Radical Hope: Inspiring Sustainability Transformations through Our Past (original) (raw)
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Stories of Hope: Towards Radical Ecological Democracy
Common Voices , 2011
Across the world, communities and other actors are innovating solutions to the myriad problems of unsustainability, hunger, thirst, inequities, shelter, disease, and illiteracy. Such stories of hope are still small compared to the dominant economic-political system they are confronting, but they provide the seeds of an alternative future.
Environmental History, 2019
Responding to the social, political, economic, and ecological challenges that confront contemporary society, this article—the 2019 Presidential Address to the American Society for Environmental History—argues that critique and resistance, married with a quest for alternative possibilities, will serve us better than a doleful narrative of decline. It seeks hope by reengaging with the ideas of scholars who earlier lamented despoliation and envisaged other, better, ways of being in the world. By discovering, interrogating, and drawing insight from the ways in which our precursors sought to emancipate their contemporaries, we can ask what they (or their ideas) can do for us. Although this strategy is unlikely to deliver immediate efficacious solutions to current dilemmas, it can help us to historicize ourselves and the precepts that shape our lives. It can also expand the range of existential possibilities by calling into question the conceited convictions, tired mantras, and blithe ass...
Hope for a Cause as Cause for Hope: The Need for Hope in Environmental Sociology
The American Sociologist, 2007
Hope is a crucial component of agency involving the setting of goals, visualization of obstacles, and increasing willpower in the effort of achieving a desired goal. This hope is not simply optimism and is potentially a bridge between structure and agency. Yet, the powers of hope in sociology have been greatly unexplored including the ability of collective hope to create social change. This lack of hope is particularly poignant in environmental sociology as the sub-discipline looks for solutions to some of the greatest challenges humanity and the planet faces. This article discusses the undercurrent of pessimism in environmental sociology and calls for the integration of hope as it is necessary for generating potential social environmental change.
Living Well Wherever You Are: Radical Hope and the Good Life in the Anthropocene
A number of thinkers have pointed to radical hope as both an appropriate affective state to motivate action in a time of radical change and perhaps the only appropriate reaction to the uncertainties expected in the Anthropocene. As Jonathan Lear characterizes it, radical hope is a hope that we might find a meaningful existence without the context and substantial constraints that previously provided one's life with meaning. If we are to appeal to radical hope as an appropriate form of motivation in the Anthropocene, however, we need an appropriate object for that hope. We need some sense of what we are hoping for. In this paper I argue that the most appropriate objects for radical hope are ideals generated from the substantial freedoms required for any recognizably human good life. These substantial freedoms amount to Senian capabilities. While, owing to its inherent uncertainties, we cannot conceptualize with suitable specificity what a good life would be in the Anthropocene, we can recognize that it will be shaped by the substantial freedoms required for most any good life, that is, by capabilities. As capabilities express ideals about the good life, these ideals provide the appropriate object for radical hope. Hoping for ideals of the good life should provide an object for our motivation in a time when the specifics of that good life are unclear. Just as radical hope seems an appropriate response to our changing climate, the ideals underpinning capabilities provide a grounding for that hope suitable for the Anthropocene.
Hope in the Age of the Anthropocene
2019
Today we are faced with all the traditional reasons to despair: poverty, loneliness, loss, tragedy, death, and the like. And, for many, this despair is exacerbated by either the modern disenchantment of the world, or a postmodern suspicion regarding grand narratives (especially those speculating about transcendence), or both. The news of the day sounds a relentless drumbeat of woe. As I write these words on a rainy morning in southern California—itself a depressing reminder of the apocalyptic drought my state is suffering, and the anthropogenic climate change that is likely to make such droughts more common and more severe—the headlines include: the ongoing brutality of the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria; increasing tensions between Russia and the West, including frightening near-misses involving unregistered military aircraft; the stillsmoldering catastrophe of Ebola Zaire in West Africa (and parallel, though much less publicized, stories of MERS and H5N1, either of which, in a ...