Hopecasting, Doomerism & a Lot of Feelings ...

How Do You Feel When You See a Tree Burning?

When I watch the fires in Hawaii , or in my home province , and when I see pictures of destruction like the sad picture of the burnt Banyan tree in Maui or the town of Lytton , I feel a deep sense of loss.

And lately, after seeing a lot of these kinds of pictures, it’s become not just a loss of something tangible, a town, a tree, a memory. It’s become tinged with fear and a loss of hope. I start to doom scroll.

Like this is too big and too powerful to face down. Climate change and destruction is coming for me, for my sons, for my future and I can’t do anything about it.

I feel it almost daily, this weight of the world that is now on fire, this fear and sadness that could draw me down into a spiral of hopelessness.

But thankfully never does.

What Does Hope Feel Like?

“It’s burned, but I looked at the trunk and the roots and I think it’s going to make it.” - Tiffany Kidder Winn, resident of Lahaina, Maui

I think maybe it never does because as a storyteller, I’m always looking for that tiny spark, the pulse.

Look at that picture of the burnt out tree again. Look at it long enough until you feel something new arising. Can you feel it?

That tiny spark. That pulse of life amid the ruins?

Feel the ray of sun that touches the leaves. The drop of water that sinks to the roots. The tiny light that will lead you out of the cave.

That’s why I don’t end up in depression or despair - because of that tiny, simple, human feeling.

Hope.

That’s what hope feels like to me - a light, a connection, a pulsing thread I can follow.

It’s what made Tiffany Kidder Winn from Lahaina, Maui look at that beloved tree and believe it might ultimately survive . She felt, saw in her heart, the vision of life within.

Hope feels like that to me. Elusive sometimes. Fleeting. Something I have to carefully tune into, like a far away radio station.

But once I feel it, then it’s powerful. It drives everything. Connections fall into place. It allows me to tell the story, like I’ve connected in and I’m part of a life-giving, regenerative, global system that wants to live.

That the pull toward life and health and abundance is part of nature. That if we only gave this ecosystem a fighting chance, it would regenerate , that we will find a path and live.

"We Need to Pit Our Solutions Against Theirs”?

We need to pit our solutions against theirs, because on this front, we win. Cheap clean #energy . Abundant jobs. Walkable cities. Better, faster cars and #transportation . Clean air and water. Better health. - LinkedIn Posting, Barnabe Geiss,?Foresight Canada

I work in communications for companies and organizations in cleantech and sustainability. I write articles, case studies, curriculum, business and scientific reports - all grounded in science and research.

I know there are solutions because I’ve seen them and talked to hundreds of scientists, researchers and business people who are actually delivering exciting solutions and making a real impact.

But, as Geiss points out in his powerful LinkedIn post, we need to get a hell of a lot better at getting out these solutions and painting a more hopeful future.

Because as a writer in this field, it’s geting incredibly frustrating. The daily stream of bad news. The dominant corporate consumerism narrative that captures all of us and paints unrealistic and pretty pictures overtop an unfolding global tragedy. The feeling that no one is really listening. The need to sound ‘professional’ and ‘scientific’ while inside you are screaming about the desperate need for people to wake up and do something before it’s too damn late. The fiddling while Rome is burning.

Fear shuts us down. Despair shuts us down. In the face of this frustration, the only path out is through following the thread of hope.

No one moves into action when they are caught in the death grip of doomerism.

We move into action when we see life, when we see a burnt tree and can imagine it coming to life again.

Our imagination spurs us into action. I imagine Tiffany Kidder Winn looking at that tree. Really looking. Looking at it through her heart, looking long enough until she could imagine it coming to life again. Until she could see a vision of a better future. Until she found hope.

Tackling the Communications Failure

If there ever was a challenge for the #marketers , #journalists , #creatives and other professional communicators on this platform, and for the funders out there, imho tackling this communications?failure could make a massive difference. -LinkedIn Posting, Barnabe Geiss,?Foresight Canada

A fight against doomerism and despair is a fight for hope and imagination. And our best arsenal in that fight is to tell stories of hope. Grounded, truthful and powerful stories about people, like me, who are living and working in the space between anguish and awe , and are ready to have real, sober conversations about the realities of climate change as they highlight hopeful solutions.

The best communicators are the ones who can tap into the current of hope that runs through every story, even the saddest and scariest ones. We listen hard, tune in and and look deeply and carefully. Then, when we have the thread we can pull, we pull it out and weave it into something transformative. That is our power, and the power that Geiss is asking us to turn on and use.

I want to live. I want my descendants to live. I want to live the rest of my life in a society and on a planet that is re-generating and healing.

We need to tell stories that spur the imagination and make us feel hope, and I want to be a bigger part of that. I’m launching a “Hope Cast” in Sept - a video and audio podcast about people who have both real-world solutions and a powerful drive toward a better future. I’ll be talking more about over the next while and I’m actively looking for guests, so stay tuned, and send me a DM if you are interested.

Challenge accepted Barnabe! Let’s tackle it.