“Where do you find hope?” “How do you sustain hope?”Those are probably the most common questions in response to more than three decades of writing and lecturing about today’s multiple cascading social and ecological crises. For years I struggled with how to answer, wanting to be honest but sensitive to the anxiety that typically motivates questioners. My answers have changed over the years, but my various responses always seemed inadequate to me.
Instead, I developed a rather banal workaday attitude: Get up in the morning, day after day, try to find something worth doing, and then do it as well as possible, realizing that failure will be routine but that small successes—sometimes really small, maybe even too small to see in the moment—make it possible to continue. Through all this, I have had to give a fair amount of my time and energy to a boss.