If you popped into our offices this week, or hung out in the hallway, you would have heard all of us talking about the impending, depressing, imminent end of life as we know it on this planet. Weirdly, it was because we were in the throes of producing our final episode of our three-part series on hope.
The title of that final episode? "Are We Really Doomed?"
The language comes from Roy Scranton’s book “We’re Doomed. Now What?” He paints a no-turning-back picture of how climate change is changing our lives, right now.
But the answer — the “now what?” — is more complicated.
Sure, Scranton and others we interviewed for the series say, yes, we are doomed. The planet has been irreversibly changed. But we still need to keep moving, creating our hope like the activists and artists we spoke to, and look deep (even deeper) for hope within ourselves and our communities like the theologians and neuroscientists.
Hope isn't dampened by despair. It exists in spite of it.
—Shannon and Charles