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In March 2009, John Vucetich, assistant professor of animal ecology at Michigan Technological University, and Michael Nelson, associate professor of environmental ethics at Michigan State University, penned an essay titled "Abandon Hope."
"Their goal wasn't to denounce positivity," explains Josh Peterson at TreeHugger. "Their aim was to challenge the belief that hope can motivate folks to overcome looming environmental problems. They claim that people should be motivated by the intrinsic value of "doing the right thing."
As Peterson explains, environmental messages are unceasingly woeful. "Many environmentalists have taken to focusing on the positive to motivate others and to undermine the ever-growing piles of bad, bad news," he writes. "However, accentuating the positive may not eliminate the negative. Instead, it sends two contradictory messages to the general public."
Author Derrick Jensen explains the impotency of hope as good as anyone: "I'm not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they've assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they've stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it." If Jensen makes it sound an awful lot like religion, well, for most folks, the verb "hope" is virtually synonymous with "pray," while "hope" the noun is often interchangeable with "faith."
Action is better than hope. Get involved! Take action!
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