Helplessly Hoping

 The climate crisis has come home to us, here in the Willamette Valley. A scorching, attenuated heat wave due to a giant "heat dome" or high pressure zone has driven the temperature higher than all historical records for the entire Northwest and beyond, and it is likely to persist throughout the week, with high temperatures approaching 115 degrees F.  The effects on agriculture for this region are likely to be catastrophic, to say nothing of the plight of the homeless and of all who lack, or cannot afford, air conditioning. Meanwhile, devastating hurricanes are already brewing in the Caribbean and South Pacific, and this year's wildfire season has already started.  And it's still only June.

As my wife and I take refuge from the heat in our air-conditioned house, I watch my carefully tended garden start to wilt, and I step out for brief intervals to gather as many greens, blueberries and gooseberries as I can before they shrivel. A hummingbird flutters gratefully around our well-watered hanging fuchsias on our shaded northern patio, while songbirds stock up on protein at our feeder as if it were autumn or winter.  

Meanwhile, I am fighting off an attack of despair for our planet that is as bad as any I remember.  Prior to this, I have always taken a certain pride in my ability to balance realism with hope. Realism, that is, about the perilous state of our planet and its intractable roots in our dominant "economic growth" ideology that requires a maximizing, money-driven economy that is parasitizing our planet--and hope--whether the latter goes under the name of Permaculture, the Gaia Movement, or simply "spontaneous remission of the Cancer of the Earth" through an unpredictable, self-replicating meme that somehow awakens us, all at once, to the fact that nature (Gaia) is a living system whose complex self-sustaining dynamics we all depend on, rather than a "resource" we can plunder at will for all our toys.

But now it's too late.  We failed. And as our increasingly erratic and chaotic global climate crosses one tipping point after another, the whole idea of "the future" has become a bad joke. Whatever is bad today--like this blistering heat wave--will be worse tomorrow, as we collectively and helplessly endure an incremental apocalypse, an irreversible global die-off.  So how do we live without hope?

Hope is one of the three theological virtues of Christian theology, along with Faith and Charity; it became so, no doubt, because it seems an indispensable component of mental and emotional health and well-being. And in the past, it was always possible--if not for people themselves, then on behalf of their children and grandchildren. The chattel slave, the political prisoner, the starving peasant farmer, the desperate soldier on the battlefield, the rape victim after a Viking massacre, could always cling to hope that the future might be better than the present; that even if they died a horrible death, their children and grandchildren would live on to see a brighter day, somewhere else, full of promise for their children and grandchildren. Such hope has always been our birthright, and has always been empowering and sustaining for us.  How can we live any sort of meaningful lives if we are deprived of all hope? If the Future has been cancelled.

I think back to that hummingbird I saw this morning, feeding on the lifegiving nectar of our well-watered fuchsia.  Unlike us, the hummingbird has no language with which to torture itself with speculation about the "future," even though it and its kind are doomed, like all the rest of us, to premature extinction. Instead, it simply focuses on the present moment: the delicious, energy-packed nectar it has found to sustain it through the torrid days to come.  How can we learn from the hummingbird, blest and cursed as we are by the language that allows us to study trends and imagine "the future"?

I have no good answer for this, other than the usual: breathe, observe, let go. The Buddha instructs us, quite specifically, to let go of craving--of wishing things were other than they are--as the key to achieving (or more accurately, returing repeatedly to) equanimity. That that is, is, whether we like it or not. Or as Lao Tzu puts it, "The ten thousand things rise and fall, while the Self watches their return/They grow and flourish, and then return to the source..."

  But this is only half of the solution he offers.  The other half, of course, is letting go of attachment to "me" by taking care of others, empathizing with them and striving to bring comfort if they suffer, and rejoicing with them when they are happy. Hence the "four immeasurables" or four useful attitudes to cultivate: benevolence, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

Nothing else matters, even (or especially) in a dying, hopeless world.