The Hope Algorithm
Main Newsletter: August 2022
Over the past month or so, I’ve been trying to educate myself a little more on some aspects of my social media that have been especially neglected — especially Twitter (two AGWA accounts: @alliance4water and @wr4er, as well as my personal account of @johoma), but also a site I’ve been using for more personal reflections on climate resilience called Medium. Despite my faltering attempts, I’ve gained a little more insight into how much of social media sees climate impacts and how we should respond.
The intensity of the discussion is very high, especially the intensity of the anxiety. Once the servers realize you’re interested in climate issues, I’ve been amazed at how you enter an algorithm of doom, to the point that many people seem to firmly believe that working on resilience is evidence that you are either giving up on reducing greenhouse gas emissions or that you are a deluded, irrational person for even imagining that hope is a credible viewpoint on climate change. Suggesting that, with careful and wise choices, our children may find ways to live successfully in a world with an evolving climate can rapidly lead to many people to seeing you as the equivalent of a petroleum company executive trying to string out a few more years of profit. I’ve not been personally attacked, but I see a lot of pushback from some quite influential writers.
I don’t use the word hope a lot in formal meetings, but working with technical decision makers or with climate planners is — for me, at least — all about hope. That making a lot of incremental changes adds up to something significant and useful. If it takes a long time to turn a ship, then we need to start moving the rudder now. I have to hope, in the same way that I need to fix my son breakfast in the morning before he goes to school, save for my retirement, or plant a tree. I have to hope that those things matter, in spite of my fears and anxiety. They are not dramatic but they matter over time. I hope.
Perhaps I was an early bloomer, but my peak climate anxiety arrived in the late 2000s, when people heard my job title as a climate adaptation specialist and asked me earnest questions about what they should be doing in their work to ensure long-term resilience. I didn’t have much to say, and that was truly frightening.
We are in a completely different place now. So many good insights, tools, and approaches are in place. So many smart people working on these issues. We are not alone, and we are not stupid. And we are making better tools all the time. Most important: we are learning very quickly at this stage.
We have created a global resilience infrastructure together over the past dozen years in AGWA that has profound momentum, which is expressed through a community of practice and hope. I have found myself on social media over the past few weeks wanting to yell out that good things are happening. I’ve wanted to look at social media to say: turn away from the doom algorithm towards the doing-something algorithm.
Yes, this can be hard work. What other work is there?
John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA