So what is “active hope” anyway?

A lot of people are exhausted with trying to find hope. Is active hope any different?

I can’t lie — it’s a struggle to tune into hope these days. When I look at the news and what’s happening in the world, my heart feels heavy.

It’s not just climate change — it’s the fact that “Business as Usual” came back with a vengeance after the pandemic, when so many of us had been hoping that the lockdown had finally caused people to slow down, to take stock, and to recognise how important nature was to them.

It’s Gaza, too. I’m grieving that we are witnessing genocide unfolding on our screens, and that the general response is “meh, I’m too busy/overwhelmed/stressed to think about that”. Then there’s the wave of people who rush in to “correct” my grief over children in Palestine, either to tell me that what I’m seeing is not genocide, or that the slaughter is in fact justified for whatever reason. I grieve the fact that some of you have been convinced that small children deserve to die, and the fact that we are not properly educated about what colonialism, empire and hegemony mean and look like.

I’m grieving the loss of several key rights that have kept the UK looking anything like a “democracy” (e.g. the right to protest… and soon to come, worker’s rights). I’m grieving that our rivers and lakes are full of shit and that nothing is being done about it because we’ve sold everything to the highest bidder.