With what words might I speak in the coming days? With what habits might I sustain myself in questions of justice and peace? It’s safe to say that many ask these questions now with some urgency. Many fear for their safety in asking those questions out loud. The first moves of the Presidency of Donald J. Trump incarnated a relentless onslaught of intellectual manipulation and imperiling blows by an administration that seems to lack any political empathy for the margins of society: for those living undocumented, for those fleeing contexts of violence and seeking contexts of safety, for those applying for refugee status, for those affected and afflicted by racism, sexism, heterosexism, and empire.
Many of us are teetering on the verge of political despair. Just a few days in and already many of us are emotionally exhausted.
But we also might see so many who have been politically apathetic for so long stand next to life-long activists to organize and resist in creative, igniting ways. Neighbors never involved in political processes in any activist way reaching out for guidance on just that, Civil Rights legends still leading the way and testifying in hearings, women marching on Washington, Black Lives Matter activists holding legislators and local officials to account, water protectors still keeping camp at Standing Rock, people of all backgrounds standing in solidarity with their Muslim neighbors, and scientists—National Park Service, National Forest Service, NASA, EPA employees—all urging new terrains of imagination and virtual activist networks.
There’s a lot of hopeful practice for justice emerging in these strange times. And we need to pay attention to them for a very good reason: resilience.
I’ve spent the last few years writing and researching on resiliency in environmental ethics. Many of us working in environmental ethics turned to resiliency when we realized certain effects, certain losses caused by global warming are now inevitable to us. How do communities, we asked, both work to prevent the worst effects of climate change and adapt or sustain ourselves as, environmental activist Bill McKibben says, a “tough new planet”? How do we practice the emotional care and flexibility that’s so desperately needed of human creatures in tough times in a tough place?
Fellow ecocritic Nicole Seymour (California State University, Fullerton) once wrote an article called “Toward an Irreverent Ecocriticism”, where she outlined some of the audacity of what ecocritics (and I would add environmental activists and activists generally) undertake. “My students,” she writes, “often ask me if I think there’s hope for the future of the planet. I tell them I think it’s probably going to hell in a handbasket, and all of us with it. And then I laugh.”
I recognize that experience in my conversations, classrooms, and work with activists. When it comes to global warming or the state of the world, many of us feel that kind of nihilistic despair. Why should we think about activism or global warming if those very challenges seem so hopeless or overwhelming? But Seymour goes on to argue that it’s precisely embracing the seeming absurdity of doing ecological or environmental work in a context of overwhelming planetary crises that can be so powerful. We might laugh or do work that is irreverent to the overwhelming feeling that we should be despairing or that we’re forever lost. The emotion, feeling, or affect of thinking critically in stories that seem “absurd, perverse, and humorous”, as she calls it, might be able to inspire us beyond political despair into political feelings of possibility, solidarity, or justice.
The question here is this: how can we create stories that imaginatively counter perceived and literal dead-ends? How do we tell stories that create ways out of no ways? What stories can we tell that could create new worlds of relational justice and creative action? We’ve seen some of those already in the form of protest, in the brilliance of Twitter resistance, for example. And those actions, even if we can’t perceive them making immediate political or material change, open up new ways of imagining the world. There are so many different stories and actions that inspire such things, practiced on a multireligious, nonreligious, and multicultural world. Those stories exist in the history of antislavery, global civil rights movements, women’s health advocates, religious and humanist social justice traditions, people long hit by the effects of global warming speaking out for justice, and the creativity of women and LGTBQ people. We’d do well to listen.
Telling stories differently— recovering legacies of justice, unexpected hope, singing, art, and performing life infused with the absurd or humorous or seemingly impossible demand for justice—may not mean an immediate political turn-around for progressive activists. But those stories may inspire us to see our embodied life differently. They may begin to unfold possibilities precisely in the moment when things seem so impossible, and might be taken up by others. I’d urge you to check out Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant Hope in the Dark to hear some of those stories.
Protests, political action, storytelling, and inquiries into the impossible are precisely so important because they inspire networks of resilience. They incarnate possibility (even in our virtual worlds) beyond the boundaries of what we could imagine. They allow us subvert power in ways we hadn’t even expected. They embolden hope, they empower communities and peoples strategically and systematically dis-empowered, and they commit to practices of radical imagination and incarnate love and justice out of the chaos.
My friend and colleague Robyn Henderson-Espinoza recently wrote about a desire for Trans resilience in a “world that actively works to eradicate systems that help us be our best selves and mechanisms that encourage our deepest flourishing.”
I desire solidarity with that story, and desire ongoing resilience for those people and advocates who so desperately need it in the days ahead. I want to tell stories of people and other creatures resisting the forces in the world that unjustly oppress and erode creaturely life. I want to tell stories of vital plants bursting through the concrete of our political life. We may be considered weeds to those in power, but we’re fabulous weeds.
Those concerned can’t just aim at “surviving” our current political milieu. We must aim to survive in solidarity, to tell embodied stories that ignite relationality, self-care, practices of flourishing, and the deepest, strangest creativity of our moment. We need daily patterns and radical stories of lament and wonder, ways to ritualize our grief and cultivate our joy.
That’s what’s going to keep me going and will inspire my own work. Live those patterns every way you can, with whoever you can. And my hunch is that in the solidarity of sharing them together, we’ll feel the difference. And we might make it, too.