“F**K Hope. What’s The Strategy?”
First Take on Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Excellent Call for Climate Action
We Don’t Need No Damn Dope-Hope
In accepting her TIME Earth award this year marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a Harvard and Scripps grad, co-founder of the trailblazing Urban Ocean Lab, and author of What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, was supposed to give a nice little talk. Instead, she through cold water in everyone’s face to wake up the audience of movers-and-shakers.
In her intentionally provocative brief speech Dr. Johnson said this:
I was asked to talk about hope. But I work on climate change and last year was the hottest year on Earth in human history. And Hurricane Melissa, supercharged by a Caribbean Sea that’s way hotter than it should be, just smashed into Jamaica, the island my family is from, with record-breaking winds. So what I have to say is: F**k hope. What’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?
It’s totally understandable why Dr. Johnson wanted to jolt her audience into truly hearing her, and why she said “F**k hope. What’s the strategy?”
In the final sentence from the quote above it sounds like hope is just a feeling. Give us our hope-fix so we feel better! Help us to be doped up on faux-hope. Give us a cathartic release that leads to nowhere, and thus actually steals real hope from us.
Honestly, a hope-fix is probably what the Time mag folks putting on the gala wanted her to supply.
“Be our dope-hope dealer, Dr. Johnson!”
No wonder she asked, “What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?” Who wants to be a dope-hope dealer who steals real hope, who gets would-be addicts addicted to that cathartic faux-hope feeling? We don’t need that damn dope-hope!
From Dope-Hope to Real Hope
As I said in my very first post, in our climate context:
We are not waiting for someone to make us feel hope. We are not desperate for our next hope-fix, as if hope’s purpose is to numb us to reality. We are not sitting slumped somewhere, wondering if anybody cares, waiting for somebody to do something. We are not alone in despair, bereft of any sense of care.
No.
We are turning No into Yes. Wrong into right. Night into day.
We are making hope happen, a hope that endures, a hope based on the reality we are creating together.
So how are we turning No into Yes?
Part of the answer is this: we must understand that climate hope is not juxtaposed over against strategy, it comes from action connected to a strategy. Any “hope” that isn’t is dope-hope.
We say nope to dope-hope because we’re in this for real. We aren’t movement-posers looking to take self-righteous selfies as if climate action was a fashion statement. Of our 10 Movement Values, the last one is Success.
We say nope to dope-hope because we are saying Yes to our two kinds of hope: vision-hope and action-hope. They must go together in an unbreakable symbiosis for there to be true hope, hope that is both realistic and bold.
Vision-hope sees our reality, including the speed and scale of the threat, and then sees how we overcome this climate reality through the speed and scale of our response.
We need such sight to see what we must do: action-hope. Our hope must be grounded in action, otherwise it becomes a fool’s hope whistling past the graveyard. But action needs vision so we aren’t stumbling around in the dark as the climate-clock rapidly ticks down. We don’t have time for wasted action. That’s why vision-hope sees strategically.
Vision-hope provides strategic guidance; action-hope makes it real.
Action needs a plan for how we will achieve our vision, and how we can do so strategically. Being strategic means we allocate scarce resources efficiently at the right times and places to achieve our time-bound goal(s). So what’s the goal?
Here’s my version of our vision, purpose, and Major Goal all wrapped up in 18 words: “to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.”
So let me unpack that a little.
Overcome climate change — Keep warming to 1.5C with minimal overshoot, and then bring the temp down to a level natural for our time; this requires speed and scale, a transformation the likes of which the world has never seen.
Create justice — We must do the three actions of justice: stop bad stuff, set wrong right, make things better.
Prosperous sustainability — This is where every person and every creature has what they need to lead the lives intended for them filled with creativity and beauty. It is flourishing that leads to fun and fulfillment as we bring about balance and harmony between us and the natural world.
So in a nutshell that’s what we need to be doing.
How can we achieve this? We do so through the Four Catalytic Sources of Transformation, aka The Catalytic-4:
the Climate Movement
Climate Action Supporters
ARTC or the accelerating rate of tech change
Governments-&-Markets.
The Climate Movement is indispensable for ensuring that the other three play their strategic role. We must and will be the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world.
To fulfill our indispensable role, The Climate Movement has seven characteristics/imperatives/goals. We must be:
Long Enough
For example, to be big and broad and active enough our worldwide goal for the Climate Movement is to have 5% of the human population, or roughly 400 million, by 2030.
Speed and scale won’t get done without the moral power and the people-power that only The Climate Movement can provide. Because there’s no such thing as trickle-down justice, only The Climate Movement can ensure we are stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better so we can create prosperous sustainability.
Thus, the most strategic thing all of us can do right now is grow and improve The Climate Movement as we ditch the individual carbon footprint scam and become 400 million strong by 2030.
The Most Strategic Thing? Grow and Improve The Climate Movement.
You’ll note that our fifth characteristic/imperative/goal is to be Organic & Strategic Enough. We must always combine strategic change with organic change because that’s the way humanity in toto is wired.
Given speed and scale, we can’t afford not to be strategic. But not everyone thinks strategically. And rigid, dogmatic strategic thinking of the grid-and-box variety will stifle the creativity of many of our Climate Artist-Athletes on their Olympian Fields of Action, creativity we need to be strategic and successful.
For us, organic change is rooted in people, place, and kairotic-climate-time — the combination of which must be activated by freedom and fulfilled through creativity, two of our 10 Movement Values.
Organic change is analogous to creative improvisation in music. Jazz in particular has creative improvisation at its very core. But such improvisation takes place in a musical structure using instruments that have to be played a certain way to make notes in tune; the same goes with a human voice singing Jazz. Within these structures there can be tremendous freedom, but freedom with purpose. Jazz has a purpose, to create art, and this purpose has goals, such as personal and ensemble satisfaction and audience appreciation. A symbiosis of Organic-&-Strategic. The melody is our strategy, improvisation off the melody creates masterpieces.
Strategic Climate Hope Together
So Dr. Johnson was right to say f**k dope-hope. She was right to ask for a strategy to get what we need done, done. We don’t need anyone to give us a hope-fix.
But we also don’t need to f**k hope because we’re not talking about hope-stealing dope-hope. Rather, our hope arises out of the implementation of our strategic vision via our moral and people-power as we pull our destiny into the present and make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster.
We don’t need no damn dope-hope because together we are the hope. We are the hope we’ve been waiting for. We are making hope happen. As Climate Action Artist-Athletes we are justice-seekers, hope-makers, and beauty-creators.
As such, the most strategic thing all of us can do right now is grow and improve The Climate Movement. Let’s make vision-hope and action-hope together. Join us!
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