A fragile hope
By Megan Bachman
I can’t decide if things are really as bad as they seem, somewhat better, or somewhat worse.
My perception may be skewed. The view out my window is lush and green, birds and butterflies dart, gardens are bursting and my kitchen is full of fresh produce. I also know that the hardship and worry is real for so many, including those across the planet struggling to feed their families and pay their bills, those dodging bombs and heat waves.
From my vantage point, living in a small community of caring souls who hold each other up, I feel buffered from the worst. I watch my young children, an evolution, understanding the world in ways it took me decades to, teaching me how to love and nurture life. I work with like-minded folks toward a mission of regenerating land and connecting people with Earth. It’s good, meaningful work, and the fruits of our labor — in healing landscapes and people — are so sweet.
Still, I can’t avoid the zeitgeist, this feeling of doom and dread in the air. It’s so much at once. Wars triggering humanitarian crises and anxieties over nuclear confrontation. A pandemic and its mitigations dragging on. Threats to Black lives and reproductive rights and democracy and so many species. Mass shootings and their rippling traumas.
Working in the environmental field, I’m aware of a particular strain of pessimism. A grim marker came on Earth Day this year, when a 50-year-old man set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court to protest their decision stripping the EPA of the ability to regulate carbon emissions. A few weeks later at a French Open tennis match, a climate activist tied herself to the net by her neck, donning a T-shirt that read, “We have 1,028 days left.”
Then there is the “Near Term Human Extinction Support Group” on Facebook for those who share the view that “human extinction is inevitable in the near term.” Some of my friends and colleagues are joining that camp these days. Other environmentalists I once admired are embracing more technocratic, corporate-controlled solutions from the feeling that there’s not enough — time, political will, concerned citizens — as if the means no longer mattered.
With such scarcity, solutions imposed from the top, even if they reinforce centralized control and erode freedoms, start to look palatable, if not preferable. Keeping people fearful of the future has its purpose. I recently heard someone say that it almost feels as if we’re being programmed to expect the worst, to brace for the next disaster, so that when it arrives we will not be shocked, but shrug in resignation to whatever new world we’re being accustomed.
Against that tide stands my thin, fragile hope that I hold tight to with every fiber of my being. At times I am embarrassed by it. I question it. I think it must stem from my privilege. Or that It’s an illusion brought on by wishful thinking or ignorance of reality. I wish I were as certain of our imminent ascension as those near term human extinction folks are about our imminent demise. I wish I could say that I knew for certain that we have more time than we think. We have more resources than we know. We are so many more than we seem. That in 1,028 days we will have built a global liberation movement for people and planet that will usher in an unstoppable age of peace, harmony and regeneration. That it’s inevitable. That things are, actually, far better than they seem.
Maybe someday I will say these things. For now, all I can do is watch the trees sway and the rabbits hop and the sun come up. All I can do is to witness, in awe, the intelligence of nature, knowing I cannot fully comprehend it. All I can do is feel the perfection of this moment and the miracle of life. All I can do is chop wood and carry water and send the next email.
As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote, as relayed by Pema Chodron, “Hold the sadness and pain of [the world] in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.”
*Bachman is the assistant director of the Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice.
