This piece, published in 2018, is still pertinent, because, as more people become aware of the immensity and the immediacy of the climate crisis, “Where do you find hope?” is still a question that people deeply engaged in confronting climate change are asked. Climate scientist Kate Marvel offers us a clear-eyed view that courage, not hope, is what we will need to face climate change.
Marvel is an associate research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics. She also writes, gives public talks, contributes to podcasts and social media, and otherwise contributes widely to the spreading of scientific knowledge well beyond the realm of specialists. Her work can be found at her web site.
In her On Being article, Marvel explains one of the paradoxes of her scientific world is that temperature (a key component of climate change) is a matter of physics and molecules. The paradox is that we feel temperature, but not molecules. So, as she says, “physics is unable to explain the whole of the world in which I live.”
What, then, can extend an explanation of the world beyond physics? Marvel is clear about where she is in relation to posing this question, what might be called her positionality: “I have lived a fortunate, charmed, loved life. This means I have infinite, gullible faith in the goodness of the individual. But I have none whatsoever in the collective.” As she explains, “hope,” comes from privilege, “Hope is a creature of privilege: we know that things will be lost, but it is comforting to believe that others will bear the brunt of it.”
So long as climate change is a matter of sad polar bears, or impacts to faraway people we don’t know and whose lives we can’t imagine, we can “hope for the best,” but don’t understand viscerally that all of the world—including places that are important to us and to people we love—is fundamentally changing. As Marvel says, “The world we once knew is never coming back.” Furthermore, her training as a scientist tells her that these changes are irreversible: “I have no hope that these changes can be reversed.”
What, then, is the responsible scientist, human, member of the planetary community to do? In the case of climate change, we know change is coming, and, ethically, we ought to know that “do nothing” is not an option. We have to press forward as well as we can, without knowing that we are, ultimately, making the right moves. As Marvel writes, “Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.”
Marvel’s contrast between hope and courage is vital. “Hope” can be read as essentially passive: “I hope my favorite team wins this game.” Moreover, a distinction can be made between hope and optimism, as in “I am hopeful about this change, but not optimistic that it will happen.” Finally, the oft-repeated question “What gives you hope?” is a nice verbal gesture, but the question asks the recipient to perform emotional labor for the asker: Tell me what gives you hope, so I don’t have to worry any more. Marvel’s insistence that we need courage is more active, resolute, and complex than a simple reversion to “hope.” Addressing a changing climate promises to alter nearly everything we know and do. Living up to that challenge will take courage.
Sea of clouds.
Sea of clouds.
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