BOILING POINT
They toil in climate
change battles. What
gives them hope?
Thanksgiving is a fitting time for writers, activists, heads of advocacy groups to reflect on their work
You’re probably just as tired of reading dire climate change news as I am of writing it.
So this week — when we’re all doing our best to practice gratitude and remind ourselves of the good things in life, and eat some delicious food — let’s try something different: Let’s talk hope.
I reached out to nine people who work on environmental issues or who otherwise deal with the climate crisis in their professional lives. I asked them what makes them optimistic, what keeps them going.
Here’s what they had to say.
Working to protect biodiversity — all creatures great and small — in the face of climate change can be daunting.
But I remain hopeful because I work in a state where we are leading by doing, and everyday people are striving for that better future. California has set important goals to grow clean energy, reverse the extinction crisis and protect our lands and waters for the benefit of all. We are the first state to implement a plan to protect 30% of our lands and waters by 2030, as part of a global effort to conserve biodiversity and build climate resilience.
Achieving California’s ambitious goals is an enormous challenge. But scientists, lawyers, organizers, legislators and their staff, government leaders, academics, students and so many others get up each day thinking about how to do better, be better and make the changes we need to tackle these tough problems.
It is not difficult to be optimistic when you work with people who see the challenges ahead and persevere because they know that a better future will happen only through hard work, dedication, and (to steal a line from a colleague) endless pressure, endlessly applied.
If Michael Jordan, Leo Messi, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady and Wayne Gretzky put together a comprehensive report on how to play their sports, it would fly off the shelves. Yet we discount top scientists when they file their climate reports.
I spoke at the United Nations when I played for the Cincinnati Reds, before the 2009 climate conference. Thirteen years later, millions of lives have been sacrificed by continued corporate greed and irresponsibility.
Athletes around the world have told me stories about how the climate is changing all around them. They’re experiencing warming water, lack of rainfall, more extreme weather, early melting of ice/snowpack and increasing temperatures. So I know we’re too late to solve the climate crisis. But I am determined. I am optimistic about the power of sport.
Sport is a great unifier, transcending political, cultural, religious and socioeconomic barriers. It can wield a uniquely powerful influence, providing leadership in sustainable practices and demonstrating a nonpolitical commitment to environmental protection. Sport also has the ability to leverage its power by demanding action from its corporate sponsors.
Teams, leagues and professional athletes must hold themselves to a higher set of values and responsibilities.
There is a difference between having hope and being hopeful.
I’ve always been an optimist — it is what has let me continue to work on issues of climate change, water resources and resource conflicts for more than 40 years. I’m hopeful that over time, we — the world — will act on the clear and definitive information about the threats posed by global climate change, inequities and resource mismanagement and depletion.
I see signs that the world is beginning to act (though faster is always better). I also hope that it rains this year in the western U.S., that our progress in moving to more sustainable water management continues and accelerates, and that the voices of delay and denial are drowned out by the voices of science, reason and action.
Last week, I was invited by First Lady Jill Biden to the White House. In grand rooms bearing portraits of U.S. presidents and American Indian chiefs, a couple of hundred Indigenous people gathered for the first White House celebration of Native American Heritage Month.
“Indigenous peoples are at the decision-making table,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary, said in her remarks to attendees. “And we’re not going back!”
I was the first to publicly suggest Haaland should be nominated for her role. As a writer, I had the opportunity to profile her and to help make the case for her historic appointment. Haaland now leads a department that manages one-fifth of the nation’s landmass and vast reserves of natural resources, as well as government-to-government relationships with more than 570 federally recognized tribes.
The fact that Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Month both fall in November has long felt like a cruel irony. The Pilgrims took a lot over the last 400 years. But these days I’m bullish on the possibility that we just might get back what was ours.
Hope is a choice. It is a verb. It is not simply a feeling but a decision about how to live one’s life.
With climate change, hope is usually framed as a question about the future. I find hope in the past.
As a journalist, I’ve interviewed such giants of hope as Vaclav Havel, who helped bring democracy to the former Soviet Union. I visited Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for many years before South Africa’s apartheid regime was forced to free him. My latest book investigates slavery in the American South.
A strictly rational person would have seen no hope that totalitarianism, apartheid or slavery would ever fall. But fall they did because Havel, Mandela and thousands of others chose hope over despair — not because they knew they would win, but because choosing hope was the only way they might win.
Every one of us can make that same choice today about the climate emergency. Young people are leading the way. That is hope in action.
I’m a theoretical astro/physicist who grew up in smoggy 1980s East L.A., right next to the 10 Freeway. My part of El Sereno, broken off from the rest by industrial train tracks, had no parks within reasonable walking or biking distance.
Across the U.S., kids like me are taught to hope for the opportunity to escape our communities. Today, I imagine other possibilities: for kids like me to have everything they need, right where they are. That is why I am pleased to follow the work of the Atlanta Forest Defenders, who are protecting the largest tree canopy in any major U.S. city.
The Atlanta Police Department plans to desecrate Weelaunee Forest with a new training facility. So far, a cross-community coalition of Indigenous people, Black people and other prison abolitionists and environmental protectors has succeeded in stopping the plan. They articulate themselves as “an autonomous movement for the future of South Atlanta.” To me, they are hope.
Each morning when I watch the sun rise in Utah’s red rock desert and illuminate Adobe Mesa, I see a fresh day before me. And the setting sun that sinks behind Porcupine Rim creates an encore light on Castleton Tower that is swoon-worthy. I am alive with gratitude.
What happens in between dawn and dusk is something deeper than hope. For me, it has everything to do with how we choose to engage with a world on fire. Meeting fire with fire is one strategy. Find your fire — what you are passionate about — and create a back-burn to meet the encroaching flames. Where they dance is where the sparks of change are born. Earth vows take root in the clearing.
In my neighborhood, children don’t get to play in parks. Instead, families set up kiddie pools between cars so their kids can cool down on hot weekends and summer days. Many can see their school across the street, vacant and unused, behind locked gates.
Children struggle to find green spaces in Mid-City and most low-income L.A. neighborhoods. Most city parks are far from home and often require crossing major thoroughfares. During the pandemic, not having a park or playground hurt children’s physical and mental health even more. With high real estate costs, demand to increase apartment stock and lack of appetite to build parks, some residents have begun to give up on any demand for green spaces.
That’s why a group of neighbors and I started Ready to Help Mutual Aid Community Network. We pressure city officials, demanding they allow school playgrounds to open as parks on evenings and weekends, and offer new outdoor and beautification programs.
There’s a lot of work left to do, but our pilot program at Alta Loma Elementary School led to 20 other community school parks opening their gates. And that gives me so much hope.
As we prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, I choose to be optimistic and grateful for our recent progress on climate action, and the strong leadership of President Biden and his superb climate team.
I believe the Inflation Reduction Act is a game-changer for the economics of clean energy and climate action. The 10-year extension of tax credits for clean energy, storage and other technologies is crucial, especially combined with the authority given to federal agencies to partner with states and utilities to build transmission lines.
I am also grateful for the continuing leadership of California. Despite recent setbacks with delayed retirement of old dirty gas plants and continuing reliance on dirty diesel backup, California knows what it needs to do to build out the infrastructure of clean energy, storage, distributed solar and fuel cells, expand energy efficiency and demand response, and hopefully retire the oldest, least-efficient gas plants in environmental justice communities such as Oxnard.
Most of all, I am optimistic about the passion and commitment of young Generation Z and millennial voters to transform the political landscape and accelerate climate action in time to stave off the worsening effects of global warming.
