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Nature and Society Abandon hope - for goodness' sake The most common feeling I hear from NSF members in private is that the planet is in deep, serious, possibly irreversible trouble. Many of these people are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they’re reduced to trying to protect just one tree. But no matter what we do, our best efforts are insufficient. Those who exert power are committed to activities and ways of living which are destroying the planet. Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the biosphere. To start, there is the false hope that somehow the system may change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or Jesus Christ. Or the government. Or the Greens. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities. Does anyone really believe that Gunns is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? But it isn’t only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we continue if we do not have hope? We’ve been taught that hope in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is a worthy and uplifting response to our present predicament. Hope is in fact a curse, a bane. There is a Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,”—without hope there is no fear—hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. Here’s a definition of hope: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless. I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I’ll take another breath right now, nor that I’ll finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it. I do not hope old growth forests survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure our dominant culture doesn’t destroy them. When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to hope at all. We simply do the work. We make sure forests survive. We make sure quolls survive. We make sure Murray Cod survive. We do whatever it takes. When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins. I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction. I’ve learned that if you deprive most of these people of that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another. A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope: you realise you never needed it in the first place. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the government, the WWF, valiant tree-sitters, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself. When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear. And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very far more powerful and effective. The above was summarised and adapted by Keith Thomas from Derrick Jensen’s book Endgame (2006) and his article in the June 2006 edition of Orion magazine. October-November 2006 edition accessible here ________________________________________________________________
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