What is hope anyway?
Someone recently asked me what I hope for and I didn’t know how to answer. Of course, I hope for things and I am sure you do as well — but in the past few months I’ve begun to reconsider what it means to have hope as an activist.
Someone recently asked me what I hope for and I didn’t know how to answer. Of course, I hope for things and I am sure you do as well — but in the past few months I’ve begun to reconsider what it means to have hope as an activist.
Often hope is seen as this passive thing, a want for the future and something out of our control. We hope that the weather will be nice or we get that fancy job we applied for or people will begin to take the climate crisis seriously. In all of those scenarios, the power of hope leaves our control and instead becomes a wish that we want the universe (or whatever you believe) will grant us because we deserve it.
Hope doesn’t work like that, though. Passivity is the antithesis to activism. We can do all of the hoping that we want and never see an outcome because hope alone won’t prevent the crisis that we are currently facing — and that’s only getting worse.
A dear friend of mine — who founded a climate action group in Missoula, Montana — uses the phrase “action is our hope” as a slogan for the organization. In my life, I’ve never met someone more dedicated to fighting, not just for her family or Montana, but all of the people who are impacted by the climate crisis, a number which is quickly growing.
When I first heard this, I thought it was a nice sentiment but didn’t think too much into what it actually meant in terms of my activism — and my path forward as a climate activist.
However, the more I considered “action is our hope,” the more I began to reframe how this phrase impacted my activism. The passivity of hope would never benefit me, even if I felt that it drove me to act so I could achieve my ideal future. Instead, I needed to think about action being hope.
Without action, hope is meaningless.
We can picture whatever future we want, we can be hopeful that post-collapse we’ll live in author Becky Chambers’ solarpunk world, but without being an activist, without participating in the multitude of actions available to us everyday, our hope for the future will just be a passive dream.
