Losing to a dog at 17D chess

something i struggle with these days, as a millenial who has lived through greenwashing and carbon credits- is hope an op? are we getting peddled idealism and hope to cover for us being well and truly screwed?

i love this blog so much and i want to have optimism but i’m also so, so scared that this is a dupe, another shell (not u but like in general)

how do you combat that? how do you push past that?

Hi Anon,

This is a great question and definitely a not-uncommon feeling. I do sometimes get the not-so-nice version of this sentiment expressed at me in angry asks accusing me of lying or being paid to say the things I say.

I think that a confluence of factors, including the manufactured climate denial that got us where we are now, has understandably made a lot of people suspicious of hope in general. That if someone disagrees that everything is irredeemably broken beyond the point of trying to fix it, that if they say good things can happen sometimes, they are complicit in letting everything that is problematic and awful and unfair in our world off the hook.

Comic by Tom Gauld

While there is certainly old-fashioned climate denialism still out there, many entities with a vested interest in stalling climate action have switched their narrative to “it’s too late to be worth doing anything”. They’ve changed from blind, passive optimism to blind, passive pessimism, but it has the same impact of suppressing action. Dr. Simon Clark has a great in-depth video about this.

One quick test for possible manipulation is to think about what tangible action a message is likely to encourage and who that would benefit. Hope, or at least the kind of hope I try to promote on this blog, is not “things will get better no matter what we do”—that is blind optimism. Hope is “we can make things better through our actions”.

I’ve gotten many asks from folks telling me this blog inspired them to start environmental careers or volunteering that they previously felt too hopeless to pursue—and from people who felt the good news helped them pull out of a mental health spiral and get back to their lives. Dr. Hannah Ritchie, a climate change sustainability researcher at Oxford and Our World in Data, nearly did not go into the environmental field because she felt so overwhelmed by doomerism. I do not think hope prompts the kind of actions that the people who would dupe us and stall climate action are going for.

That being said, I do very much understand that knee-jerk, wary feeling. A dear family member recently got me the book How to Fall in Love With the Future by climate activist Rob Hopkins, which imagines various hopeful futures that could exist when we take positive environmental action and discusses how doing so can help us commit to fighting for those futures. Some of these radically hopeful futures made me so uncomfortable that I had to take a break from reading. Something about imagining things going really well felt unsafe or irresponsible, like it was too painful to open myself up to hoping for something so good.

Engaging with hope and the imperfect, complicated work of trying to make things better comes with uncertainty and uncertainty is scary. Sometimes certainty feels safer and more in-control even if it’s a negative certainty. I don't have any easy tips for getting over that hump, but I do think it helps to acknowledge that the hump is there and that it comes from a place of understandable fear and pain. Give yourself space and patience in letting those emotions run their course. It's a process for me as well.

Something I can say with complete certainty is that the future will be better than it otherwise would have been if we believe we have the power to make it better.

I hope this helps you trust the hope at least a little more, Anon. <3

No shirt, no bra, completely bare torso, just like cis men are allowed to

It's about desexualizing breasts and "female presenting nipples" and not being criminalized for our bodies if we want to go topless because it's a million damn degrees out. This was a popular growing movement that was still widely known a decade ago!

Kiki’s Delivery Service: takes place in the regular world— albeit at some nebulous point in time— but also magic is real and witches are a thing. Witches exist in this world because it’s fun and we like them. It’s fantasy elements in a familiar setting— essentially urban or modern fantasy.

Porco Rosso: takes place in an extremely specific place and time and contains exactly one fantastical element— Marco’s pig head— which is never given an explanation and is never questioned as a biological impossibility. It’s clearly a metaphor and commentary on a real world issue but it’s also very much literal. This dude 100% has a pig head. No other mentions of magic are made. This is magical realism.

Propaganda not given