where ecosystems persist even in the face of major climatic impacts, we can learn what management strategies help to buffer destructive forces and nurture resilience.31 Rarely do the media return to profile the astonishing return of life after a catastrophic event.
Beware fatalistic mindsets
When the student I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter said, “I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless,” she believed that to be true, and I felt sad for her suffering. But I also saw her statement as an example of just how taken-for-granted and powerful the mindset of doom and gloom is. She described both her hopelessness and the hopeless state of the planet as non-negotiable, fixed, facts—as reality. She wasn’t saying, “I feel hopeless.” She was saying, “I am hopeless.” Just as she wasn’t saying, “I am worried that the state of the planet is hopeless,” she was saying, “It is hopeless.”
The vast scale, complexity, urgency, and destructive power of biodiversity loss, climate change, and countless other issues are real. Yet assuming a fatalistic perspective and positioning hopelessness as a foregone conclusion is not reality. It is a mindset, and it’s a widespread and debilitating one. It not only undermines positive change, it squashes the belief that anything good could possibly happen. Record-high numbers of Americans worry about climate change, but only 5 percent of them believe that humans can and will successfully reduce it, according to a 2017 study by researchers at Yale University and George Mason University.32
We need to decouple the enormity of the crises we face from the ongoing construction of hopelessness. Doom and gloom is so synonymous with the environment, we fail to recognize it as a frame, as a way of seeing things, as a mindset. The mindsets we hold influence the outcomes that will result. Whether we are consciously aware of them or not, our mindsets affect what we pay attention to. Mindsets change what we are motivated to do and even what we believe is possible. We need to remind ourselves of this over and over and over again because, as we’ll see in the next chapter, our blindness to hope is extracting far too heavy a toll.
2
THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF DOOM AND GLOOM
Everything is shifting. Gone, the familiar pattern of ordinary.
I am grieving the loss of my everyday normal in the midst of a global redistribution of the entire world’s species.
A mass unraveling of relationships, all of us, out of sync.
THE BELIEF THAT fear is a better motivator than hope is amazingly pervasive when it comes to the environment. The funny thing is that it runs counter to our own experiences in other parts of our lives. Think back to how you’ve felt when you had the misfortune of working for a tyrannical boss or a professor hell-bent on using cutthroat exams to reduce the class size. What you no doubt experienced is that fear can be a great mechanism to alert you to situations where failure is unacceptable. But fear of failure doesn’t propel you to greatness. In fact, fear leads most of us to panic. We can’t think straight. We stop looking for creative solutions or imaginative ways forward. Students and employees make more errors when they are operating in cultures of fear; because everyone is afraid of screwing up and being found out, we hide our mistakes, which means no one can learn from the mistakes of others.
Trying to avoid failure is a familiar but ineffective strategy. Failure, it turns out, is an essential prerequisite for success, according to a massive study of three-quarters of a million grant applications to the National Institutes of Health published in Nature in 2019. Yian Yin and his colleagues at Northwestern University set out to create a mathematical model that could reliably predict the success or failure of an undertaking. In addition to the grant applications, they also tested their model on forty-six years’ worth of venture capital startup investments. The result?
Every winner begins as a loser. But the old proverb if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again only works if you learn from your previous failures. You need to keep doing what works and focus on changing what didn’t. Plus, you should get right back up and try again. The more time you leave between attempts, the more likely you are to fail again. Rather than trying to avoid failure, what matters is what we learn when we fail, the changes we make based on that learning, and how quickly we try again.1
Fear can manifest as anxiety and hopelessness, which keeps us from being productive. Hopeful action, on the other hand, breeds confidence, happiness, and freedom to experiment—emotions that are tied to better performance and a better sense of well-being.2
Fear alone is not an effective strategy
Despite the well-documented ill effects of creating cultures of fear, I often meet people who believe fearmongering is necessary to spur environmental action. In fact, they tell me that the real problem is people aren’t scared enough. Hope, they say, creates complacency at the very time we most need people to be scared into action. Clearly, that’s the sentiment David Wallace-Wells channeled in his 2017 essay “The Uninhabitable Earth.” The article delineates the effects of the worst-case scenarios of climate change, crafting a horrifying, dystopian vision of a near future destroyed by runaway climate change.3 Within a week, it had become the most widely read article ever published in New York magazine.
There’s no doubt fear makes a deep impression.4 And it’s true that fear-based messages can be effective, especially for simple, short-term, or specific behavior-changing interventions. Yet a 2014 meta-analysis that looked at the effectiveness of fear campaigns across sixty years of studies concluded that increasing people’s confidence is a more successful approach than just trying to scare folks straight.5
Fear alone doesn’t help us to address broad, complex, emotion-laden, societal-level issues, like the ones we face with climate change. Indeed, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, describes what he calls a “hope gap” between people’s fear about climate change, and their feelings of powerlessness to do anything about it. Even those people identified as “most concerned about climate change” in research studies don’t really know what they can do individually or collectively, he says. It’s a serious problem. As Leiserowitz puts it, “Perceived threat without efficacy of response is usually a recipe for disengagement or fatalism.”6
The hope paradox
We find ourselves, therefore, in a paradox. As I described in chapter one, climate change communication to date has overwhelmingly relied on negative emotions. One could argue it’s been a highly successful tactic. American concern about climate change is higher than ever before, jumping 9 percent between 2018 and 2019.7 Evidence from polls in many parts of the world indicates that concern about climate change is at a record high. Increasing numbers of people believe climate change poses a severe risk to themselves and the countries where they live, according to a survey of twenty-six nations conducted by the Pew Research Center in the spring of 2018.8 Though the levels of concern vary by country, people rank climate change as the top global threat.
What all these polls confirm is that a critical mass of people all over the planet now know about and are also worried about climate change. This is an astonishing accomplishment. The effort required to focus global attention on a single issue is beyond challenging, especially for a problem as complex and difficult to communicate as climate change.
This mass demonstration of collective worry is driving political
