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Hope

People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen, the environmental-ist who co-founded the radical group Deep Green Resistance, how he manages to stay hopeful when everything seems so grim. But he tells them he doesn't - and that he thinks that's a good thing.

'Hope is supposed to be our beacon in the dark', Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just 'the future' - to make things all right in the end.

And sometimes that attitude can be justified; if I go into hospital for surgery, for instance, I do simply have to hope that the surgeon knows what he's doing, because no contribution I can make is likely to make much difference. But the rest of the time, it means disavowing your own capacity to change things - which in the context of Jensen's field, environmental activism, means surrendering your power to the very forces you were supposed to be fighting.

'Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world', as Jensen puts it, but by saying that, 'they've assumed the destruction will continue at least in short term, and they've stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it'.

To give up hope, by contrast, is to reinhabit the power that you actually have. At that point, Jensen goes on, 'We no longer have to hope at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. When we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free - truly free - to honestly start working to resolve it.

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