Possibility in an Age of Ecological Despair
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In February of 2015 I went to the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association Institute for Excellence in Ministry, and I had the opportunity to spend a week in a workshop with activist, eco‐philosopher, writer, and spiritual elder Joanna Macy.
Joanna is well‐known in spiritual and ecological activism circles. Her work focuses on Work that Reconnects, naming ways that we have been disconnected and how that feeds despair and apathy, and working to build community and connection in response to the reality of ecological devastation and destruction.
We know that our world is facing a climate crisis. And there is much that could be said about the science, the statistics and the rising temperatures and the extreme weather events and the NASA reports and parts per million. I’m not here to talk about any of that. My own eyes start to glaze over at the numbers, and when I zoom out, I just feel my own helplessness and overwhelm welling up inside me until I want to shut it all out and push it away, pretending I never heard any of it.
So here was Joanna Macy, 84year‐old spiritual elder, grounded in the Buddhist tradition, brilliant and effusive and leading this workshop alongside the young activists of Movement Generation, an environmental justice organization led by low income young people of color committed to a just transition away from profit and pollution and toward healthy, resilient and life affirming local economies.
Throughout the workshop, Joanna kept saying “What a wonderful time to be alive!” And I found myself thinking “Yeah, right, Joanna, have you read the news lately?”
Joanna had us begin in her four‐step process of the work that reconnects, which begins with gratitude. And let me tell you, I wasn’t feeling too much of that, so I thought it was a particularly annoying place to start. Mostly, what I was feeling was anger.
That anger was primarily directed at my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The generations immediately preceding me had not left things in better condition than they had found it. I felt a sort of “What on earth are we supposed to do with all this mess?!”
So gratitude wasn’t quite happening for me yet.
Then Joanna asked us to honor our pain for the world—and that I could do. Pain at the ways we see violence and oppression destroy families and communities, pain at the ways that we see suffering all around us, pain for the ways we are so disconnected from one another, from our natural world, from God, from our own deepest desires.
And then, Joanna announced that we were going to time travel—we were going to talk to a descendent from seven generations into the future—which is estimated to be about 200 years. She assigned half of us to be present day beings, our own selves (I was in this group) and the other half of us would be seventh generation beings—humans from around the year 2215. She then facilitated a conversation with imaginary ancestors and descendants, talking together about this time we live in.
We present‐day ancestors began. The future beings—our imaginary descendants, asked us a series of questions about the time we, all of us, live in here and now. The questions were along the lines of “ancestor, I’ve heard stories about the critical time you live in—how much of a crisis your world was in. What was it like for you to live with that knowledge every day?” and “You must have felt confused and lonely at the beginning. How did you get started in helping our world to heal?” and “You must have felt scared and discouraged throughout it. Where did you find the strength to continue?”
Those of us embodying the role as present‐day beings each answered these questions, and then we got to hear from these pretend future beings, reflecting back what they had heard about these hard times we live in.
This was when my moment of personal transformation happened. Because in my answering of these questions, I felt defensive, like it was me, my generation, young adults who won’t be young adults forever, trying to offer an explanation for the world we might leave to the future beings. And yet all of these people in the workshop—the ones roleplaying our descendants, who in reality were older than me—were part of a generation of people I had just hours before felt that flare of anger toward. And then, all of a sudden, I had this rush of compassion, a flood of transformative understanding and patience and deep knowledge of the critical questions the next generation might hurl toward mine.
My point is this: none of us alone created our climate crisis, and in part it was created by a very short view of time—a view that expects immediate profit or loss, a view that can’t fully comprehend the consequences of our choices beyond our own lifetimes. And it wasn’t until I was invited, albeit skeptically at first, to literally converse with our descendants that I had an emotional connection to the future that allowed my moral imagination to take root.
We need a moral imagination of the possibilities we hold if we are going to stop ourselves from exporting our problems to the future. We need this sense of deep time when we think about problems that span across generations, and when we are making choices that will affect future generations.
In this, there is cause for hope. Joanna Macy again: “Passive hope is about waiting for external agencies to bring about what we desire. Active hope is about becoming active participants in what we hope for. Active hope is a practice…it is something we do, rather than have.” Joanna makes very clear that active hope does not require optimism, but rather a clarity about the outcome we would like to see, letting our intentions and our values, rather than our calculations of likely success, be our guide. Active hope cannot be discovered in an armchair or without risk. In active hope, we choose our response and act on that choice. In active hope we not only envision new possibilities, we create them for ourselves and for generations to come.
- Possibility in an Age of Ecological Despair - November 1, 2020
Thanks for this Rev. Heather Concannon! I really appreciate your explanation of the difference between active hope and passive hope.