More Gloom from the Killjoy

Are you feeling cheerful yet?

Here at There is no Planet B I am always on the lookout for good news and new ideas about how we can continue to keep our home planet habitable, for us and for our fellow living creatures. Why obsess about the endless flow of bad news? Let's figure out what real-world things we can do to help heal the planet!

So here's a recent post from Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog, touting a new academic paper (which is behind a paywall, unfortunately) describing a project to collect examples of "visions of a good Anthropocene."

Here's the project's web site: https://goodanthropocenes.net/

The idea behind this project is to fill our gloomy minds with "visions of positive futures," collected examples of small organizations around the world that are working to projects that might contribute to a better future. These "seeds of a good Anthropocene" are not mere good news stories, but also potential positive models that, given wider recognition, could be "planted" elsewhere.

Well, maybe. It's really hard to tell from the web site, which is too superficial for me to envision much of anything. And I'm sure many of these organizations are doing good work, but this "seed" metaphor makes me twitchy, not cheery. All joking about invasive plants aside, what sort of ecologists think that community-based problem-solving is something that can/ should be transplanted?

To quote Clive Hamilton (who was responding to a different discussion, but whose points are still valid here): "In the end, grasping at delusions like 'the good Anthropocene' is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths.... It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed."

(Full text here: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/)