Meanings Will Change
"Hope with Its Sleeves Rolled Up"
So, if you’re wise and if you know
What few things are real which never grow old
Then take them now and make you a start
With a simple life and a simple heartBill Hughes, “Meanings Will Change”
When the Stookey family moved to Maine in the mid-’70s and bought a house, they modified the heating system to move air through glass panels they installed on the roof, becoming one of the first integrated solar heated homes in Downeast Maine. The greenhouse on their property provided the opportunity to start seedlings earlier in the spring, and taking a cue from Helen and Scott Nearing (Living the Good Life), they raised sheep, chickens and supported sustainable gardening—their own and the local farmers’ market.
Noel—solo and with PPM—has sung at a number of Earth Days, including one in Japan. PPM ended their sabbatical in the late ‘70s at Survival Sunday, a concert protesting the building of a nuclear power plant near the San Andreas Fault. In Maine, he has participated in efforts to reduce pollution and protect a watershed. The most recent event was Music & The Solutionary Way last Saturday in which he performed songs focused on building a more sustainable, humane, and equitable future and talked with Zoe Weil about her new book, The Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and the World for the Better. Zoe is the co-founder of the Institute for Humane Education.
Being a relative new-comer to the solutionary concept, Noel says “I was a perfect foil! I asked many of the questions that the audience was keen to know about. Zoe was lucid, patient, funny and filled with examples of how impactful the solutionary process can be, particularly for children.” She quoted David Orr, the author of Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, saying “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. You can't go to despair, that’s a sin. And ‘optimism’? You just don't know enough. Hope is the sweet spot. If you're hopeful, you have got to be active. You've got to be DOING stuff.”
I’m guessing that, like Noel, most of you have been caring about the health of the earth for a long time and hoping that more of our elected officials will get real and will be more open to address the multifaceted, interrelated challenges facing the world today—climate change, economic inequality, religious supremacy, polarization, and authoritarianism. In this post I want to share with you two more authors who offer resources for living “in these times.’
Bill McKibben, one of our nation’s most respected environmental journalists, writes a Substack newsletter The Crucial Years. In a recent post he says, “we are engaged in the most desperate race in human history—a race between a rapidly unraveling climate, and a rapid buildout of renewable energy. The outcome of that race will determine just how many people die, how many cities drown, how many species survive.” McKibben cites hopeful news from energy analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute that either last year or this year the earth will reach peak fossil fuel demand because of increased use of cheap solar, wind, and batteries and developments in technologies such as heat pumps and EVs. He says the critical question is whether fossil fuel levels will plateau for 10 or more years or whether governments around the world can make fossil fuel use decline quickly enough to matter to the atmosphere. It all depends on whether lawmakers face up to reality. (I love the title and subtitle of an essay he published a couple of years ago: “Magical Hope vs Actual Hope: Left or Right, Physics Doesn’t Care Much About Your Wishful Thinking.” )
McKibben qualifies as what Zoe Weil calls a “solutionary”—“a person who can identify unjust, inhumane systems and then transform them in ways that do the most good and the least harm, for people, for animals, and for the environment.” He is co-founder and Senior Advisor at 350.org, an international climate campaign and founder of Third Act, a community of Americans over 60 who work to safeguard our democracy and climate.
Author Brian McLaren, who is also a solutionary, says he planned his new book—Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart—“for all those people who have been hiding how worried they are . . . and who realize that pretending to have hope is more exhausting than waking up to reality.” It is for those who experience doom, the “unpeaceful, uneasy, unwanted feeling” that “we humans have made a mess of our civilization and our planet, and not enough of us seem to care enough to change deeply enough or quickly enough save ourselves” ( pp. 1,18).
Life After Doom is not for the faint of heart. McLaren presents four possible scenarios about where the climate crisis is going to take us, and they all involve some kind of collapse of civilization. Even as more and more people regard climate change as a serious threat to life on earth, he is encountering scientists and climate activists who say we have already lost the battle for the best possible outcomes. He gives the example of being in a protest march in which one activist said to him, "I've already given up hope." He asked, "Then why are you here?" She said, "I'm marching out of love."
Hope is a central and complex topic in Life After Doom. McLaren says that when hope becomes a resting place, it leads to complacency. For hope to lead to action, we often have to face the worst that can happen before we are moved to make changes. The philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous illustrates this principle. A person addicted to alcohol has to hit rock bottom before changing and moving toward sobriety and wholeness. McLaren is saying that both the people who have lost all hope and the ones with magical hope who think somebody else is going to take care of the problem of potential civilizational collapse have given up agency (the capacity to do something). McLaren says those who can look reality in the face are most likely to have the creative imagination to roll up their sleeves act in ways that can bring about the best outcomes.
Connections
Bill McKibben is often asked, “What is the best thing I can do as an individual?” He says, “Stop acting as an individual and join a group.” And of course, if you’re 60 or older, a group you can join is Third Act. Brian McLaren agrees. See this page on his website and resources related to his Life After Doom.
Vibrations
A video of Noel’s live performance of “In These Times” from Stonington, Maine.
Listen to Noel’s recording of Billie Hughes’ song “Meanings Will Change,” which relates to the theme of facing reality and the willingness to grow and change.
Listen to Music to Life’s “Top 70 Songs for Environmental Rights.” ( Music to Life was founded by Noel and his daughter Liz Stookey Sunde. Its vision is “to make the world a better place through music.” Check it out. )
Here’s McLaren’s Life-After-Doom playlist.
Resonance
What is your experience of the kind of hope that leads to complacency and the kind that leads to creative action?