George Monbiot's Ounces of Hope and Tons of Despair Today

About a decade ago George Monbiot published a piece titled "An Ounce of Hope is Worth a Ton of Despair," in which, reflecting "on the past few decades of environmental campaigning" (his own included) it seemed to him that had environmentalists "set out to alienate and antagonise the people we've been trying to reach, we could scarcely have done it better." What specifically concerned him was the multitude of mistakes that the environmentalist movement had made--from accommodating itself to neoliberalism in ways large and small (looking for "common ground" with their opponents, etc.), to stressing fear and despair in a way actually encouraging the "extrinsic" value system reinforcing opposition to environmentalism, to its failure to connect protection of the environment with any vision of a "better world."

Mr. Monbiot strikes me as having been right on every score here. But unfortunately his message has been little heeded--all as, of course, those most hostile to policies which would protect the environment make the most of those failings. The result is that not only does the decade 2014-2024 have very little to show for it from the standpoint of working toward "sustainability" in a broad way, or even redress of specific problems of this kind (like climate change), but on top of added damage and lost opportunity the political context has grown less promising from the standpoint of such action, the anti-environmentalist right made gains that seemed scarcely imaginable to many a decade ago, while deepening economic crisis, pandemic, the unraveling of the global economy in the most illiberal fashion imaginable, and the resurgence of great power conflict have increased the number of demands on the time and attention of even the alert and well-intentioned--all as environmentalists and the broadly progressive go on making the same mistakes. The result is that the piece seems to me just as relevant today as it was a decade ago--and attention to its insights the more urgent.