ecospirit

 For everything, there is a season – Ecclesiastes. 

In the climate movement, the ongoing debate continues to bring passionate responses.  Having absorbed the lessons of climate science, are we on the side of hope or despair?  My own engagement led from cautious hope in the early 2000’s to leading workshops on Collapsing Consciously in 2015, when I embraced the term “climate doomer.” Leading those workshops led me into deep despair and after a healing process I have described here, I disengaged from both teaching and civil disobedience.  It has been a long road since then, but my work now is to open the door to grief-work, both personally and in a small support group of those who want to do the same.  

Grief and despair are not the same thing. Despair saps both hope and energy, and does nobody any good.  Grief, on the other hand, is healing work, and the more specific it is, the more effective. The thing about grief over climate disruption and the ongoing Sixth Extinction is, that the grieving is ongoing.  The grief is bottomless, so when one grief episode ends, another calls out for attention.  Grieving is not seasonal. We are not constituted for perennial grieving, so we give it a rest and go into denial, or go to a mass action to feel good for a day or so. Given this Earth moment, how do we discern the seasons for grief, for righteous anger, and for joy in what remains? We probably all will do this differently, and as social creatures, we need folks to join us in our emotions.  And as intelligent and sensitive beings, we need to make room for others experiencing the different emotional modalities at different times. 

Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest (2007) presents the idea that the emergence of over two million NGO’s of various sorts in the first few years of the millennium represented the awakening of the immune system of the biosphere and humanity. The NGO’s were a systemic response, fighting for the life of the system.  This is an important idea, but it does not necessarily lead to a restoration of biospheric and societal health.  It is more like the healthy response of a dying person who decides to stay positive and seize all the joy she can in the precious time remaining.  So yes, we must not yield to despair, but, even when things look impossibly bleak, carry on anyway.  But the grief work will always be there, and finally, as in Kubler-Ross’s stages, we each need to reach acceptance.  If the additional climate disruption headed our way is sudden and catastrophic, then we may miss out on this important act of completion.

I get the survival instinct. The point is to stay alive and responsive, where the point is the survival of the group.  You grieve your losses along the way, but when extinction stares you in the face, you say a prayer of acceptance.  And that acceptance is grounded in faith in the evolutionary intelligence of the whole Earth and cosmological system, which is guided by a deep, purposive interiority.  In the overall scheme of evolution, we have a purpose, which is to keep the whole thing going at as elegant a level as we can.  The problem is that we don’t direct it, and don’t have sufficient respect for the intelligence of the whole.  It is in response to that intelligence that we now help many species survive the wave that we ourselves have unleashed.  (The ironies are multiple and overlapping.) So, to that extent, we are long-termists.  And we would be even better at this process if we were a rational species, but we keep proving that we are not. The current global wave of populism despises the elites who follow the scientists and the technocrats, which is understandable, due to their haughtiness, unexamined privilege, and disregard for the common man.  But it is tragic, nonetheless.

Hope is a universal emotion. But its varieties and contexts are complicating. I have written here about it several times, ranging from biblical hope, which most accurately describes my own, to “honest hope” (Diane Dumanoski, whose idea is described in the same post). 

I studied a semester in mid-life with archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who always argued that hope was a dishonest emotion that blocked facing reality.  More recently, two writers I greatly respect, Dahr Jamail and Stephen Jenkinson, have argued against hope for similar reasons. They add the crucial point that, if one remains hopeful that somehow we will escape climate catastrophe, we will not grieve Earth’s immense, virtually unending losses sufficiently or completely. 

Grief is indeed a deep well, but can one survive without hope?  Most people would argue no, and I only know a few very tough, resilient folks who seem to consistently live that practice. I still look for hope, not for short-term survival of homo sapiens, but one grounded in trust for the miracle of evolution, in which the divine is embedded: biblical hope in the age of science.

# posted by Robert McGahey @ 9:53 PM 0 Comments