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The essay below is an adaptation of article which first appeared in The Ecologist.
How Hope Destroys our Love for Nature MICHAEL P. NELSON & JOHN A. VUCETICH  President Obama inspire others with hope and thus won the U.S. presidency. Now we wait to see what role hope will play in our society during his presidency. Can hope really help solve unprecedented social and environmental problems? Or should we expect hope to be sowing seeds of disillusionment? We appreciate the value of audacious hope, but what is the nature of well-reasoned hope? The future effects of Obama’s hope will depend much less on him, and much more on what we think about the very nature of hope.  At the deepest roots of our culture, the nature of hope is contestable. In Ancient Greek mythology, Pandora, daughter of fire-thieving Prometheus, was burdened with a dowry that Zeus instructed to remain unopened. But curious Pandora – or her curious husband Epimetheus – opened the dowry and the scourges of humanity were swiftly released – greed, vanity, slander, envy, pining, and other diseases. However, before it could escape, Pandora quickly shut the jar and Hope was left behind. Was the knowing failure to obtain hope Zeus’ final sadistic revenge on Prometheus and the humanity he aided and abetted – Hope remains the undelivered salve for the worlds’ ills? Or, as some scholars believe, was Hope – in Greek, Ελπις or “elpis,” translated as “anticipation of misfortune” – itself an evil; one that Pandora’s speedy jar-closing skills spared humanity? Even in mythology, the role of hope is contestable. Contemporary expectations for hope are, similarly, vulnerable to misapprehension. Consider what may be the environmental message of our time, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. No doubt the film and book are convincing: global climate change is a crisis, humans are to blame, and human society needs to change radically to stand any chance of averting the worst of this crisis. An Inconvenient Truth offers good reasons for why we should change our relationship with nature. However, its reasons for why I should change my relationship with nature are pale: if I live sustainably, and others do the same, then there is reason for hope – hope for averting environmental disaster. An Inconvenient Truth fails the obstacle presented by all Tragedies of the Commons. The role of hope in this motivation is more profound, misplaced, and detrimental than it initially apparent. We argue that environmentalists ought to abandon hope of a sustainable future; that clinging to hope is pointless, disempowering, and destructive; and that an appropriate environmental ethic and sound environmental future has nothing to do with hope, and everything to do with very narrow and personal decisions. Allow us to explain. Some think hope for a sustainable future provides all the motivation I need to change my relationship with nature. For example, in an NPR interview following the release of his popular book Collapse, Jared Diamond spends 53-minutes of the 55-minute interview explaining why and how our current relationship with the environment makes us dangerously vulnerable to environmental disaster. Then interviewer Bob Edwards asks Diamond whether, in the face of this dreadful fact, he is hopeful. Diamond quickly says yes and supports his answer briefly with the observation that sudden and unexpected changes in human behavior sometimes occur and tragedies are sometimes averted. Then the interview ends. An Inconvenient Truth, Diamond’s response to Edwards, and our instinctive relapse to the “we can’t give up hope” mantra, all mistakenly assume that ‘hope for a sustainable future’ is an adequate reason why each of us should change our relationship with nature. Perhaps these examples illustrate a profound mistake that rises from our inability to understand the proper roles of hope and ethics in environmentalism. *** Since the late 1960s, we have been continuously and increasingly exposed to messages about our common environmental crises: global climate change, massive loss of biodiversity, air and water pollution, habitat destruction, ozone holes… Notwithstanding the extent to which we have all been desensitized, little reflection is necessary to appreciate the profundity of these messages and the seeming hopelessness of it all. Our impact on the planet is indisputably unprecedented. Just as unprecedented is the continuous and convincing broadcasting of this message of hopelessness to entire generations of citizens. It may be unwise to take for granted the consequences, especially the unintended consequences, of such a social experiment.  Jane Goodall’s A Reason for Hope and Bill McKibben’s Hope: Human and Wild are conspicuous reactions to environmental crises because they emphasize and reinforce the need to remain hopeful. Hope is expected to motivate behaviors that – if manifest by some critical mass – might avert profound environmental disaster. Hope for a sustainable future is supplied as the fundamental reason for why I should change my relationship with nature: if you live sustainably, and others do the same, there is hope – and one should never give up hope – that we will avert environmental disaster. In this way, hope is treated as a fundamental motivator and virtue for environmental ethics. However, hope may ironically deteriorate motivation to live sustainably in this way: I have little reason to live sustainably, if the only reason to do so is hope for a sustainable future. Why? Because disaster seems guaranteed given the convincing prospects for disaster and the unconvincing reasons to think that if I live sustainably enough others will do the same. If hope, which we take to be “the belief that there is at least a reasonable chance or possibility of realizing some circumstance,” were the best motivation we had, we might have to accept its deficiencies; but there is a much richer and more powerful motivator that does not entail hope – a motivator that is also a well-known response to tragedies of the commons. *** But wait a minute. Isn’t attacking hope as mean-spirited as stealing Tiny Tim’s crutch? If you want to guarantee failure where success is possible, appoint John Bolton Ambassador to the United Nations, or attack hope. Wouldn’t you just as readily choose hell over heaven as abandon hope?,…for what?,...despair? We understand such objections; but we can show how they are misplaced. *** I hope the Israel-Palestine conflict ends this year. Indeed this is my desire, but not my expectation. But my failure to distinguish is benign. What about the young man who hopes to become a pro-basketball player, neglects his education, and never makes it to the NBA?, the daughter who hopes to repair her relationship with her mother, does nothing to repair it, and the mother dies?, the terminally-ill patient who desires to mend broken relationships and do what they always wanted to do, and postpones these activities because she hoped to live? These people were hopeful (i.e., believed in a certain outcome) when they should have merely acknowledged their unfulfilled desire. To confuse desire and hope in cases like these is not merely delusional, it is detrimental. We all desire that environmental disaster be averted, but our environmental leaders go out of their way to elaborate and reiterate that there are outstanding reasons to expect the worst – reason to not be hopeful. Yet they tell us to be hopeful. Are they exaggerating or lying about the severity of the prospects?, or are they delusional for thinking that we should be hopeful in circumstances they describe as being hopeless? Indeed, sometimes unexpected fortune is realized mysteriously or inexplicably when a person is hopeful – the cancer patient who hopes for and suddenly realizes remission. Pat Robertson calls these miracles. Even in the realm of social behavior unexpectedly good circumstances arise. For example, attitudes about smoking in the U.S. changed suddenly and unexpectedly in the late 1980s. So miracles and unexpected fortunes occur, fine. Is this good reason to think that if we continue destroying our environment that we can expect (hope) that it won’t be destroyed? But isn’t this all obnoxiously Cartesian: aren’t we disregarding the real effects of the human spirit and attitude on the physical world? We know anecdotally and scientifically that positive attitudes promote human health: Calm attitudes reduce blood pressure, which reduces risk of heart disease. Scientists have discovered that mediation can cause cancer remission, due to the minds’ influence on the immune system. Also, hopeful attitudes alone certainly inspire some of us to live at least a bit more sustainably. However, with the same certainty, we know that hope does not inspire most of us to live sustainably. Maybe people unmotivated by or detached from hope have good reason to appreciate hope’s limitations for motivating change in the context of imminent environmental disaster. We need adequate reasons to motivate most individuals to live sustainably; individuals who live in a careless society and in an environment that is, by all reasonable accounts, on the verge of catastrophe. We also need environmental leaders who better empathize with their presumed audience, those who do not live sustainably. Many of these people are unsure – like it or not, deserved or not – about how environmental leaders differ from authorities like Presidents that lie about reasons for war and Cardinals that turn a blind eye to pedophilic priests. To this audience, environmental leaders deliver an incredible message, in three parts: (i) scientists give good reasons to think profound environmental disaster is eminent, (ii) you tell me how urgent it is that I live up to a challengingly high standard – sustainability, (iii) and you tell me the reason to live sustainably is that doing so gives hope for averting disaster. To this audience, the most conspicuous element of the message received may be its apparently profound contradiction – be hopeful in a hopeless situation. Given a predisposition to mistrust authorities, contradictions justifiably elicit mistrust. Environmental leaders need to employ motivations for living sustainably that do not appear contradictory, and motivations that do not require trust but that are self-evident. Here, mere hope will simply not do. Perhaps the audience is not jaded and captious, rather just sagacious in handling the narratives we feed them. When hope is controversial – as it has been since Pandora’s Jar – the environmental leader’s most effective strategy is still to provide a self-evident motivation. But if hope for averting environmental disaster isn’t the right reason to live sustainably what could be? *** If ‘not being hopeful’ really meant being in despair, then giving up hope may be unacceptable, if not incomprehensible. But, this ontology gets it all wrong.   Consider again athletes who really have no chance of winning a competition. Do they all really hope to win? Probably not. Contra Lombardi, might not some athletes – those with realistic expectations and honor – compete simply because the virtue and rightness of the activity (competing) is more important than any particular outcome (winning or losing) – an outcome not entirely within the control of the athlete? The athlete is not hopeful nor is she in despair. She competes simply because she believes it is virtuous to compete. The assumption that despair is the necessary and unacceptable B-side to hope, and that the hope/despair dichotomy captures the sum of all ethical motivators, represents a preoccupation with “consequence of action” more than “virtue of action,” and an unhealthy preoccupation with “judging the goodness of an uncontrolled circumstance” more than “judging the rightness of one’s own action.” These preoccupations diminish the value and role of ethics in environmental problem solving because there is something futile and morally vacuous about judging the rightness of the circumstances in which I involuntarily find myself. In contrast, judging the rightness of one’s own actions, given one’s circumstance, is a wholly ethical activity and perhaps the whole of ethical activity. The 19th and 20th centuries were like no other in human history – not so much because of advances in technology, the advent of industrialization, or global environmental crises and warfare – but because of the dominating influence of an odd form of ethics: Utilitarianism. As a kind of consequentialism, utilitarianism holds that moral actions are those whose future consequences are good, insomuch as they produce the most utility, happiness, or pleasure for the most people. So we’ve built a society fixated on the future, perpetually risking all the problems with justifying means by their ends, and forever flirting with endorsing the hedonistic instincts of the masses. Even though the ethical tyro knows that morality depends on motivations, utilitarianism, oddly, has not the least interest in motivation. Utilitarianism’s fixation with the future requires a means for judging the future; in this way hope, despair, and Utilitarianism are entwined. But really these have been odd times. Our recent preoccupation with the future at the expense of concern for the present is a hallmark distinguishing the Modern West from non-Western cultures and even from its own moral history. Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle worked out many details of what we now call Virtue Ethics, which holds that ethical people are those who appropriately manifest virtues such as respect, humility, empathy, sharing, and caring. Virtue Ethics and healthy ecosystems dominated the Western World until both became casualties of that phenomenon we call the Enlightenment. Ever since the mid 19th century, Utilitarianism has permeated nearly every aspect of our lives – why we pick the jobs we do, our laws and policies, and even what counts as having lived a good life. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue published in 1981 may mark the beginning of rediscovering and reinventing Virtue Theory. Since then there has been hope (sorry) for a future a little less preoccupied with the future and a little more focused on manifesting virtues in the present. We usually think hope is a salve; the Greeks thought hope was a scourge. The Greeks had a proclivity for judging the virtue of present actions, and hence considered hope just another way of being preoccupied with the future – a distraction from morality. We, however, have a proclivity for judging the utility of future outcomes, and thus we sanctify hope. From this sanctification we even develop odd beliefs about how hope can affect the future.  Following Aristotelian principles, being hopeful is not unconditionally virtuous. At times being hopeful is delusional. This is oddly juxtaposed with a Christian view of hope that may dominate the Western mindset where hope is unconditionally virtuous. The more hopeless the circumstance, the more virtuous it is to be hopeful. But Christian hope has nothing to do with the welfare of life on Earth. Rather, it refers to “hope in eternal life in heaven.” If we find it difficult to believe that hope is sometimes vicious, it may be because the modern secularist has inherited, with remarkable transformation, the Christian view of hope. Like the moth’s attraction to the flame, the modern secularist is drawn to unconditional hope. However, the environmental secularist’s hope is earth-bound and concerns a future over which they have little control. It is difficult to conceive of a more tragic transfiguration of the Christian conception of hope. Relief from the pedestal of the mission 
cross in Saint-Beauzire, representing 
an allegory of Hope, with allegorical anchor    Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. ~ Baruch Spinoza *** There is one point where Gore’s narrative in An Inconvenient Truth glimpses this moral truth. Gore tells us that after his sister Nancy died of lung cancer, his father stopped farming tobacco not because he hoped that his actions would have some impact on the future, but because it was the right, or the virtuous, thing to do. Evidence about future effectiveness was an irrelevant, even inappropriate, consideration. So, it is ironic that Gore boldly and correctly insists that global warming is a moral issue, yet the reason he offers for why we should live sustainably are, oddly enough, morally vacuous: if you live sustainably, and others do the same, there is hope – and one should never give up hope – that we will avert environmental disaster. So, hope and despair are both detrimental? Is this an attempt to abolish emotion? No, we have no neo-Stoic agenda. Our complaint is first with being hopeful in hopeless circumstances, and second with despair because it is the debilitating offspring of hope. The 18th century ethicist, David Hume, showed the Western world how emotions are essential for a healthy ethic. Consider sadness. Environmental abuse is a sad circumstance. If you love the environment, to respond with sadness is virtuous and can inspire care. Ultimately, despair is hope’s wicked consort. Together they distract us from being ethical and leave no room for virtue. Focusing on hope misapprehends how a wise balance of basic ethical ideas – virtue and consequence – can help us live sustainably. Ultimately, hope's role in environmental problem-solving ought to be diminished. *** We need to provide our young people with reasons to live sustainably that are rational and effective. We need to equate sustainable living, not so much with hope for a better future, but with basic virtues, like sharing and caring, which we already recognize as good in and of themselves and not because of their measured consequences. Living by such virtues is a fundamentally right way to live – even if no one else does so, even if there is no apparent reason to hope for averting environmental disaster. The table that is link to the top of this page offers practical, every-day examples of how hope-based reasons for living sustainably can be replaced with virtue-based reasons. Relating sustainable living to virtues like caring and sharing, has other important benefits. First it can motivate sustainable living in people that do not even believe we are on the verge of environmental disaster. One only needs to understand that a less disparate distribution of wealth requires more sharing (rather than more extraction). Second, it clarifies the connection between environmental and social problems – a connection that many people fail to grasp. There is a desperate need for widespread understanding of this detrimental use of “hope” and the value of understanding and offering alternative reason for personal change. Environmental educators, writers, journalists, and other leaders need to work these ideas into their efforts. If they do, there may be legitimate reason to hope for a better relationship between society and nature and hope to avert environmental disaster. *** There is one hope that no person should ever give up – the hope of living a virtuous life in a world that appears headed for environmental disaster. We do almost nothing to foster this hope. We desperately need to lift up examples of virtuous living – that is, sustainable living motivated by virtue more than by a dubious belief that such actions will avert environmental disaster. Without such examples, one is justified – sadly so – to be hopeless about one’s future as a virtuous person. We need examples celebrating the possibility of sustainable living. But do not confuse hope for a virtuous life with hope for averting environmental disaster – hope for the later might be misplaced, appears misplaced to many reasonable people, and is not needed to motivate sustainable living. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/baruchspin155819.htmlshapeimage_3_link_0
How Hope Destroys our Relationship with Nature
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A practical guide for living without hope
Scholarly Praise and Criticism for:
How Hope Destroys our Relationship with Nature
 
 
HOPE AND CHRISTIANITY
Thank you for a stimulating article on how we can encourage environmental change. The 'virtue ethics' approach taken by Prof. Michael Nelson and John Vucetich is really important and one that I use myself in my own writing and speaking on environmental issues. I was very struck by their statement that 'Christian hope has nothing to do with the welfare of life on Earth; it refers to "eternal life in heaven"'. It's very true that this has become the dominant stereotype of what Christians think about the future (think destroyed earth and souls on clouds playing harps!), particularly amongst the religious right in America, which of course is Prof. Nelson and Mr. Vucetich's context. However, you may be interested to know that there is a widespread movement within Christianity that now recognises that this
sort of thinking reflects Greek Platonic thought and actually has nothing to do with Christianity. Jesus was a Jew and the Jewish people did not believe that people could be divided into body and soul, with the soul going to heaven.
 
Christian thinking that is rooted in Jewish belief rather than Platonism sees that this earth is good and should be looked after and cherished until the time when Jesus returns to this earth and transforms everything. This thinking leads to Christian hope that has everything to do with the welfare of life on Earth!
 
Ruth Valerio
www.lisforlifestyle.com
www.livinglightly24-1.org.uk
[pdf] Nelson, MP & Vucetich JA. 2009. Abandon Hope. The Ecologist