Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously

In the face of looming climate catastrophe, eco-philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore notes how we tend to polarize into one of two camps: either Blind Despair (“No matter what I do, it’s not going to make a difference”) or Blind Hope (“I’m just going to trust that somehow it’s all going to work out”). In either case, there’s no reason to do anything.

Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.