Hope: The New Fear  

Dave Roberts at Grist is one of my favourite bloggers. In one recent post he takes a look at a Salon article on how hope is a better motivator than fear (an idea I like to promulgate as well, given my general aversion to the "serious" fearmongering we're constantly subjected to - as opposed to my more blatant parodies of this style of motivation of course).

The article quotes Russian anarchist Kropotkin, which is one of those names that always catches my eye. A while ago George Monbiot plugged a couple of British alternative newsletters called Undercurrents and Schnews, which I read for a little while (which was quite a refreshing change from the Economist) - according to Schnews, your more committed type of stereotypical anarchist thinker is called a "Kropotkin beard".

A while back I criticized the new global-warming ads from Environmental Defense for relying entirely on fear. I wrote an alternate script, based on hope and uplift.

According to near-universal consensus, my alternate script ... sucked.

Fine. But I still maintain that while fear might serve the short-term purpose of getting people's attention, like a burst of adrenaline, it won't suffice to produce substantial social change.

Happily, I'm not the only one thinking this way. Today in Salon, Kevin Sweeney offers an eloquent defense of hope.

Global warming is the worst news of our time. But pessimism saps our will. It's time to embrace the challenge, and call boldly on Americans to win the fight of a lifetime.

Earlier this year in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to sit in on Al Gore's slide show on global warming. It's the most brilliant articulation of climate science I've ever seen. With time-lapse photography, excellent graphs and charts, snippets from cartoon shows, and vivid examples, the former vice president makes it easy to grasp the scale and the urgency of the climate crisis. His delivery is perfect -- he roams the stage, sometimes whispering and sometimes shouting. It's enthralling.

Gore's slide show is the subject of a forthcoming documentary and book, both titled "An Inconvenient Truth." It's also a welcome sign that climate change is finally a blinking red light of concern on the American radar screen. Two new books with rich and heartbreaking details -- Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" and Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers" -- also deliver an exceptionally clear picture of how global warming is already on us and what disasters lie in wait should we fail to act.

All of this should be good news because it offers Americans a better handle on climate change. But it's not all good news, largely because it's all bad news. Really bad news. Something is missing from all of these stories: hope.