This is a bloggy-essay-article about climate change, genocide, telling stories, hope, and being as human as we goddamn can. Trust the process, it comes round to writing at the end.
The other day I was chatting to my new neighbour and we ended up talking about how, in the early 2000s, I was a journalist writing about climate change. She looked a bit sheepish and then asked a question I haven’t heard for a long time.
“Do you think there is any hope?”
Hope.
Huh.
I used to get asked that all the time. There was a period where I was on a lot of panels at conferences and events, which was always strange to me since I didn’t really have a clue about anything, but not a lot of people were writing about climate change at the time, and I had great hair and wasn’t afraid to have opinions. During these events, people always asked me about hope. Is there any hope? Do we have hope? Can we have hope? At first I was flattered, thought I must be some kind of authority for people to be asking me that, thought I must be important somehow.
Then I realised people were asking because they wanted to outsource action. If so-and-so says there is hope, then I don’t have to do anything. Hope, as Greta Thunburg famously sort-of-said, is not a substitute for actually fixing the fucking problem.
And so here I am, 25 years since anyone last thought to ask me about hope, now with greying hair and significantly less certainty in my opinions, wondering about the answer to that question.
For a long time, I lost hope entirely. Regular WHQers know I’ve written a lot about my various mental states over the years, including the times when I’ve absolutely bottomed out and given up all pretence of coherence. I left climate change journalism exactly because of that; a mental breakdown caused by a seemingly insurmountable existential terror that made it impossible to do my job.
I couldn’t let it go completely though. My obsession with climate change, and in fact all the various apocalypses humans (who am I kidding? The British, mostly) have wrought on the world, is not a coincidence.
I grew up in the long shadow of the holocaust. It permeated everything. Every conversation, every event, every moment was an opportunity to take note of who wasn’t there, who escaped and who didn’t, what treasures and trinkets were smuggled out and what was left behind, to tell of great horrors and impart dreadful warnings. Beware! There is always danger!
There are people in my life, as present as my parents and my siblings, who I have never met, who died decades before I was even born, who nevertheless are with me all the time.
Their memories are a blessing, of course, but they are also hungry ghosts, constantly yearning and demanding and gnawing, a haunting that continues generation after generation. A kind of febrile madness, existing in a state of permanent rage and schism and rootlessness, a violent tearing of the bonds from our heart to our feet to the ground to each other. And all of this is passed directly from my grandparents to my parents to me and, despite all my efforts to the contrary, also to my children.
This is the first lesson all children of brutality learn. That the violence we deliver upon each other transcends generations. That the harms done to one are done to all in perpetuity.
Climate change, then, is the culmination of an entire human history of hungry ghosts. It is thousands of years of schisms and rootlessness, it is the ultimate manifestation of the violent tearing of people from their land.
In this space, what hope really means is healing. Can these fractures be tempered? Can we kintsugi the world, paint gold over the cracks and insist it’s more beautiful than before?
We cannot heal a wound that is repeatedly and brutally reopened. We have spent years watching genocide unfold before us, live streamed to our phones while we plod on in quiet horror, just trying to pay our bills and get through the day. We are watching wars delivering new apocalypses across the Earth in real time every day. The world is always ending for someone, somewhere.
Hope means we can trust in the future. But nothing has changed, and so nothing will change.
To me, then, hope means that the only thing we can do is face the reality of ourselves, to understand that our capacity for horror is as immense as our capacity for love and try to tip the balance in whatever small way is available to us.
In art, in stories, we find a moralistic sanctuary. The good guys win, the bad guys lose. And even if the bad guys do win (boo!) we know with certainty that it’s not right.
This is the place where the unspeakable can be spoken, even if we still have to look at it through hands pressed over our eyes. A place where we can begin to unravel the inscrutability of the human heart, and where we can begin to outrun the shadows of our history and redraw the maps of humanity. The place we can truly communicate with each other: this is me, this is me, this is us. Where we can be as human as we goddamn can and throw all our weight on the right side of the scales.
Stories are the tool by which we express our humanity to each other in the hope that we become real in other people’s imaginings. If we are real, it is harder to hurt us.
If it’s hope you are looking for, this is what we have to do. One heart at a time. Mine to yours, to our feet, to the ground, to each other. Stitching the world back together, one story at a time.