Hope Requires Energy—But It Is Necessary

Despair about human-caused damage to clean air, fresh water, healthy oceans, and abundant forests has started to affect the mental health of adolescents. They can’t understand why we have done so little to protect their future.

Until recently, most of us have been able to avert our eyes and let our individual lives distract us, but last summer the wildfire smoke from forest degradation enshrouded great swaths of our country. We couldn’t breathe the air of our denial anymore.

The most important response is to find hope—search for it, identify its specific contours, and then to enact the small steps that collectively make a difference. Where the psychology of despair leads to inaction, hope quite literally causes us to fill our lungs and get going on doing something. Yet it’s not so easy to find hope and nurture it.

Hope itself requires energy; we can’t simply proclaim it. We have to find ways to bolster our sense of hope and keep it coming as temperatures rise, the sea surges, and the fires rage.

First, let’s give voice to our distress. This is what a group of teenagers did in Montana last year when they invoked their right to clean air, fresh water, and intact forests that had been enshrined in their state’s constitution. They took their state government to court and won. Now Montana’s legislature cannot accede to short-term economic interests while sacrificing the future of their children’s children.

The boost we receive from speaking up and taking action in turn gives us the energy for maintaining the hope we need to go on speaking up and taking action. It’s the same for any healing process. When someone first tells a therapist about abuse suffered in childhood, the therapist must hold hope out to this person during the tough early days of coming out of isolation. Gradually, the person finds hope on their own and in relationship to others. The reward of speaking up releases them from what they had been bearing alone and keeps getting replenished.

When she was dying at 101 years old, a dear friend born in 1883 told me: “I’m sorry to be leaving you such a dirty world. When I was a little girl, the world was clean and quiet. I didn’t hear the motor of a car until I was in my thirties.” She crossed the ocean to Europe on a ship. She never got to fly in a plane, and so she asked me to describe what the clouds looked like from up there in the sky. I did my best, just as she did with telling me about the silence that had once been so deep and how they had no garbage, how everything could be used again or in another way, and how infinite the stars were in the night sky, and how it was to walk amongst the grandeur of the old growth trees that once stood at the edge of what was becoming the city of Seattle.

Now as an elder myself, thirty years younger than the age she attained, I find hope in the adolescents who are standing up and demanding their right to a cleaner and more silent world, a world of inordinate beauty that is ours to keep and pass on.