A Question of Hope

When my oldest granddaughter, Winter, was seven or eight, she looked up at me with concern in her wide blue eyes and said, “Did you know, Grandma, polar bears will go extinct in my lifetime?” What do you say to that?

“I’ve heard that, too,” I confirmed. “The sea ice they need to survive is melting.” Scant comfort for her, or me.

More recently, I spoke about climate change with a group of sixth graders. After I laid out the connection between rising CO₂ levels and melting permafrost, a petite young girl raised her hand and said, “If you’re a scientist, does that mean you don’t believe in God?”

I thought for a bit and replied, “Many scientists see proof of God’s creation in the things they study.” True enough, and I am one of them. Yet I had to wonder, how have scientists become the villains? I can only surmise that we, as educators and as parents, have failed to communicate the value of science as a tool to deeper understanding. Now, in a world where uninformed opinions frequently supersede fact, even our leaders push back against empirical truths they don’t want to hear.   

Maybe it’s the nature of these kinds of questions, but of late, I’ve been struggling with the issue of hope. Witnessing America coming apart at the seams, I don’t have a lot of it these days.

I’m not talking about optimism at the personal level, like hoping the biopsy comes back negative or the forest fire we see from the ridgeline doesn’t burn down the house, although these are important, often all-consuming realities. I’m talking about big-picture hope. Hope that we, collectively, can cultivate the compassion and wisdom needed to reinvent our shattered society, economy, and environment into something we are excited to gift to our grandchildren.

Recently, after dutifully hunkering down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, my husband, Hal, and I decided to take an Alaskan road trip to visit friends and camp among streams and vistas not our own. We drove from our cabin in Homer to Anchorage along the gleaming expanse of Cook Inlet and stayed with our buddy David the first night. Retired after a long career as a bookstore owner, he’s well-read, and I can always depend on him for deeply probing discussions on politics, overpopulation, poverty in America, and death—depending on what book he’s currently reading. I told him I’d been thinking a lot about hope lately and asked him to share his thoughts.

His shoulders slumped, and he said, “I feel so unsettled. The world is not what I’ve been pretending it to be. It’s fucked up and getting smaller and smaller, or maybe I’m just recognizing that. Eight out of ten people I talk to want to leave the country.” He trailed off. “It’s crazy. It’s scary.”

He shrugged in agitation. “I’m so uncomfortable, almost out of my skin. I can’t even watch the news anymore. The veil about America being the greatest country on earth is gone. This country is a mess.” He paused and looked at me with a mixture of defeat and concern. “It’s not so much me I worry about.” Gesturing at his minimalist 800-square-foot house, he continued. “I’m fortunate. I’ve got everything I need. It’s my grandson and my daughters I worry about. So, hope?” He shook his head.

I’ve long believed in a quote from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I’ve joined protests against the war in Afghanistan and carried signs in the Women’s March and the March for Science. For much of my career I taught children and adults about forest and fire ecology and marine science. Over time, I began to incorporate information about greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, and melting permafrost. More and more, I spoke with a positivity about our ability to sway the future that I didn’t always feel.

Now I’m no longer sure our small band of thinkers and believers can revolutionize the state of the world. These dark days, I find myself overwhelmed by the local and national news: the swell of refugees in Central America fleeing social unrest, crop loss, and extreme heat; aquafers in the west dwindling even as populations in swell; forest fires and hurricanes growing bigger and more destructive each year. The grim reality of the news is relentless, and I question how an election outcome or a climate action plan will make a lasting difference.

The next leg of our trip took us to Talkeetna to visit with friends Monica and Steve. As we drove north of Willow, we saw campaign signs announcing Monica’s run for Alaska’s House of Representatives. After a wrong turn and a dead-end at the train tracks, we pulled into their driveway ahead of an oncoming storm. We broke with Covid protocol to give Monica a quick hug and shake Steve’s proffered hand. After a look around their classic log home with its view of cloud-capped Denali, we took separate cars (a chastened return to social distancing) and followed Monica into Talkeetna as the storm clouds gathered. It was a Sunday evening so the town was busy in a post-tourist season kind of way.

The rain started as we attuned our forks to a dinner of red salmon and tomato salad and caught up on Monica’s campaign. “I’m not running because I want this job—I’m running because the Democratic party needs representation,” she told us. Monica had retired the year prior after thirty years as a U.S. diplomat. She wasn’t looking for a new career in local politics, but she saw a need and couldn’t say no. When I told her about my efforts to quantify hope, her animated face grew serious. “My platform is on mental health issues in the state. I’m really worried about this fall and winter when people will be inside more.” This prompted a discussion about Alaska’s suicide rate and how Alaskans, if we can afford to, take a trip out of state during the darkest, coldest part of the year.

When this pandemic began, Hal and I both felt like we were living through a dystopian movie. And sometimes, because our little world hasn’t been greatly impacted by the specter of job layoffs and income loss, I find myself slipping into an easy complacency, forgetting, if only until I tune in to the news again, the predicament we’re in. I vacillate between naïve expectations and genuine despair.

The flagging optimist in me wants to believe we are on the cusp of a great awakening, with Black Lives Matter protests and women rising into positions of power serving as harbingers of a positive change. Then I read a report stating songbird populations in the United States are down by 25% since 1970 and that, by 2050, there may be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans, and I put my head in my hands.

I struggle to reign in this constant yo-yo of emotions and supplant it with some sense of grounding. As I understand the Buddhist concept of the Middle Way, we can overcome our natural tendencies toward anxiety and sorrow if we learn to engage in the moment. Lean into the pain. Look squarely at the situation. I ask myself, if fear is the flip side of hope, would hopelessness allow for fearlessness? If I’m no longer biased by hope, maybe greater clarity will follow.

The next day we drove east across Hatcher Pass in a steady rainstorm to meet up with Fairbanks friends Don and Tracie at a cabin they maintain off the Richardson Highway. That far north, the birch and aspen were full-on gold, and the waning fireweed lent a brilliant red to the understory. The clouds parted briefly, and to the south of us, Mount Sanford and Mount Drum gleamed with the fall’s first snow.

Inside the cabin, we all donned masks and ate our meals at separate tables, then Hal and I slept in our car to reduce the risk of transmission. Tracie, a youthful fifty-one, can always be counted on to speak her mind with candor and compassion. Don, who looks all of his seventy-three years, with white hair and stooped shoulders, is as active as ever. He has an optimistic yet pragmatic outlook on life that I admire. During our stay at the cabin, it rained hard off and on, but during breaks in the weather we hiked to the ridgeline for an expansive alpine view, and trekked along the braided Delta River where we picked a small treasure of blueberries.

One evening, as Hal washed the dinner dishes with boiled rainwater, I broached the subject of hope. Hal, washrag in hand, chimed in with his argument against hope, which goes something like this: “Hope is a distraction the mind uses to try to cope, and often, as a result, we’re left with disappointment.”

Don countered, “We’ve faced difficult times in the past and, in the end, we’ve come out stronger than before. The Spanish flu in the 1920s. The Great Depression. World War II. If anything, we’re better situated now than we were then. I’m not ready to throw in the towel.” He explained that he’s been volunteering in local election efforts as a way to help.

Tracie spoke of the youth she’s met through Don, “There are all these young people who are out of school, their world is a mess and their answer is to work on the election.” I recalled all the younger folks I know in Homer, especially women, who are dipping a toe into politics or dreaming up sustainable, community-centered business plans. Tracie echoed my thoughts, “The young people I know want to make the world a better place.”

Recent events have laid bare the frail nature of our democracy. Many of us concede that we can do little more than observe the signs and brace ourselves, best as we can, for the coming storm. We plant a big garden, buy gold, or stockpile dry goods and pray it’s enough to shore us up against whatever the worst may bring. Yet this jaded view doesn’t take into account the determination, perceptiveness, and connected nature of the younger generation.

I know women in their twenties and thirties who are hesitant to bring children into this world, and I admire them for setting aside long-held traditions and personal fulfillment to avoid what will surely be a difficult future for their would-be descendants. This feels like a sound choice, but on another level, I suffer a sense of loss for the children these wise, insightful women would have raised. The irony is, we need more broad-minded, colorblind children if we are to have any chance of resolving the issues we face.

Consider Greta Thunberg and the rallying cry of students in the United States and Europe, unified in their efforts to awaken national leaders to the effects of climate change. When high school students take the stage to chastise their government for leaving them catastrophic problems to solve, how can I not cheer them on, lump in my throat, and believe that, this time, change will be forthcoming? Isn’t that reason for hope?

Still, we can hope all we want for political mandates to curb carbon emissions when what we need is a worldwide groundswell of people who willingly trade in their cars for electric vehicles or bicycles, invest in solar or wind energy, curtail their shopping habits, and reduce their dependence on beef. This broadscale corrective action, coupled with government incentives, might just slam on the emergency breaks as we approach eight billion people and an imminent plunge over the cliff of diminished fish stocks in the ocean, dwindling aquifers, and climate collapse. To this end, I’m not optimistic, but I haven’t given up.

On the last night of our road trip, we drove south to Seward. The rain had departed, and the cool air, tanged with highbush cranberries, held the promise of frost. We stayed with friends Jacq and Jay in the hills above town, car camping outside of the Airstream they call home. If the rest of my friends can claim a little safety net, not so for these two dear souls. Any slight shift in the ground beneath them could send them into a crevasse of debt and despair. Worry haunts my relationship with them.

Jacq was tidying up her flower garden when I asked her about hope. She brushed her hands on her jeans and looked up, her face thoughtful. “It’s like every day, or every few days, new icebergs roll over and expose these massive instabilities we only suspected before,” she said. She wondered when she would feel safe traveling to visit her elderly parents and shared her concerns about the winter to come. As the breadwinner in her family, she carries the weight of the world on her slight shoulders, and the struggles imposed by winter grow harder each year. I wanted to hug her, but we don’t do that these days. Then, like sunshine burning through the clouds, she smiled and gestured to a pair of nuthatches at a nearby feeder. The tiny birds chittered cheerful as they worked at the suet she had provided. Jacq has a tenacious resilience that awes me, and our conversation moved on to other things as we pulled out lawn chairs and drew our eyes to the brilliance of the late-day sun on Mount Marathon.

The obvious occurred to me—hope serves a vital role. It gives us the courage to confront the days ahead, run for public office, or take a road trip to visit friends during perilous times. Hope is like the winter solstice. Darkness, but with the promise of light returning. And when we slow down enough to savor the small joys that present themselves each day, like dew on a spider’s web or the paisley of frost on the windshield, we find that we can survive the unthinkable.

My youngest grandchild, Dorothy, lives with her mom in Tucson. Her parents are divorced and my former daughter-in-law, with whom I have a close relationship, has custody. Dot is spirited, inquisitive, and analytical. Her questions are so astute she trips me up if I’m not on my toes. For her, I want a world rich in possibilities – a world where a wicked-smart little girl can aspire to a college education without the burden of student loans and with better prospects than holding down multiple minimum-wage jobs. She should be free to love whomever she wants, and her body should belong only to her, without the government dictating what she can or can’t choose for herself.

But I foresee that, in addition to her struggles for personal freedom, she will witness a world whose population approaches sixteen billion people, a global temperature rise that will leave places like Tucson uninhabitable, and the loss of polar bears and songbirds, along with thousands of other species. I’m bracing for the day when the reality of this diminishment hits home, and she looks at me with her chocolate-brown eyes, wounded by the truth of her situation. What words of hope can I offer her then?

Just this. We do the best we can and then push ourselves to do a little better, give a little more, and ask for a smaller portion. We march and vote and write letters, trusting against all odds that our collective voices can and will make a difference. We cultivate community with others and build resilience together. Family relationships matter, especially those families we create from our eclectic, supportive friends. We need each other now more than ever. At the same time, we strive to awaken to the here and now, relishing the gifts of late season berries and the call of sandhill cranes as they ride the thermals in advance of their migration south.

For hope is like a seedling. To plant a forest, we plant one seedling at a time. If I tend to my seedlings, protecting them even as the world around them burns, and you do the same, someday we will rest in the shade they cast, and if enough of us harbor and tend to the same hopes and dreams, there will be a forest from coast to coast for our grandchildren to steward. We need only to teach them how.