The End of Hope?

I’ve just finished reading Dahr Jamail’s alarming (to say the least) book, The End of Ice. And though there are dire surveys aplenty in the latter half of the book (chapters on the terrifying loss of biodiversity in the Amazon which is being clear cut rapidly, on the loss of critical sea ice in the Bering Sea, on the already-threatening sea level rise in Florida which threatens not only the Everglades but Miami Beach itself, and on what may be the greatest threat of all, the melting of the permafrost in the Arctic and thereby the release of methane—a more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂), I’d like to focus on Jamail’s last chapter. Here is where Dahr Jamail tries to conclude with some prospects for what we can do in the face of collapse on every meaningful front and the threat of warming which is so far underway that nothing we can do can forestall the warming that is already locked into the system. As Jamail puts it, “Given the fact that a rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coincided with previous mass extinctions and that we could well be facing our own extinction,” we should be asking ourselves, 

“How shall I use this precious time?” (216).

This is really the question. Jamail admits that his close scrutiny of the calamitous events happening all over the globe—something he is deeply committed to—caused him to fall into a “deep depression.” And it is no doubt this, fear of this fall into deep depression, that leads most of us to turn our eyes and our thoughts away from the catastrophe that looms. We don’t want to think of millions of people displaced from their homes, of the entire Middle East being too hot for human habitation, of our coastal cities inundated by sea level rise and lower Manhattan under water, of so much disruption to the ocean currents that London turns into a frigid zone that people accustomed to the warming Gulf Stream are unequipped to endure. We do not want to face global food shortages, of starving millions perishing as they are forcibly turned away from places where the food supply still exists for a time. So, we bury our heads in the sand, hoping that someone, some wiser political savior or saviors, or perhaps some technology will emerge to finally save us from disaster. But for people like Dahr Jamail, this simply won’t do. He is compelled to face, and he has traveled the planet in the effort to face, the warming future squarely. And to finally realize that his writing, no matter how well shaped and researched, will not fulfill his hopes that people would be roused from their slumber and take, or at least demand, action. And even beyond that, Jamail 

“came to understand that hope blocked the greater need to grieve, so that was the reason necessitating the surrendering of it” (217). 

For Jamail, the way to use his time is to continue to trek in his beloved mountains, to be revivified by the healing power of nature, but also and thereby to remain “connected to my sorrow for what is happening..” (218). For what is happening is terrible and inevitable in all its senses and he, above all, knows it:

We are already facing mass extinction. There is no removing the heat we have introduced into the oceans, nor the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every single year. There may be no changing what is happening, and far worse things are coming. How, then, shall we meet this? (218).

Jamail then quotes Stephen Jenkinson, a storyteller who works in palliative care and gave a recent lecture at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, that focused on grief:

“Grief requires us to know the time we’re in. The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are (un)willing to know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free. To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless.  They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed” (218). 

For Jamail, this involves surrendering “any attachment to any results that might stem from my work. I am hope-free” (219).  

            Does this acceptance of grief and the surrender of hope mean ignoring what is happening, ignoring the planet that is dying for us humans? Anything but. 

A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing (219). 

For Jamail and, he suggests, for all of us, grief is something to fully embrace and then move through to whatever exists on the other side. This other side of grief reveals something unexpected: 

This means falling in love with the Earth in a way I never thought possible. It also means opening to the innate intelligence of the heart. I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive. I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace…(219).

But again, for Jamail this means not so much ignoring the terrible things we humans have done to the natural world, or giving up on whatever can be done to salvage it. Rather, it means doing whatever we can without any vain hope that calamity will be ameliorated or avoided thereby. It means doing everything possible, in communion with like-minded people, no matter the outcome.

“I am committed in my bones to being with the Earth, no matter what, to the end.”

This means, for Dahr Jamail, and by extension for all of us, becoming newly aware, again and again, of not so much our rights as top predators or God’s chosen ones, but of our obligations to the Earth that nurtures us and the beings with whom we share it. This is what many indigenous cultures have tried repeatedly to teach us. And Jamail ends his alarming, sorrowful, determined book with exactly this: “What are my obligations? From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?”

            It is a profound question, and one we would all do well to ask ourselves.

Lawrence DiStasi