Preparing for Hope in an Apocalypse
A personal reflection on the ways in which I have been preparing for the climate emergency all of my life
Every day, I am all too aware of the need for hope in what seems like a hopeless climate crisis. Knowing that without hope, humans risk losing the ability to respond, I wrote my first post on my blog on my website about hope. It is a more academic piece about understanding what hope is. This essay is a personal reflection on how I have come to understand how hope has played out in my life, since I was very young. I invite you to use it to consider where you find hope in the world today, and how you live it out.
Apocalypse Movies and Me
Mark and I watched an apocalypse movie on the weekend, the 2014 film Interstellar. In the movie, the Earth is becoming increasingly uninhabitable, as something has caused deadly dust storms and crops are failing. Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is an astronaut who, with the help of Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) and his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy as a girl, Jessica Chastain as an adult), seeks to find another planet where they can all live. I am not into science fiction, normally, but since it was about the Earth dying due to ecological collapse, I was all in. (And with a brilliant gifted girl who ends up saving the world? Yes please!)
I love apocalypse movies. Shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic started, I re-watched Contagion (as did millions of others on Netflix). I enjoy movies where a cyclone is about to decimate a community, or an asteroid is coming, or tidal waves. And, for many reasons, I loved the 2021 Don’t Look Up. It’s a must-see, whether you like apocalypse movies or not.
Mark remarked on the fact that I spend my days dealing with apocalypse, or the ‘ecological Armageddon,’ as I have nicknamed the climate emergency. Wouldn’t I want to watch something completely different, in my downtime? As you can see from the above, my answer was ‘no’.
I have been reflecting on this. Wouldn’t I be tired of learning about crisis by the end of the day, and want something completely different? Doesn’t it raise my anxiety to watch ecological threats (and pandemics) play out on the movie screen? No it doesn’t. They actually energize me; even though they are fictional (not only is it impossible, but I think that the idea of trying to find a different planet to live on because we destroyed this one to be a really bad one), it is the idea of acting in response to crisis, the idea of being able to use all of who we are, well-equipped or not, to offer healing or rescue, that thrills me. Remember the 2004 Day After Tomorrow? I have come to realize that it is what I have been playing and working at all of my life.
“Wilderness” and Early Activism
It seems that confronting crisis and acting upon it has been a part of my makeup, part of who I am, since I was young. I grew up in the country on 300 acres, with a cedar grove as my backyard. I would spend hours out there, playing “Wilderness” and being a ‘hermit’ in a tree fort. I would imagine that I was all alone, and had to survive. My father built us a playhouse, and I would also pretend, with my younger siblings, that we had to subsist on water, cedar berries and mud pies, and live in the tiny space that was that house. I loved every minute of it.
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