It turns out there's a science to hope. Who knew?
Try saying “solastalgia” out loud. It’s the most wonderful word to roll off the tongue. And it’s so like “nostalgia” with its warm, wistful memories of a past we want to return to.
However, solastalgia isn’t wonderful. It describes our feelings of grief when our environment is harmed or destroyed. Remembering, we ache for what’s lost. Solastalgia describes how I felt when I learnt the river I frolicked in as a teen is now too polluted to swim in. I must’ve drunk buckets of river water learning backflips with friends, our only concern the slip of a bikini. I don’t nostalgically want to return to the clean river to do back flips; I solastalgically want the clean river to return to me, to my children.
If looking backwards from environmental harm leads to solastalgia, what about looking forwards to further harm? That's eco-anxiety, the chronic general sense that our ecological foundations are collapsing. Eco-anxiety, with its fear, grief, anger, and frustration.(1)
Eco-anxiety is uniquely overwhelming because as individuals we can’t stop environmental destruction—cycling and recycling, while important, only go so far. We all need to work together. Unfortunately, others we rely on—say, political and business leaders—have proven unreliable. Feeling powerless we look away and give up, precisely when we need to step up.
What to do?(2)
I began studying Sustainable Practice because I was (am) worried about my children’s future. I researched eco-anxiety, then the science of hope(3). Hope is the belief that the future can be better than today and you have the power to make it so:
Hope isn’t a feeling; it’s a way of thinking.
Hope is different from optimism—it's a framework for action.(4)
Hope comprises three parts: an objective, the ability to identify pathways to achieve the objective, and agency(5) to maintain movement along the pathways.
We can nurture hope to grow—for ourselves and others.(6)
Hope science helps me view eco-anxiety as low hope. If we grow hope for the future, we might free ourselves from paralysis and powerlessness. With higher hope we’ll be empowered to act, to do the hard mahi (work) needed to achieve a sustainable future.
There’s more to explore—I'll keep coming back to hope science in future posts. In the meantime, today I look out my window across the valley and see a naked patch of earth where last week pine and eucalyptus trees swayed. I miss them, and I miss the kererū that flew fatly among them. But I know elsewhere in this place good people are collectively doing the hard mahi of hope: they’re planting natives, catching predators, and practising activism; others are gardening naturally, shopping locally, and consuming less. Hope will beget hope.(7)
(1) Pihkala, P. (2020). Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety.
(2) Elizabeth Haase, psychiatrist, believes the key to addressing eco-anxiety is shaking off the feeling of paralysis. Plautz, J. (2020, February) The Environmental Burden of Generation Z. The Washington Post.
(3) Chan Hellman PhD is a hope researcher at the University of Oklahoma. He explains hope in his Tedx talk on the science and power of hope.
(4) Optimism assumes everything will be alright without our doing anything.
(5) Agency is a complex term that describes your ability to dedicate mental energy (willpower) to begin and sustain the journey toward your goals. Willpower gets depleted so needs to be recharged, and some brains find willpower more difficult to maintain than others, for example, those with ADHD.
(6) “Hope is a social gift. Hope … happens in relationship with each other. Our connectedness with each other is one of the single best predictors of hope.” – Dr Chan Hellman in his Tedx talk.
(7) This is also hope science.
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