working with my wife on a biography of Dave Foreman, who, back in the 1980s, became famous (or perhaps infamous) as a co-founder of Earth First! Recently, I read a piece he wrote questioning his “Ecotopian” colleagues, who seemed to think the rightness of their cause would ultimately prevail. No, he wrote, that wouldn’t be enough. It would require action, engagement, political agitation, and even disruptive and forceful action to protect wild places, biodiversity, and justice. Foreman had moments of despair, but he always came up with a plan to forge ahead, and he did much good.
Dave found hope in his reading of history – he could take the long view, in his case, even an evolutionary view. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Dave was often impatient, but he agreed with this. He knew the history of conservation well, so he knew how long it had taken, for instance, to come up with the idea of protecting wilderness and to act on that idea. And how long it was taking to recognize that doing so was not just for the benefit of humans but for all living beings.
Originally, wilderness was given a measure of protection for the values it could offer humans, like inspiration, challenge, and relief from the stresses of modern life. He and others understood and enjoyed these values but went further to say that wild lands and wild creatures had value in themselves and were intrinsically valuable, not just instrumentally valuable to humans. When Dave died after working toward this goal for forty years, he knew more work needed to be done, and the moral universe still needed bending, but he had done what he could and could take satisfaction in that.
None of us can save the world by ourselves. We should not think that way, for it would only lead to frustration. But in our microcosm, our corner of the world, we can make it better, and collectively, if enough of us are doing this, who knows what the outcome might be? Everything is uncertain. We cannot, of course, know the future or assure the outcomes of our efforts. As an educator for nearly fifty years, I hoped I was doing something good for each student that might result in cascades of good for many, but I could not know for sure if that was or would be happening. Nonetheless, I had hope, and a plan and made the effort, and after decades I can see some positive outcomes.
I’ll finish with a personal anecdote. I grew up in a rural New Hampshire town in the 1950s, and in front of my house flowed the Sugar River, a small tributary of the Connecticut River. I loved to be outdoors, and we played along that river for years, despite the water being so severely polluted we could see sewage dropping out of the riverbanks into the stream. A woolen mill upstream dyed the water bright colors: yellow one day, red the next. The only fish that survived in that cesspool were suckers which we could catch but shook off our hooks because we didn’t dare touch them. That was in the 1950s. When I returned to this same river in the late 1980s, I was astonished and delighted to find it was a blue-ribbon trout stream, flyfishing only, and very popular.
How did this happen? The Clean Water Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1972 and signed into law by none other than Richard Nixon. Pollution got so bad back then that rivers caught fire, Lake Erie was declared dead, and a “catastrophic crisis” seemed imminent. But with the help of this law and hard work by many locals who enjoyed the river, my little Sugar River was cleaned up. In 2016, wild Atlantic salmon returned for the first time to the Connecticut River, a sign that the entire watershed was healing. No salmon had made this journey since the Revolutionary War, and the struggle to restore this iconic fish migration continues. Other fish populations that had plummeted, including striped bass, sea-run brown trout, alewives, and endangered American eels, are recovering. This process of restoring the Northeast’s longest river continues, but hopeful people are at work, and they are succeeding. In the face of what seemed long odds, they made a plan, are working tirelessly, and are hopeful the river will ultimately be restored— for their own benefit and that of many species.
Perhaps the most famous message about hope is from the Nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson, who wrote,
Hope is the thing with feathers-
That perches in the soul-
And sings the tune without the words-
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest- in the gale – is heard-
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
Her message seems quite clear. We have a choice, and I choose to take the path of hope.
John Miles climbed and hiked in the North Cascades for nearly 50 years. He also taught environmental studies at Western Washington University, taking students “into the field” as often as possible, and what a field it was. In retirement, living near Taos, New Mexico, he hikes and skies the Southern Rockies. His latest book is Teaching in the Rain: The Story of North Cascades Institute (2023).