Your singing Garbage Man

Daily Equestria Sketch #125

Due to where it is typically grown, coffee farms are particularly vulnerable to damage from erosion when rain comes either too intensely or too sparsely. A coalition assembled by the Global Environment Facility set up test farms to help provide local coffee farmers in Uganda with the resources to apply regenerative agricultural techniques to their local farming conditions.

The results have led to better yields, healthier soil that is less prone to erosion, and more stable income for farmers.

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

Mangrove forests used to be considered one of the world's most threatened ecosystems. However, recent analysis of satellite data shows that mangrove forests are no longer in decline and in fact the global coverage of mangrove forests has been increasing over the last 16 years due to restoration and natural habitat expansion.

I'm an ecologist. As you can imagine, that's not exactly a very fun profession to be in right now. Every day I have to deal with multiple different crises on multiple fronts- coral reef bleaching, extinctions, habitat destruction on unprecedented scales, and governments that don't really seem to be giving a single shit about any of it.

Do you have any advice for staying resilient and optimistic about the future?

Hi Anonymous Ecologist,

First, I can't express how much I resonate with the way you are feeling. My educational background and career have all been in either biology/ecology or closely adjacent work—and I currently work with a lot of folks doing ecology research.

Here are some other posts I’ve made about this topic that might also be helpful to you. (X) (X)

When I was freshly graduated with my ecology degree, I had a long period where I couldn’t look at a beautiful landscape or endangered animal without prematurely grieving its loss. How much longer until this forest is clear cut or degraded beyond recognition? Will this species be to my kids what the thylacine was to me? I saw only the damage, the invasive species, found flaws in any news of progress. I believed the conservation and environmental work was worth doing for its own sake, but deep down I often did not truly believe it would ever be enough to slow or push back the tide of destruction.

But the thing is, I was wrong. Not just philosophically, but my belief that everything was just circling the drain and not enough people cared to make any meaningful progress was demonstrably, factually wrong. Things have gotten better and they can continue to get better in the future, even though it doesn't always feel that way.

Here are some tips that have helped get me out of that hopeless place:

1. Consciously look for and give attention to the good news. Yes, there is damage and backsliding and grief, but I also have stories come across my feed ever day of dam removal, rewilding and reintroductions, species being spotted in places they were previously wiped out for decades, ecosystems bouncing back after receiving protections, grassroots restoration efforts, the list goes on. It’s easy to have a knee jerk “it’s not enough” or “what about X, Y, Z?”, but you do really need to stop and actually feel the hope, joy, and pride when progress is made instead of immediately moving on to the next crisis—no one can live in crisis mode forever without burning out. “Things are a long way from where they need to be” and “we are making progress” are two thoughts that can both be true at the same time.

2. Zoom out and look at the bigger picture. It often takes a lot longer to fix things than break them, and I think that can sometimes make ecological work feel like banging your head against a wall with nothing to show for it. But much like the starlight we see now can be hundreds of years (or much more!) old, in many cases we are just now seeing the major payoffs from decades of previous conservation work. Many of the known and unknown heroes who quietly, patiently did that work did not live to see the full extent of their impact. The light from the work we are doing now—the work you are doing now—may not be visible yet but it’s coming and it will be so bright when it gets here. Just because you’re not seeing it right away doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

3. Look back at historic environment wins. Remember that we used to spray DDT on children at picnics because of how “safe” society considered it. We fought and won against acid rain and chemicals burning a hole in the ozone layer. “Save the Whales” was a pejorative for “naive, unrealistic environmentalist” fifty years ago and now many whale populations are headed towards or even exceeding per-commercial-whaling numbers. Even within my own lifetime, it wasn’t all that long ago that I had never seen an electric car and renewable energy was considered impractically expensive—now I see many electric cars every day and solar is the cheapest energy on Earth. There are species that were fully on life support when I was born that are now surviving and repopulating without human intervention. Things have looked insurmountably bad before and they have gotten better—and the progress we have made today looks a lot more encouraging when you look back at where we started.

4. Tell yourself hopeful stories. I’m sure this one is going to make some people raise their eyebrows because it sounds a bit cheesy, but it really does help to imagine the world you are working towards instead of just what you are fighting against. This used to make me super uncomfortable, it felt almost wrong or painful to imagine things actually getting that much better. But it gets easier. Imagine the cheering and celebration when we close the last coal plant. Imagine a little girl many generations in the future, about to snorkel a coral reef, with her dive instructor telling the story of all the people and all the work it took for that reef to still exist. I used to imagine how special a day it would be when it was finally safe to release frog species decimated by chytrid back into the wild—but it turns out we are already working on that decades earlier than I would have expected!

5. Recognize that hope is a more effective psychological strategy for progress than cynicism. Research has found that our society tends to view cynicism as a more rational and even sometimes more moral worldview, but the opposite is true. Cynics actually perform worse on cognitive and social tasks and they are less likely to vote, protest, or take positive action. Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki is a really excellent book about this. Sometimes on bad days I have to remind myself that hope is a strategy and to act as if my actions will make a difference even if I'm not really feeling it that day--if you act that way long enough your brain will start to believe it.

6. Speaking of books, I personally find it really helpful to read books by smart and qualified people who work in the interface between climate/environmental science and psychology/hope. I’ve been meaning to make a post with my ever growing book list, but Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie and A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety by Sarah Ray are two excellent ones off the top of my head.

I really hope this is helpful to you. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the work that you do. I can almost guarantee it is having a bigger impact than you know. <3

❤️💙💛GRACEFUL💛💙❤️