How To Avoid Despair When it Seems Hopeless
Simple: Never Give Up. Especially not when it comes to the environment.
I had lunch the other day with a couple of my heroes: Bill Haney, a publisher’s publisher, who has taught me more about the craft than I can say, and Lisa Wozniak, who for years has been the president of the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, trying to elect people who both care about the environment and who either know, or want to learn about what can be done to preserve and save it.
I barely knew but long had admired her, and there was something I very much wanted to ask:
How do you go on doing your job, trying to save the environment, when we have a President of the United States who is actively hostile to environmental protection, and who seems in fact to gleefully enjoy destroying it?
Wozniak handled that with grace and class. “I have to remember what we have accomplished, and that what we’ve gotten done has taken a long time,” she said. Apart from the federal arena, she reminded me that her group, which is national is still getting a lot accomplished in the states, to protect the land, air, and water.
The Michigan League of Conservation Voters is still working to prevent other states and Canada from dumping their waste products and trash in Michigan landfills.
She reminded me what I have always known, that nothing is a matter of simply passing or defeating some big bill, or fighting against some atrocious action, like sanctioning drilling in what should be federally protected sites. Everything is a matter of continually fighting on many fronts, and hopefully taking more steps forward than back, especially in the long run.
Thanks to term limits in the Michigan Legislature, much of what groups like LCV also have to do is constantly educate newly elected lawmakers, many of whom come to Lansing not knowing much about environmental issues or policies.
Nor can any of us afford to stay in our little silos, not just on matters concerning the environment but much else. In her case, she’s on multiple boards and good environment/good government agencies from the Huron River Watershed Council to Voters Not Politicians.
When it comes to the horrors of the Trump administration, she also believes that “this, too, shall pass,” when there will be opportunities to repair the damage, and maybe inspire people to accomplish more. A few years ago, I interviewed scientist Henry Pollack, the distinguished geophysicist who shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
He told me he thought the tipping point for human-caused global warming had probably come around 1950, and it was now too late to reverse it completely.
But with the right policies, climate change could still be slowed down, he thought. And in that as in so many things, he, Lisa Wozniak, I and hopefully you all think we all owe it to ourselves and the future to do the best we can.
Maya Angelou once opined: "Every storm runs out of rain." This regime will end. The idiot pretending to be our president will end (though not soon enough). Then the tasks before GenZ and GenAlpha will be to figure out how to cope with extreme weather to moderate its effects, and to curse their grandparents' stupidity and greed. They will be as mystified and annoyed looking at us as we have tended to be when looking at Europe's religious wars of centuries past.
Ever since I heard Gore’s prediction in 2006 that our climate disruption would pass the point of no return in ten years, I couldn’t help but note that this deadline then became a moving target, generally shifting farther into the future as the future kept catching up with it.
Although manmade global warming seems undeniable and there certainly must be a real tipping point, the uncertainty gives us both despair and a glimmer of hope.