Hope, or Kinship?

Recently, a friend of mine messaged me to chat and share their feelings of hopelessness and helplessness in the face of environmental disasters and geopolitical crises. I did my best to cheer them up, primarily by talking about how I found hope in taking action, whether it’s by participating in environmental restoration or community organizing. But ultimately, I left the conversation feeling like I did a poor job of instilling any optimism.

Soon after that I watched this lecture by Dr. Kyle Whyte on Indigenous approaches to environmental justice and I really appreciated what he had to say on the matter. It’s a great talk that deserves to be heard by anyone interested in advancing environmental justice and confronting climate change.

During the Q&A session, Dr. Whyte addresses the idea of having hope in the face of environmental crisis. To paraphrase him very roughly: Hope isn’t useful if it disconnects you from the material reality we are dealing with—obviously, you can’t look at the world as it is and have “hope.” But hope isn’t what actually matters—it’s acting upon our responsibilities and repairing kinship that matters. (Crucially, kinship as he describes it is a far more universal concept and doesn’t just refer to bonds within a Western-style nuclear family.) Again, paraphrasing very roughly here, but: “Get rid of hope. Why aren’t we motivated by paying attention to responsibility and kinship in everything we do?”

To illustrate this further, Dr. Whyte points out that a truly just approach to tackling climate change (for example) wouldn’t be to merely draw down carbon drastically without much consideration of the inequities that such a massive undertaking would perpetrate. A truly sustainable and just approach would focus on repairing consent, and repairing broken relationships—and Dr. Whyte emphasizes that once one realizes this, one will also come to realize that under a just approach, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels probably can’t be drawn down as quickly as one might want or “hope” for.

As someone who finds motivation in action, I felt quite “at home” with Dr. Whyte’s views on hope, and why it’s not a useful framework for understanding or reacting to what is happening in the world. Doing what you can in all aspects of your life to fulfill your responsibilities and promote stronger kinship is what’s more important, and when you approach life through that lens, you’ll begin to understand why.

Here are some articles I’ve been reading that relate to some the themes of Dr. Whyte’s talk:

• Why Environmental Justice Is Crucial in Climate Resilience: Just Look at New Sea Level Rise Predictions — An article from February by KQED, on the inequitable impacts of climate change induced sea level rise in the Bay Area.

• “The Stars Have Moved”: How Climate Change is Impacting the Planet at Multiple Scales — This recent piece from the University of Washington’s College of the Environment talks about how an Iñupiaq community in Alaska, in collaboration with Dr. Griffin (Griff) and others, worked to answer the question of whether or not climate change has altered the position of stars in the night sky—spoiler alert: it has, and it’s due to how large-scale ice melt has drastically changed the Earth’s water distribution to the point that the way the planet wobbles on its axis has been altered. Griff is one of my favorite professors from my time as a student so I’m always glad to see what he‘s up to and to see the work and the knowledge of Indigenous communities recognized.

  • By the way, Inuit knowledge holders have been talking about the changes in the position of the sun and other stars for years—since at least 2010!—and were initially not taken seriously. You can learn more about this in Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, a 2010 documentary by Ian J. Mauro.