Maintaining hope vital in addressing environmental challenges: Spencer

Posted on September 5, 2024 by admin

By Heather Cameron
Southern Alberta Newspapers
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

During the Oldman Watershed Council’s recent 2024 Annual General Meeting, Anthropology Graduate Student Rebecca Spencer gave a presentation on ‘Crafting an Art of Hoping Well’ and spoke about different types of hope and ethics of care during her presentation.

First, Spencer briefly touched upon the teachings of Donna Haraway, a medical feminist anthropologist at the University of California, saying that Haraway agrees that there are two major responses to the global crisis of climate change: one, comic faith for that blind optimism that everything is going to be okay and two, destructive pessimism that it’s already over and therefore, there’s nothing left to be done. What Haraway says, Spencer stated, is that both approaches serve to do the same thing: they create chaos and they serve to uphold the status quo rather than making a change.

Spencer also spoke about Australian philosopher Victoria McGreer and how she says we have a continuum of hope and how there are types of hope: there is a spectrum. Spencer used a chart to illustrate the spectrum.

“On the far right side here, we have wishful hope,” said Spencer. “It’s much like blind optimism. It is overly emotional and overly optimistic, and it excuses the person from action. It allows them to abandon responsibility and accountability to carry hope through. Pay attention to those words, carrying hope through actions. She says that wishful hope is a failure to take on full responsibility of agency and a person’s own power. To remain over reliant on external powers to realize one’s hope on the other side. Over here on the lefthand side, yes left, we have willful hope. This is a selfish type of, it is one that sets forth its own agenda and it uses other people. And while it is very actionable and action oriented, it lacks social responsibility. So in the middle we have responsive hope. This is a balanced type of hope. It doesn’t always feel good, but it is socially and morally responsible. And it’s one that embraces individual accountability and individual action as part of a larger collective community of action.”

McGreer, Spencer says that a selfless hope that facilitates action for requires a level of social responsiveness that acknowledges other people’s hopes and dreams and challenges In this way, then responsive hope shows enthusiasm and interest and it responds to the world as it is around us.

“It responds though not just to challenges, but responsive hope responds to and with imagination and with creativity and imagines what our world could be and could look like,” said Spencer. “Good hope, in other words, involves empowering ourselves and part of empowering others with the energy of our own hope. In this way, hope is a deeply social phenomenon. Responsive hope is what I saw with the Oldman Watershed Council and have continued to see with the Oldman Watershed Council.”

Spencer then spoke about a moment of her first day of field work where she was at an Indigenous plant walk behind Lethbridge College in early 2022 and she was being told by her supervisor to get to know people. 

“I overheard them saying they were going to look at willow staking sites that had been done a previously, and they wanted to see how their efforts had unfolded, so I just invited myself along,” said Spencer. “We started looking at sites and everyone’s talking about willow staking, but I don’t know what willow staking is. I have no idea. We go and look the sites, and he starts explaining to me that these are willows and they haven’t grown, but at least they will act sort of as like a rebar in this spot, and we moved further upstream to go look at another site. At the next site, they had put up a sign that had asked recreationists to stay off of this site because of the efforts that had been put into restoration parking. Not only had it been completely disregarded and you can see the tire tracks, but people had taken the sign physically removed it and thrown it off the path. And I didn’t know what Willow staking was yet, and I had no idea how much work went into it, but people’s faces were disappointed and people were sad. I was really curious to see what was going to happen here. because to me this was like a key moment of like, “What happens when you lose hope?” People aren’t like respecting the work that you are putting in.” 

There is an acknowledgement of feelings, Spencer said, and then they started seeing people connect to each other.

“The art of hoping well is a philosophy and it’s an attitude that I found to be embedded in the organization, those who care and those who pay attention to the current crises and act together in a network of uplifting each other and themselves, and also attempt to and successfully create a more fully realized community,” said Spencer.

Spencer then asked “What does hope look like?” and “Is there an end to hope?”

Spencer says that she includes those questions because every time she tells people she studies hope, they ask ‘when should we give up hope? Is there a time we should give up hope?’

“Everything that I have learned is indicated that hope is a process; it’s action oriented, and if it’s a process that means that it’s dynamic,” said Spencer. “And if hope is dynamic and it’s a process, it’s ephemeral shifting, it means that it will change. And it means that my hopes and your hopes will be different, but we can work together and it can have a cumulative effect to make a real difference no matter what happens. These types of questions are fatalistic and dystopian and destructive in its very nature because it assumes that there is an end to what is possible and it therefore puts an end and a boundary on what a hope can be and can achieve.”

Spencer then explained that in terms of how she understands a labor of hope, she has a background that includes 14 years of working in Disability Support Services and that field is ripe with work burnout and compassion fatigue and advice about leaving work at work and learning to leave work at work. 

“My question for these people that were participating in my research is how do you leave work at work when you live in the environment, when you live in an area where there’s drought, when you go on social media and there’s fatalistic and dystopian doomsday narratives about, “Oh we’ve reached the peak of climate change and there’s no turning back. How do we leave this work at work and how do you continue?”

Spencer says there is very little literature regarding burnout and compassionate fatigue for those who are engaged in environmentally conscious work.

“I think that’s a gap and that’s something we need to address is the mental health and wellbeing of people who care for our labs and the future, but I digress, if you can’t leave the environment, you can’t leave these narratives behind and it’s always there,” said Spencer. “Then in a sense, people who are environmentally conscious, people who labor in this work, you’re always on. People would say, “I feel like I’m not doing enough. I feel guilty when I have to drive somewhere. I feel guilty when I forget my reusable bottle.” Again, vague, strong emotions that are being experienced by people, but I came to understand these feelings of guilt and feeling like you’re not doing enough while managing systemic issues like funding. And Oldman Watershed Council does that really, really well, but I’m talking bigger picture here and other environmental organizations as well in terms of dealing with funding and maybe sometimes unstable employment because of funding, Public discourse, political and cultural identities in southern Alberta, especially because we know that there is such a rural and urban divide. People who are environmentally conscious and engaged in this context in southern Alberta are having to maintain hope for themselves. Not only are they having to take action, but they’re having to actively engage in hope for themselves, a labour of hope. It’s a constant effort of maintaining emotional resilience to be able to continue your work.”

Then, Spencer spoke about ethics of care.

“This moral sense of responsibility and feeling guilty is partially driven by, and it’s certainly preyed upon on capitalistic endeavors of such as oil companies,” said Spencer. “They use this to their advantage, watching them of their own accountability and responsibility in framing a more just future. I would be wrong to say that that is the only reason to say that would be to reduce the power that people have individually for themselves, and the most important piece of this is that people who are environmentally conscious have and ethics of care. This care is extended in many directions. For example, caring for the environment for other than human species, caring about people and families and communities and future generations. That effort and caring and for the environment can wear heavily on many people, and those caring for the land can often navigate tense political cultural identities. Yet, despite these obstacles, I found that people were finding their own ways to support their own emotional resilience and to support the emotional resilience of each other in a network of uplifting each other. This is the strength of a labor of hope. While it is exhausting if it is done well and when it is done socially responsibly, the labor of hope is one that supports the creation of emotional resilience for the person enacting it as well as their cohort. I think it’s really important to recognize that remaining hopeful, but the work that you do is not just the physical outputs. It’s not just building Beaver Dam with logs and doing restoration and planting willows and writing grants and getting grants, but the very labor that you’re doing is in remaining and choosing to remain hopeful.”

Spencer concluded her presentation by acknowledging that their labor is enormous, their care ethics are enormous, and their contribution to the Southern Alberta community is enormous.

“What the outputs of that labor are, people might not always know, but the biggest takeaway from my time researching your labor is just how much you do, how much you feel, how much you care, you support our community,” said Spencer.