Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods

       INTRODUCTION

      In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report. It is a work defined by exhaustive detail and three exact and exacting conclusions. The first is that the global target set in the Paris Agreement of 1.5°C of warming would have far greater impacts than were previously anticipated.¹ The second is that these impacts would still be vastly preferable to those incurred by 2°C of warming: a sea-level rise of nearly half a meter by 2100; a massive increase in the proportion of the population exposed to severe heat; a decrease in marine fisheries by three million tons; a sixteen-percent loss of plant species; and a ninety-nine percent decline in coral reefs.² Perhaps most striking, however, was the report’s third and final conclusion: the window for containing these clearly catastrophic consequences is rapidly closing. If warming is to be limited to 1.5°C, just twelve years remain in which to undertake what the authors call an “unprecedented” transformation of society. As NASA scientist Kate Marvel notes, 2030 is not a deadline. Climate change is not “a cliff we fall off—it’s a slope we slide down. We don’t have twelve years to prevent climate change, we have no time. It’s already here. And even under a business-as-usual scenario, the world isn’t going to end in exactly twelve years.”³

      The authors of the IPCC report intended it as a “clarion bell”—an intervention which would “mobilize people and dent the mood of complacency.”⁴ Yet the reception of the report was, for many, defined not by decisive determination but desperate dejection. As climate activist Mary Annaïse Heglar notes, “Lots of folks who had never thought about climate change, or who thought it lived on some distant horizon, are now coming to terms with its reality, here and now. They’re terrified. And sad.”⁵ In an essay published just a few days after the report, she describes how she came to comprehend the scale of climate change and how it drove her to despair:

      I knew climate change was real. I knew it was dire. I had an inkling that it was not far away. But I didn’t know just how bad it was. I didn’t know how many innocent — and I mean innocent — people were already suffering hideously. I didn’t know how many people had been marked as allowable casualties because they were born in the wrong places under the wrong circumstances.… Where other people saw bustling crowds of people, I saw death and destruction. Even as I walked on dry land, I saw floods.… I worried about how we would treat each other in the face of such calamity. I doubted it would be kind. (I still doubt that, actually.)

      Heglar suggests that for many, the initial shock of destruction is not met with resolve but with grief. The realization that people, creatures, and entire ecosystems have died, are dying, and will continue to die does not immediately lead to determination but melancholia. As Heglar puts it, “We’re mourning our futures … some of us are mourning our todays, even our yesterdays.” The quantification of destruction does not instantly inaugurate action to prevent it, especially when what is being destroyed is so all-encompassing. Indeed, the devestation is so total that its most spectacular forms—floods, storms, fires—are poor metaphors for the true depth of the damage. To really grapple with the scale of the destruction involves attending to the slower, less eye-catching processes: the