The Living Planet Report is produced every two years by WWF and the Zoological Society of London, serving as a regular health-check on wild nature. It’s not been positive news, and over the years its headline finding has become increasingly well known: that since 1970, average wildlife populations have declined by 73%. (This is frequently mis-reported and is more specific than it looks. Hannah Ritchie explains all that here.)
What I wanted to highlight this time around was the report’s subtitle, the science of hope. Perhaps as a corrective to their gloomy reputation, the authors of the report present four positive case studies of nature recovery, and what this teaches us about hope. It’s a useful overview of what hope means in environmental circles, what it doesn’t mean, and how we can foster it.
Hope is a complicated word. At its most simplistic, it’s used to express a preference about an unknown outcome. This can be trivial – I hope it doesn’t rain later. I hope there are pastries at the meeting. Maybe we should come up with another word for this sort of thing. It seems unfair on the word that hope is also a profound and practically inexpressible characteristic of the human soul, a seam endlessly mined by poets and prophets and philosophers and never entirely grasped.
Hope is often described as a feeling, a kind of general vague positivity that we either have or don’t have. In the English language hope is something that’s found or lost, rather than something built or nurtured. Or it’s given to us. “What gives you hope?” is the classic last question to the panellists at environmental events, to end things on a positive.
Even though we all understand what hope is and know what these expressions mean, it’s hard to articulate exactly what hope is. As St Augustine wrote about time: “if no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Well, the authors of the Living Planet Report have some ideas, with their chapter on the science of hope. They draw on psychology and social cognitive theory. This is of course different from how other traditions would explain hope, including religious traditions, and they acknowledge that. But from this perspective, hope is “a process that keeps people engaged with difficult, uncertain challenges. It develops when people connect what they value to actions they believe can make a difference, even when success is not guaranteed.”
There are three parts to this process. The first is “a goal grounded in a person’s values, identity and culture”, and they suggest that this is more about what we want to protect than what we fear to lose. The second part is a pathway for action, some steps we can take towards that goal, no matter how uncertain we might be of getting there. Part three is agency – the ability to act on your intentions. Hope arises out of these three, building momentum as they are sustained and come to reinforce each other.
For conservation, which is what the Living Planet Report is all about, this kind of hope is important. It’s how we keep going long enough to see the change we want to see. It’s not optimism, which expects positive outcomes without us having to do anything. Neither is it false hope, which would hold back the facts or exaggerate the positives. Real hope is honest and adaptable.
It’s also collective, something that emerges as people combine their efforts in service of something larger than themselves. This is the biggest “engine of change”, say WWF and ZSL, and we need it because the challenges are so vast. Behind biodiversity collapse and climate change lie the drivers of a global economy and the profit imperative. These are huge systemic problems, and it is hope that will keep us on course.
“Goals provide direction. Pathways provide a route. Agency, especially collective agency, provides the conviction that effort matters. When these reinforce each other across time, transformation becomes possible.”
