Some Alternatives To Hope
With and without feathers
Hello friends.
This magical moment happened the other day, like a children’s bedtime story come to life. I was jogging by the waterfront when a family of geese started crossing the road, with five little fuzzy goslings in tow. A guy stopped on his bike to block traffic in one direction, while me and this woman helped herd them across the street. There was extra high drama because one of the babies couldn’t quite make it up onto the curb on the other side. He kept squirming and doing his best little butt wiggles and we tried to shoo him up without touching him.
It feels, this spring, like my whole neighborhood has fallen in love with birds. There’s a very popular, “wacky” hipster birdwatching club in my local park, which, I should emphasize, is not a big park. My younger daughter saw an owl there recently, and there are often hawks. The other day, in a different park a half-mile away, I came across a bunch of people gawking at a wild turkey.
All this urban birb love reminds me of Emily Raboteau’s book Lessons For Survival, which I interviewed her about in the spring. She was “sparked” in part by a mural project depicting endangered birds all over New York City.
Kindness vs. Courage
She told the podcast Bird Notes the other day: “It’s about loss…recognizing beauty while it's here, in an act of love and devotion and conservation, in the same way that people participate in bird counts — participating in something that’s bigger than myself.”
For me, this experience of joining with my neighbors in noticing and embracing the wildlife that coexists with us also feels inexplicably hopeful.
Hope is the troubled theme of episode 6 of We Are The Great Turning.
Our third, possibly final, meeting of the Podcast Club is on June 20 at 7pm ET! Don’t miss out, it’s been amazing so far. Just reply to this message if you want to join.
Troubled, because Joanna Macy is impatient with the compulsory American version of hope—the Pollyanna, toothpaste-smile version. Related, there can be some doom-shaming in the climate movement; proclaiming that scaring people is a bad communication strategy, even when the facts are downright scary. The exhortation to focus on the positive feels relentless and false.
Macy, by contrast, is the author of a 2012 book called Active Hope. Active hope is defined as staying engaged in the work of trying to produce a better outcome. Rebecca Solnit writes in her 2023 book Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story From Despair to Possibility: “Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an axe you break down doors with, in an emergency.”
I actually came across this active approach to hope years ago, as an NPR reporter, via Brandon Busteed. He worked for a long time for Gallup, collecting data on what keeps people engaged and thriving. Busteed defined hope based on his data sets “as a ‘strategy’ of forming goals, understanding the paths to take to reach those goals, and having the energy to set off on that path.” This is the kind of hope we want to inspire in our kids, particularly in their education : a sense of capability, of possibility, of agency.
In the podcast episode, Macy defines the “energy to set off on that path” a different way—as courage. Understanding the extent of the threat, there’s an outcome you want, and you go for it, with no guarantee of success. This is an epic vision; it made Macy and co-host Jess Serrante think of The Lord of the Rings.
“It takes courage on your part to even see the, the, uh, extent of the danger. But we need this darkness in order to see the light of possibility. We need a clear-eyed view of the danger in order to deal with it, in order to meet it.”
( As it happens, my 7 year old would not go to bed last night without listening to “Misty Mountains” from the Hobbit audiobook, so I’m going to drop it in here: )
The “light of possibility” is something I spy in our collective cherishing of the birds, bringing me and my neighbors together. The way I felt when I heard that those howler monkeys in Mexico,that were dropping out of the trees from the heat, some of them, were rehabilitated and released back into the wild. And the way I felt when Mexico elected the first Jewish, first woman, first IPCC climate scientist, who pledges to get the country to 50% zero-carbon energy by 2030.
But we don’t always have the energy. We don’t always see the light. And that’s why we need each other so much. I’m going to leave you, of course, with Emily Dickinson’s verse.
“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.
Dickinson’s hope has no words. It makes no argument. It’s the most cherished when times are toughest. And in contrast to the active hope we’ve been talking about, it doesn’t ask anything of you but that you keep listening for it.
Some links
I’ve been organizing for a year-plus for greener NYC schools with Climate Families NYC. I spoke at a rally at City Hall this week and also co-authored this op-ed on the need to decarbonize NYC public schools. This grassroots activism stuff gives me all the feelings and I’m excited to write more about it soon.