It\u2019s easy to be pessimistic about the environment. Just look around. I\u2019m sure almost everyone who cares about nature has seem someplace special to them go under pavement or at the very least watched the cancer-like growth of urban sprawl. Fifty years ago Aldo Leopold wrote, \u201cone of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.\u201d It\u2019s truer now than ever. In the face of overwhelming evidence, anyone would be justified in being pessimistic about the state of the world. Hell, despondence would be a pretty reasonable response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So for a long time I was extremely negative about the state of the planet. I could recite chapter and verse on species extinctions, global warming, pollution, you name it. I was a font of bad news, and the only positive future that I could envision was one where humanity finally drives itself extinct, leaving behind a few bits of nature to start over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In my dark period there was, however, something that amazed me: if you read the writings of the foremost conservationists of today, you won\u2019t see a hint of pessimism. None. E.O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, David Brower, many environmentalists I\u2019ve spoken with all are resolutely optimistic. And I don\u2019t mean optimistic in the Polyanna sense of Bjorn Lonborg or Gregg Easterbrook, living in a sugarcoated fantasyland. Wilson and the others are brilliant people, well educated, and certainly knowledgeable about the state of the world. Yet they somehow manage to stay hopeful despite the fact that our planet\u2019s health suggests a terminal illness. From my dark corner, I marveled at the ability of these people to be so positive, and I wondered how I could tap into whatever drives their hopes, to no avail. My best guess was that some people were simply born positive thinkers while I wasn\u2019t so lucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just recently though, I think I\u2019ve finally figured it out. The trigger for me was working on the Kerry campaign this fall, my first-ever political campaign. I volunteered in Arizona, and throughout the campaign the news was discouraging: poll results were against us, and the campaign first pulled their advertising and then their staff. But throughout it all, I remained uncharacteristically optimistic about our chances. Every time bad news came, I just added more hours of volunteering each week. Nothing got me down. And so I realized this: optimism doesn\u2019t come from some internal source. Optimism comes from works. It\u2019s not that Wilson or Goodall or the others are innately positive or in denial about the state of the world. The thing that makes these people optimistic is that they work. They act on their beliefs and try to make the world a better place. They have a vision for the world, and they try to effect it. And this makes them hopeful because they can see the good that has come from their own words and actions and the possibilities for improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking back, I see my negativity about the environment in a new light. I did a lot of environmental activism as a college student, and I don\u2019t ever recall feeling pessimistic at that time. Whenever we encountered a setback, I just resolved to work harder. Pessimism didn\u2019t set in until after college when I dropped out of the activist world for several years. And the problem is that idleness and pessimism are self-reinforcing. If \u0443ou\u0442\u0410\u0429re negative about the future, you\u2019ll be less inclined to try to change it. And by not working, you don\u2019t have any tools with which to chip away at pessimism. The hardest thing is to make that jump from passivity and pessimism to work, but I really don\u2019t think that it takes much to break the cycle. Even simple actions like blogging, joining an environmental group, or recycling can start to build that sense of optimism that comes with work. And like idleness and pessimism, optimism and work are self-reinforcing, too. With action comes hope, and with hope comes the impetus for further action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suffice to say, I\u0442\u0410\u0429ve put my pessimism behind me, and I\u0442\u0410\u0429m feeling more optimistic now. Of course we\u0442\u0410\u0429ve lost a lot. And we\u0442\u0410\u0429ll probably lose more before humanity reaches some kind of truce with nature. But this isn\u0442\u0410\u0429t reason to be depressed. We just have to stand our ground and fight even harder for what is left. What else is there to do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s easy to be pessimistic about the environment. Just look around. I\u2019m sure almost everyone who cares about nature has seem someplace special to them go under pavement or at the very…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18,"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenstateblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}