How to Maintain Hope in the Face of Climate Chaos

Hope is not always easy to maintain when we are constantly bombarded with bad news and facing increasing climate chaos.

Whether or not we ourselves are directly affected, the impacts of our actions on global temperatures and patterns are ever-present, and every day, it seems we hear more of the negative impacts of human action.

Hope is Important for Action and Behavioral Change

But hope is important. A paucity of hope can lead to despondency and feelings of dismay and depression. And unfortunately, negative emotions of sadness and anger can often lead to a lack of action—to giving up. This is the very opposite of what we need.

How to motivate action and behavioral change is one of the foremost challenges of the environmental movement. Hope, I believe, is one of the strongest tools in our arsenal. Hope can invigorate and inspire us to make the changes we need to make and become the people we need to be.

To be clear—hope is not about misguided optimism. It is about finding a kernel of positivity within our view and maintaining an idea that we can forge a better future for all in harmony with the natural world. It is important to face the truth—while not merely focusing on the negative.

Key Ways To Maintain Hope

Maintaining hope involves ensuring we are not looking only at the bad news. We should not avoid understanding the truth and should not shut our eyes to the reality of our situation. But we should also avoid looking only at the negative side.

Look for the Positive

When we bias information gathering on the negative, we often have a tendency to avoid good news. We may overlook positive stories in the broader negative narrative.

Narrative, or storytelling, is important when it comes to promoting healthy balance in our perspective. Recognizing the bias that comes from certain narratives can help us to see things in a more balanced and clearer way.

In seeking out good news, we should remember that both mainstream media and alternative news sources often have an agenda. And that most outlets report more bad news than good. Sometimes, maintaining hope can involve taking a break, tuning out for a while, and switching off from negative news cycles now and then.

Listen, however, and we can soon realize that all around the world, many are quietly acting—producing their own good news stories, large and small. From other people and from the natural world around us, we can learn important lessons in resilience and fortitude that allow us to live in hope more of the time. We can learn to look and listen and to seek out the good news stories in the noise.

The problems we face have their source in humanity. But hope lies in humanity, too. People are intrinsically good—in spite of what many believe. And looking at the good in people can help us to cling to the belief in a positive future.

In order to have hope, we need to develop a clear picture in our minds of what a positive future with positive outcomes would look like. If we can picture that positive future, we can begin to work towards it, with at least a little hope that it can be achieved.

Forge Connections

It can be easier to maintain hope if we remember that we are not alone. Connections forged with others can often help us to remember that we do not need to struggle on our own. 

Connection and cooperation help us to cope, and boosting personal resilience – our ability to cope - can help us to make sure that we recognize and acknowledge small victories as well as setbacks and to see the positive in any situation.

Choose Hope

Hope is not the same as blind optimism, remember. Hope implies a chance that something can happen or that something can be achieved, not a certainty. Hope is fragile. Maintaining it can often be a challenge. But it is something that we can cultivate and nurture, like a seed that can grow into something so much more.

By actively choosing to be hopeful and actively nurturing that kernel of hope for a better future, we can ensure that we do not burn out or give up and that we can continue to work towards achieving the results we wish to see.