Hope Matters

Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis

Elin Kelsey

• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771647786
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Calentamiento global y cambio climático

"This book comes at just the right moment. It is NOT too late if we get together and take action, NOW." —Jane Goodall Fears about climate change are fueling an epidemic of despair across the world: adults worry about their children's future; thirty-somethings question whether they should have kids or not; and many young people honestly believe they have no future at all.In the face of extreme eco-anxiety, scholar and award-winning author Elin Kelsey argues that our hopelessness—while an understandable reaction—is hampering our ability to address the very real problems we face. Kelsey offers a powerful solution: hope itself. Hope Matters boldly breaks through the narrative of doom and gloom to show why evidence-based hope, not fear, is our most powerful tool for change. Kelsey shares real-life examples of positive climate news that reveal the power of our mindsets to shape reality, the resilience of nature, and the transformative possibilities of individual and collective action. And she demonstrates how we can build on positive trends to work toward a sustainable and just future, before it's too late.
Praise for Hope Matters "Whether you consider yourself a passionate ally of nature, a busy bystander, or anything in between, this book will uplift your spirits, helping you find hope in the face of climate crisis."
—Veronica Joyce Lin, North American Association for Environmental Education "30 Under 30" "A tonic in hard times."
—Claudia Dreyguis, author of Scientific Conversations: Interviews on Science from the New York Times "Beautifully written and an effective antidote against apathy and inaction."
—Christof Mauch, Director, Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society
Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.

1 The Power of Expectation and Belief

What we pay attention to shapes our lives no matter what species we are.

Plant roots sense and sidestep rocks before they hit them.

Songbirds avoid tornados by listening for them from hundreds of miles away.

And elephants sneak their way into fields, by watching—then imitating—how the farmers cross the moats and fences they’ve built to protect the crops.

WE ARE LIVING amid a planetary crisis. “I am hopeless,” a student in an environmental study graduate program recently told me. “I’ve seen the science. I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless.”

It’s not surprising she feels so depressingly fatalistic. In his speech at the start of a two-week international conference in Madrid in December 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”¹ And this student isn’t alone in her feelings. I often give public talks and no matter where I am in the world, I begin by inviting people to share how they are feeling about the environment with the person sitting beside them, and then, if they are willing, to call out some of the words that capture these feelings. I have done this hundreds of times, and every time, the answers shock me. When I look out at these audiences, I see bright, healthy, relaxed-looking people who have somehow found the time to come to a public lecture. Yet their answers convey an unnerving level of grief and despair: “Scared,” “Hopeless,” “Depressed,” “Numb,” “Apathetic,” “Overwhelmed,” “Guilty,” “Paralyzed,” “Helpless,” “Angry,” call out the voices. Whether the room is filled with adults, university students, or kids as young as grade three, whenever I ask, the words remain the same.

Not long ago, I found an almost identical collection of words. It’s a list published in a research journal by Johana Kotišová. The words describe the emotions that crisis reporters feel when they are covering horrific events such as the Haitian earthquake, the Brussels or Paris attacks, the war in Ukraine, the war in Liberia, refugee camps, 9/11, famines in Central African countries, or the aftermath of the Greek debt crisis.²

The same words. What I am saying is that ordinary kids and adults regularly describe their everyday feelings about the environment using the same words that journalists use to describe what it feels like to report on the worst imaginable crises.

The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope.

This crucial idea drives this book. My agenda is absolutely to spread hope. I believe the way to do that is to collectively challenge the tired narrative of environmental doom and gloom that reproduces a hopeless status quo, and replace it with an evidence-based argument for hope that improves our capacity to engage with the real and overwhelming issues we face.

The power of hope and beliefs

When everyone around you is shouting doom and gloom, actively choosing to be hopeful—and to do the hard work of seeking out and amplifying solutions—is difficult. But it’s also essential, because hope really matters.

It matters to your individual health and well-being. Many studies underscore the value of feeling hopeful in all sorts of situations. If you have hope, you’re better able to tolerate pain. You’re more likely to follow through with physiotherapy or other recuperative treatments following an injury or illness. Feeling hopeful leads to better recovery from anxiety disorders and cardiovascular disease.³ The capacity to hope has been shown to provide a therapeutic quality that helps refugees overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges as they move forward and resettle.⁴

Being hopeful also matters to how we collectively influence what happens on the planet. That’s because thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and beliefs are so powerful, they actually shape objective outcomes.

The placebo effect

I had the opportunity to think more about the power of expectations when I was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2018. A researcher named Parker Goyer at the Mind & Body Lab generously talked me through the breakthrough work the lab’s founder, Alia Crum, and her team were doing.

You’re probably familiar with the placebo effect. Though not named as such at the time, the concept dates back almost five hundred years. “There are men on whom the mere sight of medicine is operative,” wrote the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne in 1572,⁵ referring to situations in which a person experiences relief from pain, anxiety, or other symptoms because they believe they have taken medicine or received treatment, when in reality, they have not.

The placebo effect demonstrates the power of our minds to produce physical changes in our bodies. Clinical trials demonstrate that if we believe we are taking a real medication, then something as simple as taking a sugar pill can lower our blood pressure, reduce anxiety and pain, and boost our immune system.⁶

Placebos work by triggering a host of specific neurobiological effects. As Alia Crum explains it, “The power is not in the sugar. The power comes from the social contexts that shape our mindsets in ways that activate our bodies’ natural healing abilities.”⁷

Think of a mindset as a lens or frame through which we view the world. Our mindsets orient us to particular associations and expectations. Our mindsets don’t just color our reality. Rather, the way that we look at reality changes what we pay attention to, and what we expect. Believe it or not, those expectations and associations actually change that reality.

Mindsets impact objective reality

Take this study involving hotel cleaning staff. Early in her academic career, Alia worked with Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer on a study that involved women hotel-room attendants. Cleaning all day involves lots of physical activity, but the women doing that job didn’t think of their work as good exercise. The researchers divided the hotel-room cleaners into two groups. In one group, they did no intervention. But with the second group, they showed the women how the work they did cleaning actually more than met the US surgeon general’s recommendation for daily physical exercise: detailing, for example, how fifteen minutes of vacuuming burns fifty calories, fifteen minutes of scrubbing sinks burns sixty calories, and so on. They posted this information in the staff areas at the hotels where only those room attendants in the second group would see it.⁸

A month later, the researchers checked back. That simple intervention—no changing of diet or exercise regime, just promoting the mindset that “work is good exercise”—produced dramatic results. Hotel-room attendants in the second group lost weight and lowered their blood pressure on average by ten points.⁹

These findings demonstrate the capacity of our inner dialogues and self-perceptions to manifest themselves. Objective health benefits depend not just on what we do, but what we think about what we do.

These days, many of us know the benefits of a plant-based diet for our health and the environment. So, what’s the best way to help someone choose to eat vegetables? The most common method for encouraging healthier food choices is to prominently display nutrition information. But Alia and other researchers at the Mind & Body Lab found that focusing on health but failing to mention taste unintentionally instills the mindset that healthy eating is flavorless and depriving.

In 2016, they tried a new approach and applied it to the food sold on the Stanford campus. The researchers chose adjectives that popular restaurants used to describe tasty but less healthy foods, and then used those same words to name vegetable dishes that were both nutritious and tasty. Decadent-sounding labels—like “twisted, citrus-glazed carrots” and “ultimate chargrilled asparagus”—persuaded more people to choose veggies.

They took the study nationwide, testing the same idea in fifty-seven US colleges and universities. They tracked nearly 140,000 decisions about seventy-one vegetable dishes. It turns out diners put vegetables on their plates 29 percent more often when those vegetables had tasty-sounding labels than they did when the vegetables had health-focused names, and 14 percent more often than when the veggies were given neutral names.¹⁰

Yummy labelling works because it makes eating healthy crave-worthy. Knowing that veggies are healthy and that eating them is the right thing to do isn’t enough. We are more likely to do something good when it also feels good. Our feelings about eating vegetables are not fixed. It’s not that we either love or hate vegetables; rather, our decision to eat them is influenced by labels that appeal to a delicious and indulgent mindset.¹¹

People, too, can exert a placebo effect. When British doctors in a now-famous empirical study gave patients (who were suffering from minor cold symptoms or mild muscle pain) a firm diagnosis and positive assurances that they’d feel better in a few days, 64 percent of those patients got better. But when patients with the same symptoms were seen by doctors who told them they were uncertain of the diagnosis, and that if the patient still felt ill in a few days they should return to the doctor, only 39 percent said their health had improved.¹²

What we expect can cause negative consequences. Back in 1962, Japanese researchers did an experiment on thirteen boys who were hypersensitive to the leaves of the Japanese lacquer tree.¹³ Contact with leaves from these trees can cause a painful, itchy rash similar to poison ivy. The researchers touched the boys on one arm with leaves from a harmless tree and told them they were from the Japanese lacquer tree. They touched them on the other arm with leaves from the Japanese lacquer tree but told them the leaves were harmless.

All thirteen arms that had been touched by the harmless leaves showed a skin reaction. Only two of the arms that were touched by the poisonous tree produced a rash. Even more surprising, the reaction to the harmless leaves was stronger than the reaction to the leaves that were actually poisonous. Simply thinking that one is being touched by a poisonous leaf brought on a rash more often than actually being touched by one. Health professionals sometimes see the same phenomenon happen with patients who fear uncomfortable side effects to a prescription. The capacity of inert substances to bring about pain and other negative responses, simply because we expect them to do so, is called the nocebo effect.¹⁴

So, what does all of this have to do with hope and the environment?

Suffering headline stress disorder

Think of the environmental stories you’ve consumed recently. How do they make you feel? What’s the impact of being bombarded by the climate crisis, species extinctions, wildfires, plastics pollution, and so many other urgent, global issues?

We are exposed to horrifying events more today than at any other time in human history. Twenty-four-hour news cycles, alerts on personal mobile devices, and social media feeds bring incessant predictions of a bleak future.¹⁵ The percentage of adults using social networking sites jumped tenfold in the past decade. Much of our news consumption now occurs on these digital platforms. A mobile phone image taken by Alexander Chadwick, a survivor of the 2005 London subway bombings, jump-started what is now the everyday practice of reporting news in part through user-generated content. Our increased exposure to real-time, on-the-ground knowledge of things happening all over the planet can help build connections with people in different circumstances, but it also places us in perpetual, intimate contact with tragedies, which leaves many feeling cynical, desensitized, and ineffectual. Life has always been stressful and terrible things certainly happen, but personal exposure to horrifying events occurring any place on Earth is a new and disturbing phenomenon. What is also new is our heightened exposure to images and videos captured by ordinary people on their smartphones detailing the devastation of climate change, along with a clear message from our most trusted scientific sources that if we do not act fast, even more dire consequences are coming.

The anxiety, exhaustion, and difficulty sleeping many experience in response to the news has become so prevalent in recent years, psychologist Steven Stosny gave it a name: headline stress disorder. It’s the state of anxi...