This week I have been thinking about hope and responsibility, two words that have gotten a lot of play in the last few months. My train of thought actually started with a contrarian-sounding article in The Ecologist, in which John Vucetich, assistant professor of animal ecology at Michigan Technological University, and Michael Nelson, associate professor of environmental ethics at Michigan State University, argue that holding out hope for a sustainable future can actually do more harm than good. Since the major messages we receive about climate change are a) doom and b) need for overwhelming change, it’s not psychologically realistic, they contend, for masses of people to be motivated out of hope for the future — yet this is exactly what environmentalists tend to urge. Is advocating hope just sowing the seeds of disillusionment and apathy?
“Instead of hope, we need to provide young people with reasons to live sustainably that are rational and effective,” the professors write. “We need to lift up examples of sustainable living motivated by virtue more than by a dubious belief that such actions will avert environmental disaster.” This makes a lot of sense to me, and most people would agree that hope of averting disaster is a rather burdensome aspiration. ”Sharing”, “improving the neighborhood” and “eating well” are examples of much more immediate and practical motivators, and what is built on them outlasts our constantly shifting anxieties about the future. People who participate in a community garden project are making big strides towards a sustainable lifestyle, but they are not necessarily doing it just to save the world. They might (or even might not) want to save the world, but a community garden is also connected to commonsense, personal-level virtues that nearly everyone tries to live up to; and it yields local, tangible results. Another way to put this is that, in addition to working on how we can help make society more sustainable, we need to ask how we can connect sustainability to the everyday business of living a good life. Maybe one day the future will be an intrinsically hopeful concept again; for now, what we want to achieve is more in the nature of practical inspiration.
The Transition Town project, when I heard about it, certainly had an inspiring effect on me. “Transition Town” is a framework for achieving carbon neutrality on a community scale, by taking responsibility for the vision of the places where we live. Transition Town provides sustainability activists a set of common goals, a process model, and some support infrastructure; so it’s more, and less, than a blueprint. The underlying philosophy is a cheeky kind of can-do, community empowerment (because, to paraphrase the website, government projects may be too little, too late, and individual effort is usually too little); and the key concept is the Transition Initiative. As Transition Town’s wiki sets forth,
‘A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:
for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?’
Hundreds of communities around the world have become part of the project, and thousands more probably have the critical mass of people ready to take it on. There may be a Transition Initiative happening where you live — Los Angeles, where I live, has one — and perhaps you are interested in helping to organize something in your own community.
