As the First season of Endgame draws to a close, Rob and I are feeling the pressure to give it an uplifting, if not a happy ending - so I put on some coffee and searched online for options - and came up with this piece about hope.
LISTEN TO ‘HOPE AND COFFEE’
Along the way I stumbled across a tar baby of climate messaging - that if we were to embrace - would take us deeper into this mess…
So, here’s my list of green messages with red warning signs:
Solutions - hyping up simplistic answers to complex problems.
Commodifying the climate crisis. I heard the futility of this explained - if we are striving within the current capitalist system to sell sell twice as many ‘reduced carbon emitting’ items as full carbon emitting ones - does nothing to actually reduce our overall emissions.
The story the hero story that human ingenuity is going to save us - a reliance on technology that is not yet invented and dependent on a stable world to be developed and produced
Or it’s incrementalism - that we have the option of shifting things just a little at the time and that this can possibly be adequate - as if we can go down to the beach and negotiate the terms of rising with the sea
And then there is the insidious framing of the climate problem as only 50 years old as if it isn’t deeper and older than this…
I’m feeling a bit over it now - so have resolved to go in search of stories and storytellers who don’t get lost in the pothole of toxic hope - that help us find the strength and courage for the long haul of striving for a just transition and a safer planet… And amplify new knowledge and ways of thinking about things that help us imagine different and better futures - ways of being in the world that are not dependant on exploitation and extraction and the myopic lens of human exceptionalism.