#daniel sherrell

It feels increasingly clear to me that I don’t have hope. It’s not that I’ve succumbed to fatalism. I just no longer think that hope is something you can “have”. The past two weeks have made unmistakably vivid to me that hope is a kind of discipline; it is something you do. I have felt the daily effort of it: gritting my teeth and wrenching some glimmer from the gloom. [...] [H]ope is not something we do because we know we’re going to win. Hope is something we do for each other. It’s a gift we grow together then spread outward, a communal act of unconditional grace. It is looking past the headlines at the people we love and telling them we haven’t given up.

The nature of fossil fuel is essentially ambivalent: an invisible pervasion that powers all things and will also, inevitably, destroy them. It is produced by drilling, extracting, and refining those delicate ferns and planktons that millions of years ago were ground to sludge by the planet’s crust. The sludge gets processed into coal, gas, or petroleum, then shipped off to power plants where it is converted into energy. In this way we power the present almost exclusively by burning the remains of the past. Unearthed, our history surrounds us, dissolving through the air, until its ubiquity comes to look very much like the future itself. Another way to put this is that we are involved in a kind of transgeologic grave robbing, in light of which, the Problem can rightly be seen as a haunting.

This is maybe the chief ethical and political challenge presented by life in the Anthropocene. To finally match our obvious and increasing interdependence with an appropriate breadth of care.