For weeks, I’ve had a bone-level craving for deep, soft soil and air with mist, raindrop-laden branches and exposed granite.

This place—or rather, these places—are a continent plus an ocean away.1

In 2023, a year after these longings first appeared, I connected with people in this place who needed dog sitters. Relying on public transport and my own feet, I traveled for weeks, situated by lakes, lochs, bays; always on islands.

I swam almost daily in the frigid, tannin-colored water. Onlookers, when they were around, watched in disbelief under gray skies and autumn jacket weather. In the shortening daylight, I took the dogs on hours-long walks around dramatic headlands, across broad glacial valleys, over rustic, creaking bridges, and along wide, kelp-strewn beaches.

Longing and loss

It’s one thing to enjoy a place you’ve visited and then want to return; it’s quite another to have a bone-deep ache for a place that cannot be defined by lines on a map.

It’s not simply missing a place I long to return to, or feeling some deep ancestral remembering, though both of these are likely present.

There is a new layer: grief.

The grief runs much deeper than my current lifetime, because the place that my bones know better than I do is changing. It suffered under oppressive heat this summer, and though I wasn’t there, I could sense it, thousands of miles away.

Solastalgia, most simply, is distress caused by environmental change.2 From the Latin solacium (comfort) and Greek algos (pain/suffering), it is the pain of losing what comforts and sustains us.

It’s the feeling of a home burning to the ground, or the well running dry. Or—as I experience on morning walks when returning to the deciduous forests that raised me in the upper Midwest—the depth and breadth of the morning bird chorus that is no longer there, leaving a gaping silence.

It can be difficult to know when to let go of the version of the world we fell in love with, and when to fight for the one we want. Sometimes we give up too soon; other times, we may hold on too tightly to a version of the past that is no longer possible, wasting precious energy on fighting for something we can’t have.

So how do we know what to do?

Though the conditions have changed, the bafflements of right action are not a modern phenomenon. Ancient wisdom traditions can offer signposts.

Abhinivesha is one of the kleshas—or hindrances—in yogic philosophy.3 The five kleshas are thought to ultimately result in unwise actions and suffering because they corrupt the mind.

The physicist-philosopher Ravi Ravindra re-defines abhinivesha—traditionally defined as “clinging to life” or “fear of death”—as attachment to the status quo.

I love this redefinition because it gives us something we can work with. Fear of death is primal and primary, embedded in the DNA that evolved our ancestors over millennia. If they hadn’t struggled to stay alive, we wouldn’t be here.

Attachment to the status quo is fear of change, yes, but under the illusion that we know, for sure, that whatever comes next is going to be worse than what we’ve got now.

In her book, Earth and Soul4, Leah Rampy5 grapples with the question of how to live our way into a changing world. She writes:

We cannot return to times gone by; to know the loss and to allow our hearts to be broken by that knowledge is critical to the work to which we are called. Only when broken open will our hearts be large enough to hold the beauty and wonder as we face sorrow and grief. Only when we look clearly at what is happening6 will we build the fortitude and resolve necessary to reconnect with Earth and work toward the dream she is weaving anew.

We need both grief and hope to step into our next phase, whether we are ready or not.

Currently

One morning this week, as if I’d summoned a miracle while working on this post, the coastal fog graced itself all the way up to the little mountain valley I call home.

Choosing to show up fully for what is happening right now offers the opportunity to give my love to the places and beings I care for—while they’re still here.

And that makes a difference, however small I perceive that difference to be.

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Tell me: have you ever longed for a place? Is it the place that you originate from, or somewhere else entirely? Do you experience grief for ecological change, whether in your home or elsewhere?

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As always, thank you for reading, tapping the heart icon, and sharing this post. Your support is everything.

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But that’s not how it works.

Rather than starving ourselves of joy and wonder under the assumption that we somehow deserve it because there is so much suffering in the world, what if we leaned into joy more?

If you prefer the doomist version: The world is changing so rapidly, we may not have access to some of our joys for much longer. And especially not if we don’t do what we can to save them.

Therefore, joy is urgent.

Stubborn gladness

The world was a very different place when we planned our recent trip to Ireland2 than when we departed several months later. Given the global instability just prior to our departure, I considered whether we should cancel.

Ultimately, I opted to embrace the opportunity that we had long planned and saved for. Sacrificing the joy and respite of that trip might have rippled out into our lives and the lives of those around us in decidedly unhelpful ways.

In Jack Gilbert’s poem, A Brief for the Defense, he writes:

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert said about the poem:

He says the world is terrible and wonderful, and your obligation is to joy. That’s why the poem is called “A Brief for the Defense”—it’s defending joy. A real, mature, sincere joy—not a cheaply earned, ignorant joy. He’s not talking about building a fortress of pleasure against the assault of the world. He’s talking about the miraculousness of moments of wonder and how it seems to be worth it, after all.

Practice and resilience

Joy is like hope: you don’t wait around for conditions to work in your favor for a passive, feel-good experience. Instead, you cultivate both through practice.3

The practice of joy builds resilience. Resilient people can contribute to the world in meaningful and lasting ways, despite impossible conditions.

Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. Conditions are always impossible.

-Doris Lessing

In her excellent book on writing, Craft & Current, asserts that privilege creates resilience, and that it is important to look at our own privilege so that we can better understand those who don’t have any.

If our resilience stems from privilege, then it’s even more important that we not waste it—and instead pay it forward.

I’m often asked what helping in a world on fire looks like. I don’t like giving advice because one-sized-fits-all approaches don’t exist. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you.

I struggled with this what-should-we-do question on the Podcast4 recently, and in an attempt to generalize, I heard myself saying: Do what is right in front of you.

For me, right now, that looks like: nourishing community connections through mentorship, service, and collaboration; caring for my Loved One5; and working on a book-length story about cultivating hope in the face of personal and environmental crises.

I don’t tell you this so you’ll think I’m a great person; I’m telling you so you can see how straightforward (though not easy) it can be. I’m not going out and looking for any of these things; rather, they are at my feet, asking for my attention.

Spread it around

If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that we are all physically—not just virtually—connected, more than we could have imagined.

If a virus can spread across the world like wildfire, so can joy. So can healing, appreciation, and protection of the beautiful, wild world that remains—the parts that aren’t incinerated, that aren’t covered in oil, that aren’t being bombed. They are just as worthy of our regard. They need us, too.

The more we can give the people and places we care about our love, time, and attention, the more likely they are to persist in the future.

We owe the Earth, and each other, that.

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I’d love to hear from you in the comments: In what ways, however small, is joy appearing in your life? Do you see joy as a practice? How do you recognize resilience or its absence?

As always, thank you for being here.

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Well, first, this perspective leaves out all of the parts of the world that aren’t.1

Pico Ayer wrote that we travel to “open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.”2

Turning our attention toward what is beyond the news can bring much-needed shifts in perspective that point the way out of this mess, rather than serve as a mere distraction from it.

I lived in Nepal for four months at the turn of the millennium. Completely immersed in the local culture, I underwent a massive transformation: nothing prepared me for what I experienced there, and I haven’t been the same since. Norway, Scotland, India, Thailand: they have all shaped the way that I relate to myself and the world, in fits of growth and learning both profane and sublime.

In September 2023, I launched Hopecology just before a trip to Ireland and the British Isles. While traveling, I wrote to capture the mental overhaul I was experiencing after a decade of not leaving my natal continent. I asked my spouse to read the post.3 He said, “This is great, but I’m not sure what it has to do with hope.”

What I hadn’t connected the dots on yet4 is that massaging the kinks out of the mind IS a recipe for cultivating hope.

Because hope is not about the outside circumstances suiting your preferences so you can feel better. It’s the internal practice of cultivating a more resilient orientation to the world, no matter what is happening.

Travel—especially international travel—works me over in this department. Even if I witness suffering and the aftermath of destruction, I end up with more hope than when I arrived. Maybe it’s because healing has occurred, even if it isn’t finished yet.5

My therapist says that one of the best ways to get out of a mental or emotional rut is to rearrange your furniture. Forcing the brain to see things differently is often enough to unstick the stuck. At the most basic level, travel is an extreme form of furniture rearrangement, of nothing but change: of place, surroundings, diet, culture, and the bed you sleep in, if you’re lucky to have one at all.

This isn’t to say that travel is everyone’s medicine—but it’s most certainly mine, and, I suspect, Pico Iyer’s.

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Last month, I returned to Ireland, drawn in part by its its earth-inspired spirituality, tiny gems of ancient forests, and increasingly sustainable ways of life. The country exemplifies that, in addition to the heartbreaking daily news feed, the world is also changing in positive ways.

Below are a few of these impressions:

In the Wood

At the end of the last ice age, forest covered 80% of Ireland. Today, native forest covers a mere 2%. But those 2% are celebrated, venerated, and protected.

At St. John’s Wood, interpretive signs offer keys to forest species, and the locals come by for a Sunday afternoon stroll. Under the canopy, the air is sweeter.

Forests like these serve as sources of valuable, rare DNA that is used to populate other remnant forests around the country. It’s a thrill to imagine what today’s efforts will make of Ireland’s forests in 100 years.6

Sheela na gig

The mysterious figure of a woman spreading her vulva open with her hands is often found adorning the keystone on church doorways throughout Ireland.

Though they have been desecrated through the centuries, some survive. Today, they are celebrated through increasing awareness of their existence and efforts like Project Sheela7, which places modern sculptures in locations significant to women’s rights.

It is said that the Sheela na gigs were talismans of protection. They had the ability to ward off evil, because the devil himself could not bear the sight of a woman’s genitals. Even if this version is to be believed:

That’s not shame.

That’s power.

Lots of it.8

Of gorse

Hiking the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin, it was difficult to ignore the large swathes of yellow flowers brightening the landscape at seemingly every turn. It looks a lot like Spanish broom (Spartium junceum), so my biologist mind kicked in: “Must be invasive.” In California, Spanish broom is generally considered a noxious weed because it can outcompete native plants and form dense, fire-prone monocultures.

The real story is more nuanced. This showy yellow shrub is common gorse (Ulex europaeus), which in Ireland may be an archaeophyte—a species that was introduced before 1500 AD. Now, it is generally considered native. Having been a part of the landscape for so long, it plays important roles as medicine, livestock forage, wildlife habitat, and is used for the festival fires at Beltaine.

Gorse turns the dualism of “nice native or evil invader” into a much richer tapestry: the ecosystems of Ireland have changed and evolved through various forms of human habitation, the rise and fall of systems of control, and the land use that accompanied them.

This refreshingly nonbinary, can’t-pin-it-down situation is found in more than the flora.

Brigid

Brigid—earth goddess and saint—is bridging the gap between earth worshippers and Christians, while raising the status of women in spirituality and society at large.

Kildare (Irish: Cill Dara, Church of the Oak) is the epicenter of Brigid’s influence. An ancient oak grove once hosted a fire temple tended for centuries by the priestesses of the goddess Brigid. In the 5^th century, St. Brigid, the abbess, established a monastery for both men and women. Her nuns continued the flame tending practice.

It’s difficult not to try to pin down the historical chain of events, but sacred places like these are invariably difficult to pin down, as they probably should be. Even if the dates are approximate or the details obscure or legend and history incongruous, the history of Brigid and this place are no less deserving of attention and consideration: the limelight.

In fact, Brighid roughly means “Bright/High/Exalted One”. She is the limelight herself.

So who was she?

I think the more important question is, Who is She?

A small exhibit at the back of St. Brigid’s Cathedral in Kildare says that the pagan goddess is “not to be confused with the Christian saint.” Pagan sources say that the church integrated Brigid the goddess into its beliefs when it arrived. This is a matter of considerable contention, as you might imagine.

Regardless of what history does or doesn’t ever work out, maybe it doesn’t matter.

What matters is this:

• The fire temple is still used by believers who leave offerings.

• The faithful still worship in her cathedral and church in Kildare.

• The ancient practice of venerating the oak has lived on through the centuries.

• Her holy wells are still visited, preserving the ancient practice of water worship.

• After its extinction in the 12^th and 16^th centuries, the sacred flame was relit in 2006, and is still tended today.

• In 2023, St. Brigid’s Day was finally made a national holiday.

• Her relic—a skull fragment moved from its resting place in Kildare to Northern Ireland in 800 AD, then transported to Portugal in the 13^th century—returned to Kildare in 2024, on the 1500^th anniversary of her death.

This timeline makes clear at least one clarifying and hopeful truth:

Brigid is emerging as a much-needed healer for these times—not just in small circles, but in some of the most high-profile, meet-the-people-where-they-are ways—supporting Christians, pagans, and everyone in between in healing ourselves and the planet.

As B. Monaghan writes:9

Brigid inclusively embraces many kinds of cross currents, some of them apparently contradictory—the ancient and the new, the pagan and the Christian, the animal and the human, the rich and the poor—and from this it is clear that her ample cloak can accommodate all kinds of apparently irreconcilable differences.

Conclusion

Nobody’s perfect, but Ireland is really getting its proverbial shit together. I could go on about the next-level energy efficiency unlike I’ve ever seen before, the elevation of women’s rights and prominence in culture, the shift to hyper-local food production and energy independence, and more.

It all makes clear that such things are possible, even as their opposites erode the planet and people we love. Ireland is emerging as a light in the dark, and basking in that light for a time offers a renewed sense of hope.

Your turn: Should we stop traveling in times of tragedy and instability? If so, when would be a good time? Have you ever experienced an inner transformation after visiting a place or culture other than your own? How so? Let me know in the comments. As always, thank you for being here. Every subscription, read, like, comment, and share supports this work.

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It was my first year of grad school and I’d stayed up all night polishing and practicing my talk. The eyes in the dimly lit room felt like the glare of a hundred spotlights. My heart pounded so forcibly that it shook my vocal cords, chest, and arms.

At the end of my presentation, an audience member asked a question while I took a big gulp of water. I thought so hard about how to articulate my answer that my mental wires crossed, and I leaned into the microphone instead of away from it to release the air bubble that made its inevitable rise.1

Back then, I was brand new at public speaking in academic settings, so couldn’t possibly have stuck the landing. I simply didn’t have the ten thousand hours required for mastery. Eventually, I did.

This week, I comforted myself with the memory of that first academic talk and the seeds it planted. I didn’t belch into any microphones, but I was on a podcast for the first time.2

One of my favorite things about being interviewed (I have more experience with print journalists) is that I’m often surprised by my answers. Interviewing is a remarkably reciprocal, generative process.

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Hosts Jenny Misslin and Phil Dieke started the podcast because they found they were not able to talk about deeply important topics in the religious spaces they were working in. I’ve had similar experiences in the academic world, which is why I write.

Though we humans are whole and complex and multifaceted, our institutions can become siloed and constraining, even stifling to growth and much-needed change.

In the episode, you’ll hear about:

• The story behind my (metaphorically) getting struck by lightning and how it eventually led me to create Hopecology

• My years as a Catholic school girl

• How science is a doubt system, not a belief system, and why that’s a good thing

• Intellectual humility and the quest for truth

• Reframing hope as an action, rather than a feeling

Jenny and Phil are disarmingly deep listeners. Though we’d just met, I felt like I’d known them a long time. Our conversation unfolded in a way that felt like watching a rose bloom in time lapse.

I told Jenny and Phil things I didn’t know I was ready to talk about in public, because I hadn’t written about them publicly yet. But the timing felt right, and I have no regrets.

During the interview I referred to an experience from my childhood, and although it wasn’t terribly revealing, it violated every code of silence that has been passed down to me for generations.

When I stood at the podium for my first academic talk all those years ago, I shook, in part, because I had a deeply internalized belief: It isn’t safe to be seen.

When I revealed a deep and formative truth about my upbringing on the podcast this week, my body trembled because of another old but deeply held belief: It isn’t safe to tell the truth.

There was a time in my life when both of these were true.

That time is over.

I am not alone.3

Shaking is both the body’s preparation for leaping into action in response to danger, as well as a way to discharge built-up energy from the physiological cocktail that fear sends coursing through our veins.

The millennia-old Waidangong tradition uses intentional shaking to release muscle tension and relieve stress. The Shakers worship with trembling and dancing to relieve themselves of spiritual burdens. Our chihuahua mix trembles when she goes to the vet. Intentional shaking is having a renaissance moment as a nervous system-regulating somatic embodiment practice.

Shaking is a mode of healing deeply rooted in the wisdom of our ancient neuroarchitecture.

By using my voice, whether spoken or written, I am overcoming generations of silence and fear.

In that sense, our conversation couldn’t have been more radical.

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If you’d like to listen to the episode, you can find it in the usual podcast places (Radical Sacred Episode 29: Dr. Andrea Adams on Hopecology), or (with video) on YouTube.

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The trip was also my first real vacation since my Loved One’s stroke two years ago.1

I retreated to the jungle intending to step away from my responsibilities as much as possible, putting measures in place so that my Loved One would be checked in on by another family member daily. I made contingency plans, and double-triple-quadruple-checked to make sure everyone involved was on the same page before I left.

Hammock time

Upon arrival, I spend as much time as I can staring at the jungle, practicing a meditation technique I learned from my partner, from the version called staring at the desert.

I lie in my hammock, long and still in the heat. So much biodiversity calls Costa Rica home that animals are always coming by, rustling in the leaf litter on the forest floor or rattling the branches: agouti, iguana, turquoise-browed motmot.2

As often happens when I try to relax, I meet a familiar feeling of resistance: mentally, I want and need to make the most of the precious recovery time I’ve carved out so carefully. But my body has other plans. I feel it pushing back, as if to say, Is this safe?

Strange symptoms begin to appear, along with the chronic ones I always carry. My shoulders seem permanently lodged up next to my ears because my body is conditioned to brace itself for the next blow. There was a time when the blows were physical; now, the mental and emotional variety show up just often enough to make the bracing feel justified.

After some time in the hammock one afternoon, I get up and rinse off in the shower, which either doesn’t have hot water or I simply haven’t figured out how to work the faucet yet. I don’t mind, either way: it’s so hot out, warm water isn’t necessary.

I hear the unmistakable, ethereal growl of a howler monkey rumble through the jungle. Still wrapped in my towel, I walk out to the porch and see them just outside. A pair of small, sinewy youngsters hangs upside down, assisted by their prehensile tails, plucking small fruits from a cluster on a branch.

An older, larger one moves slowly and intentionally on its own, appearing to glide. Suddenly, it leaps horizontally and plops down, belly to bark, legs dangling. The movement is so emphatic, so comfortable, so confident, I chuckle out loud. Fortunately they ignore me, probably accustomed to the loud, smelly, hair-impoverished ground primates loitering in their territory every day.

I’m almost in tears now, struck by the way this monkey fully embraces its birthright to plop its belly down without hesitation on a branch after a snack. It doesn’t stay long. It doesn’t take a nap like I think it will; it just moves on to another part of the canopy—climbing, hanging, sitting, scratching, nibbling.

One of them softly chortles in what I can only assume is pleasure as it eats.

All of the monkeys’ movement is graceful, but also startling: they briskly leap from one branch to another, falling through the canopy, until one of their limbs catches another branch or vine.

I hold my breath, afraid for them: How do they know they aren’t going to fall all the way to the forest floor?

How does one acquire that kind of trust?

Perhaps it’s something more akin to faith?

I feel wholly unqualified to answer this question.

War and trust

This week, just as I was pondering the difference between trust and faith, I came across this passage in Thin Places3, a book that is holding me in uncertain times like a hammock:

We may never know of the bargains and sacrifices made, of the leaps of something—something unthinkable—that were taken. Leaps of something that feels much stronger, even, than sheer ‘faith’. That border has seen it all – every last trace of the violence, bloodshed, silence, trust – the peace that has been carefully and sensitively shaped. A peace as delicate as the wings of a moth.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh is writing of the peace process in the North of Ireland, but her words span oceans, rivers, straits.

I find it difficult to write or think about anything these days without the pall of war draped over it.

Even while watching howler monkeys in the jungle.

The monkey’s belly-plop had me wondering: I would venture to guess that they don’t spend much of their time worrying about what to do next.

Jiddu Krishnamurti once told our mutual friend Ravi Ravindra, who paraphrases him often, “A rose doesn’t choose to smell like a rose; the scent just oozes out of it, because that is its nature.”4

Monkeys plop and nibble and scratch because that is their nature.

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It begs the question, then: what is our nature? (Besides our own version of nibble-plop-scratching). One need only look around to see what oozes out of us.

Some would argue we are hopeless warmongers driven by nothing more than our selfish genes.5 Biological determinism, however, is a ridiculously poor excuse precisely because we have choices, and access to wisdom that can be our guide in choosing.

The do-nothingness of doing

The Bhagavad Gita stresses the importance of engaging in action while also releasing attachment to the outcome, or the fruits, of that action.

Easier said than done? Maybe; it depends. If I’m in fight-or-flight (or freeze/fawn) mode, it’s almost certainly more difficult. But when I’m centered, it’s clear that the pushing way is so much harder than the intuitive way.

I can do things as if I am a very important person doing a very important thing, railing against my needs and the parts of the world I detest in the process. Or, I can simply follow the next indicated thing.

This does not throw ethics and citizenship out the window. It’s as if there is a better angel of my nature, so to speak, that knows the right thing to do, even if my mind disagrees. The problem is, its voice is oh-so-subtle compared to everything else clamoring for my attention.

When I returned from Costa Rica, the world around me looked different. After a much-needed break, my choices felt a little wiser, more intuitive. I had a softer approach to life with my Loved One, which I stepped back into immediately. We enjoyed our time together, sharing meals and going through old photos. I felt more capable of being, rather than doing, and the daily activities of life felt more joyful and easeful.

Monkey wisdom

In all my monkey contemplations this week, I was reminded of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, a deity praised for the ability to couple great power with great humility.

If ever there were a wisdom lesson for current global events.

Maybe howler monkeys hem and haw about where to go fruit picking each morning, how to amass a great wealth of fruits to stockpile, impoverishing others in the process.

But I doubt it.

Many idiomatic expressions about monkeys are negative or dismissive, implying they are insincere, foolish, unintelligent, inferior.

But if we take an honest look, they show us that nothing could be further from the truth.

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Hopecology is not about the sunshine-and-rainbows feeling of hope that some think that hope, in its entirety, is. Instead, I aim to explore the cultivation of hope—which is an action, not a feeling—by facing difficulty and charting a way forward.

Perhaps this is a skill I’ve honed as a wildlife ecologist who has worked almost exclusively with animals on the brink of extinction. I’ve grown accustomed to pressing on, despite hopeless circumstances.

As fellow ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote in a letter to a friend:

That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.

Though much less often than I would like, sometimes my perseverance has paid off, and my efforts have made a difference. If I needed success to carry on, however, I would have quit long ago. Conservation success is, quite simply, too rare. But something keeps me going.

Fish guts to ecstasy

One summer day, on the 16-mile route over three mountain passes to the High Sierra basecamp where we worked, a colleague and I struck up a conversation about pain and joy.

“You know,” she huffed, gasping for oxygen in the thin air above ten thousand feet, “It’s weird…the more physically miserable I am, the happier I seem.”1

It certainly was true for me. I was deliriously happy on some of my toughest days in the wilderness—whether nearly being struck by lightning or just doing back-breaking physical work with rotting fish guts covering my hands.

A decade and a half earlier, while backpacking in the Superstition Mountains, my group encountered a sudden, unexpected snowstorm.2 In the ensuing days, we ran out of food; we lacked enough warm layers. One evening, I completely forgot how to set up camp. I stood motionless as I descended into the early stages of hypothermia.

Each day, as the situation inched ever-nearer to a scene from Lord of the Flies, my faith in humanity eroded considerably.

But after making it out—back to an unlimited supply of food and fresh water and a warm bed and as many layers as I needed to thermoregulate—I felt like a goddamn superhero. I had just survived hypothermia, for crissakes.3

Isostasy

Shortly after I defended my dissertation, a professor stopped me in the hallway to congratulate me.

“How does it feel?” he asked.

I thought for a moment. How did it feel? It felt like an enormous stone, which bore its weight down on my body and life for six and a half years, had been removed.

“Isostatic,” I replied.

He laughed. He was a geologist so he knew what I meant.

The earth appears to rebound in response to the removal of weight—a mountain, a glacier, a tectonic shift—regaining its equilibrium (isostasy). That was the best way I knew how to explain the ineffable lightness: I could literally breathe better.

I experienced the transformation that happened under that weight, but not necessarily because I handled the pressure well.

In the face of difficulty, it’s tempting to think we can optimize our way out of it, to “fix” the problem. I certainly did: in grad school4, I added two triathlons, extra lecturing jobs, and elaborately disordered eating habits to my to-do list, thinking these things would help.

They did not.5

Optimization is often not the solution. Let’s face it: aren’t challenging times hard enough? What would happen if we just let pain and difficulty do its transformational work on us? Maybe the weathering is the integrity.

Wait…what?

Surrendering to the weight of difficulty may sound like an excuse for inaction in times that call for anything but. ’s words this week in Death and Birds clarify, by way of the Andean Condor:

These magnificent beings take to the skies, and surrender to the currents they find there. They do not fight the air they’re met by, nor wish for better winds. They sense what is, and answer in accordance—and the world, thus met, holds them aloft. Their surrender is not capitulation, but an active and intelligent response to the world exactly as it is.

When the opposite is the medicine

It is possible to surrender to the weight of difficulty while also responding wisely to the shitshow. But these responses take time—something we feel we have less and less of.

It can be hard to do nothing when you feel like the alarms are going off.

On a nearly daily basis caring for my Loved One6, there is a crisis or challenge, from micro to macro. My nervous system wants to react immediately, because it perceives nearly every situation as an emergency (which is inaccurate about 98% of the time).

But when I do wait to respond (frankly, not often), the problem either fixes itself, or another wiser, more intelligent, and frequently more collaborative solution emerges.

When I was getting hypothermic, I fought the colleagues who tried to put me in my sleeping bag with Nalgene bottles of hot water and a meager ration of warm oatmeal. I was confused, so I didn’t believe them. Resting seemed ridiculous.

But it probably saved my life.

I’d love to hear: how do you perceive the relationship between difficulty, joy, and hope? Has the opposite ever been the medicine for you?

“But I need it right now.”

I hear you. It’s looking pretty bleak out there. Have you ever had to start physical therapy while you were still injured and in pain? You’ve got to start somewhere.

Besides, the practice I’m about to share only hurts at the very end (for me, anyway). But it’s the good kind of hurt.

First, though, let’s go inside.1

Imagine I’m inviting you into a cozy little Irish cottage.

You sit down next to the peat fire. I cover you with a blanket knitted by someone’s grandmother—maybe yours. I hand you a big mug of your favorite warm beverage.

Now, put your feet up on the hearth to gently warm your toes. Here are some visuals to help, because this place really exists:

Feeling cozy, warm, and settled, at least a little? OK. Now all you have to do is listen to the instructions. You can decide later if you want to try it.

Here’s how it works:

1. Grab a container. Any container will do. Turn it into a craft project if you like; my household uses a 1-quart, no-frills, undecorated Mason jar.

2. Find some scraps of paper. Have extra origami paper from that 1,000 paper cranes project you didn’t quite finish during pandemic lockdown? Bonus points for beauty. I just tear up the blank parts of junk mail. It’s helpful to have these scraps, along with a pen, lying around near the container so you don’t have to go searching to complete the next step. You want this to be as easy as possible.

3. When something good happens, write it down on one of those scraps of paper, fold it up, and drop it in the container. I like to put the date, but it’s not necessary. Had a heart-filling chat on the phone with a dear friend? Flight arrived on time? Grandkid’s little league team won? The crocuses are up? Put it in the jar. It does not have to be a big thing. In fact, it will likely be mostly little things. Nothing is too small to put in the Joy Jar.

4. At the end of the year, open the jar and read them, one by one. My partner and I like to alternate reading them aloud to each other. When we’ve read them all, we toss them in the fireplace. Do what works for you. Maybe you and your friends could throw a Joy Jar Party (actually, maybe I’ll do that).

For one low price, you get…

The Joy Jar Practice does several things.

First, the act of taking the few seconds to write it down and put it in the jar tells your brain, “Hey—good things happen to me (or in this world2),” which is not a message it’s necessarily used to getting. (I could be wrong. Perhaps you have a robust, self-motivated gratitude3 practice of your own).

Second, watching the jar fill up over the course of the year sends your brain another message: “Lots of good things happen.”

Third, walking past the joy jar reminds you to think of something to put in there. Maybe it’s been awhile. I can always think of something from recent days, if not the same day.

Fourth, at the end of the year when you review the contents of the jar, you get to remember each of these things again. It’s like a little highlight reel in your mind.

The next part is when I usually start sobbing. Releasing the joys into the fire, I realize that I have a life I love so much, it hurts to let go of even little paper representations of it.

I’m then grief-stricken as I realize that I spent a lot more of my time than I’d care to admit worrying, disaster-planning, and losing sleep over things that never even happened in the previous 365 days.

I’m reduced to a six-year-old for twenty minutes or so as this plays out, wherein my partner and I usually have some version of this conversation:

“Why are you crying?”

“So many good things…” [sniff]

“That’s a happy thing, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“Because…they’re over.” [sniff]

“But that’s why we have to empty the jar—to make room for new memories.”

I know I’m being a little ridiculous at this point, but I still surf the wave of grief all the way to shore.

The realization that the empty jar is not oblivion, but an opportunity for more good things to happen, presents a choice:

I can live as if our best days are behind us. Or, I can trust that the joy will return, even if it looks different. Most likely, as with all those that came before it, the coming year will be full of the Ten Thousand Joys and the Ten Thousand Sorrows4.

Right now, I’m sitting at the sweet little writing desk a dear friend gave me (joy) because she is moving away (sorrow).

Both are present—at the same time.

Not fearing the future is tough these days, even in my own relatively peaceful little corner of existence. Here, I know that, statistically, there isn’t too much more room for things to get a whole lot better for my Loved One5.

But right now, everything is okay. My Loved One is safe. They are warm and nourished and cared for and they know they are loved.

That’s going in the Joy Jar today, come to think of it.

Tell me: how do you acknowledge good things? Do you have a gratitude or Joy Jar practice? What keeps you afloat in tough times?

If, like me, you tend toward the anxious end of the spectrum (maybe that’s why you’re here), I see you.

Perhaps as a child, a caregiver or parent often said to you, “What are you doing that’s productive?”

Maybe you’ve been plagued by a nagging sense that you aren’t far enough ahead, or should have gotten whatever that thing is you want—preferably by now, yesterday, or last week, or a decade ago.

In graduate school—while working my government desk job a 40-minute commute in one direction, and going to campus 75 minutes in the other—I became obsessed with efficiency.

In order to harvest the considerable time I was spending in the car, I started listening to audiobooks—about things that could help me solve the problems I was having: books for anxiety; books about productivity; books about spirituality, soul-sickness, and hopelessness.

Some of them helped, and listening to narrators meant that I arrived at my destination more calm than if I’d been listening to the news in bumper-to-bumper Santa Barbara traffic.

It rarely occurred to me to listen to fiction, and I certainly wasn’t going to spend precious non-commute time on reading a book—that was for reading papers, writing, and doing my research, or working, or trying to keep my relationships intact.

Anything resembling pleasure reading had long fallen by the wayside.

Fictional truth

I’m in groups with other writers, many of whom write fiction. I’m learning about their process and developing a lot of respect for their craft. I’m also learning that the fiction/nonfiction binary is flimsy. What about auto fiction? What about memoir that creates dialogue to fill gaps in memory?1

Take this excerpt from one of my favorite books of the year, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey2 by Kathleen Rooney, a novel about World War I:

Honors ennoble those on whom they’re bestowed, but they also ease the guilt of those whose commands made them necessary in the first place. A medal is a mirror, reflecting a glory that we force ourselves to believe in.

This, folks, is not fiction.

I met the author last summer during a nonfiction intensive in Wisconsin; she was teaching the counterpart course in fiction during the same week. Rooney read her newest book at an event one night.

To say it aloud: “A novel about two real-life war heroes—one human, one pigeon—reflecting the true costs of war” seems reasonable, until you discover that the pigeon narrates half the book.

You may be thinking what I was thinking—Talking pigeons? No thanks.3

For a long time, I subscribed to the idea that anthropomorphism was among the worst transgressions a scientist could commit.

Detachment serves a purpose—one more sinister than simple objectivity. It’s a separation required to justify cruelty and indifference to suffering. It teaches us how to care less so that we can do what we set out to do.

The more we—scientist or otherwise—can imagine the experiences of other beings, the more compassionate and tender the world will be. This is something Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey does—in force.

I think often about how not that long ago, it was generally accepted that animals couldn’t feel pain—that it was just “reflexes” causing the yowls of dogs being experimented on with no anesthesia. But we know better now, so we (generally, with exceptions, as always) do better. I’d like to think that in 100 years, we will have grown even more compassionate, with a deeper understanding of our kinship with other life, and will act accordingly. Because by historical standards, we already are.

Despite my skepticism about the pigeon, I was intrigued by the passages Rooney read. I introduced myself, bought her book so she could sign my copy, and began reading.

When that pigeon started talking, it began expounding such animistic profundity that I couldn’t put it down. I started recording passages I wanted to keep, as I would quotes from a wise elder’s memoir.

“Humans make their mighty interventions in our lives—hunting, taming, training, breeding, eating; warping our bodies and instincts away from nature, toward their own ends—and they imagine that their great power puts them beyond our regard, beyond our judgment. But we observe, even as we are observed. Most humans forget that.”

- Cher Ami

Deeply researched, the book creates a portal back in time, within which the characters each come to terms with the consequences of war in their own way, bringing the best and most unsavory parts of humanity to light.

Books as medicine

In my relatively new life caring for my Loved One4, I’m continually seeking tools to re-ground my nervous system through the ups and downs of caregiving. Pleasure reading has reemerged as one of these. It gets me to sit still, passes the many lonely evenings away from home, and takes my mind off harsh realities.

In her essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula LeGuin writes:

A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

This explains why reading Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey was a balm at a time when my own life wasn’t making a whole lot of sense (and still isn’t, BTW).

The effect is not limited to historical fiction. LeGuin writes of her own genre:

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.

We can say and understand things under the banner of fiction because it gives us, perhaps, a safer space to be more ourselves. The characters can be more honest.

I stopped breathing when I read this passage from Major Whittlesey:

Canyons of incomprehension yawn between me and most other human beings, and I keep acting as if it’s possible for me to reach across and join them on the other side, to span the gap between who they believe me to be and who I really am.

How does he know?

Because we are a lot more alike than we think we are, and good books remind us of that.

Others that rose to the top

Several books stayed with me this year, and I’d like to share them with you here. One of the best parts of my 2025 reading list is that it grew organically from meeting or already knowing some of the authors.

Memoir

I read a lot of memoir in 2025. I’ve undergone a radical transformation in my perspective about memoir—from that of “self-indulgent navel gazing” (which is actually a load of bullshit used to keep women and other oppressed people silent; see below) to that of reverence for the courage it takes to tell the truth on a level that makes a memoir truly compelling.

A lot went into this shift in perspective, but a significant driving force was reading Melissa Febos’s Body Work. She writes:

The resistance to memoirs about trauma is in many respects a reiteration of the classic role of perpetrator: to deny, discredit, and dismiss victims in order to avoid being implicated or losing power… Resistance to the stories of women, and of all oppressed people, is a resistance to justice.

The River’s Daughter, by

A coming-of-age story about trauma, resilience, and the healing power of deep connection with the natural world.

I’m overjoyed by the wild success of Bridget’s debut memoir. She wrote it for 22 years and finally received her well-earned break into the genre when it published in June. This book is unputdownable, and I’m not just saying that because Bridget is my friend. It carried me away like a river, and I cannot wait for the next installment.

“Over the years, I had spent a lot of time ruminating about what my family had not given me, overlooking what I’d inherited as my birthright: the ability to transform suffering, rise up, and survive.”

— Bridget Crocker, The River’s Daughter

The Mourner’s Bestiary, by

Caffall weaves her life with chronic kidney disease seamlessly with the plight of the ocean and its wild inhabitants; it’s a work of natural history and memoir rolled into one. This book helped me develop more compassion toward the suffering of my Loved One and their health struggles, via a natural history lens I was already accustomed to.

“I have been sick with chronic illness for a long time. I feel only rage at any implication that the sick bring illness on themselves, or think their way into cure. I am not looking to be cured; I can’t be. I’m looking to be healed. The former is about science; the latter is about belief. The former acknowledges a disease system that operates through biology; the latter allows for complexity and the quality of my suffering.”

— Eiren Caffall, The Mourner’s Bestiary

Educated, by Tara Westover

I’m late to the party on this one, which was published in 2018, but it came up enough times that I finally read it. It’s a memoir about being raised in rural Idaho under the shadow of religious conservative extremism and mental illness.

Perhaps one reason I’m currently reading a lot of memoir is so I can feel a little better about the more traumatic aspects of my childhood. And yet—even though the above description does not approximate my experience—so much of Westover’s story still mirrors my own. This book is about learning how to think for oneself, against the grain of all of the forces that aim to prevent you from doing so.

All the Way to the River, by Elizabeth Gilbert

If you’re recoiling at the mere mention of this book, I invite you to hear me out. I almost wrote an entire post about it last summer, but didn’t want to be yet another voice in the din that became the practical media takeover during its publication, so I’ll summarize here.

The release of the Eat Pray Love author’s latest memoir at summer’s end was a distinct phenomenon of 2025. Perhaps you didn’t notice, but chances are, if you heard anything about this book, it was negative.

The amazing thing is that most of the negative press (and ensuing rhetoric) about the book occurred before the book was even released.

That’s both fascinating and, unfortunately, predictable. Here’s what happened: a high-profile author—whom many people decided they knew, and what they could expect from her—told a story that was as authentic to herself as she could muster, to shocking effect. The most often-repeated criticism of the book?

Self-indulgent.

There it is again. What does it mean, anyway?

From the Oxford dictionary: “Characterized by doing exactly what one wants, especially when this involves pleasure or idleness.”

Pleasure? Sure—as an escape from harsh realities. That’s what addiction is, and it’s a book about addiction. The grueling nature of caregiving is anything but idle. But to do exactly what one wants—this is the (supposed) crime.

I went to see Gilbert on her book tour in Ann Arbor. She talked about all the ways that she tried to avoid writing the book, all of the different versions—fiction, poetry, a hybrid—that she tried to shape the story into, in order to not have to write the book. But in the end, All the Way to the River was the book she had to write.

That doesn’t sound like “doing exactly what one wants” to me.

As noted above, the phrase “self-indulgent” is reemerging in the zeitgeist as a slur thrown at women and other oppressed folks who are daring to tell the truth about themselves and their experience—even if it makes other people uncomfortable.

The book made me uncomfortable, but I’m less inclined to dismiss it altogether because of it. Sure, there are some parts I could have done without. But you know what other books that is true of? Literally every single book I’ve ever read. This is called critical thinking.

During the Q & A at the speaking event, it became clear that her message was helping people with their own struggles with addiction. I suspect that Gilbert will not feel quite the same way about the recovery process in a year or two, if she even feels the same way now.

That’s the tricky thing about writing a book: it takes so long to write and publish one, that by the time it comes out, the story has likely changed, because you have.

Her unflinching account of caring for her girlfriend with terminal cancer while they were both active in their respective addictions is insane. Still, Gilbert came through it with profound insights that, at this point in my caregiving journey, made me feel less alone, and that was worth a whole lot of discomfort.

“I’ve never had a baby but there were times when I felt that this is what a mother must experience, tending to her sick child in the dark of the night. It was grueling, but also felt like a sacred encounter with unconditional love…the deep and primal love of one mammal caring for another.”

– Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

Fiction

The Women, by Kristin Hannah

I picked up this book because it was recommended in one of my writing groups, and I wanted to lose myself in some good fiction while also learning about the Vietnam War.

The story focuses on what the women—the nurses—went through, and how they were not considered “real” veterans because they were not men, though they were similarly traumatized. I found myself looking forward to when I could next return to reading this one; I got really attached to the characters. Hannah conducted numerous interviews in her research in order to get the details right. It shows.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, by Lisa See

This novel highlights women’s traditional knowledge systems and struggles in minority-ethnic and rural Chinese cultures, interwoven with nature like a tapestry. I enjoyed being taken so drastically far from my geographic and cultural experience. At the same time, the universality of the human—and female—experience resonated deeply. I’ll be reading more by Lisa See. I’ve also switched from coffee to pu’erh.

Nonfiction

The Age of Dignity, by Ai-Jen Poo

This book hits close to home because of my experience with my Loved One. The work of caregivers of all kinds is under-appreciated and underfunded. The situation is set to worsen as Baby Boomers reach the point where they need assisted and elder care.

Along with staggering statistics, the author brings us back to the essentials: that caregiving, at its root, if it’s going to work, is about care. And that care is everyone’s responsibility. Though the statistics are dire, the author has an incredible message of hope: the needed change is well within our power.

“Let’s remember: people getting older is not a crisis—it’s a blessing. We are living longer; the question is how we should live. As a country, we have to figure out how to embrace this demographic shift with grace.”

- Ai-Jen Poo, The Age of Dignity

The hope part

Cancer, war, addiction, aging, oppression, violence? This may not look like a very hopeful list of reading topics. And it’s not, on the surface. What matters are the stories.

The stories tell of caregivers who won’t give up on their people, even when they are at their worst; about finding love in the most impossible circumstances; about breaking free from harmful mental and emotional programming; about finding solace in the power of nature when the people you were supposed to be able to rely on failed you too many times.

These are all stories of hope—through trial.

And that’s life, isn’t it? We face the tough stuff we are given the best we can, which is never perfect; always flawed, mired in struggle. But, I think, that is what makes it beautiful and worthwhile.

The caregiving journey with my Loved One has been a bit of a shitshow. I’m doing my best but there are times when that feels like not enough. Still, I’m not giving up on them. And reading these stories helped carry me through some tough times.

Tell me: What did you read this year that you’re still thinking about?

Note to subscribers:

Hi! I’m so glad you made it to the end of this post. In the current attention economy, that is no small feat, and I hope you can appreciate the significance of your effort as much as I do (because it’s a lot).

I greatly admire the writers who can whip up a Substack post and publish it in minimal time with little editing; however, I’m realizing that I’m just not one of those people.

I chew on each post for weeks or months at a time, stopping to make notes as I go about life. That’s actually where this note to subscribers originated: in the woods walking on a trail with my dog in 8 inches of snow among the bare trees on a cloudy afternoon. The trail, after all, is where I do my best thinking.

So! Much gratitude for sticking with me here, even as the posts remain intermittent and the Substack forest fills with an abundance of content. There is more to come from my end. I’m chewing on a lot right now—the fun part is deciding which to send you next. If the comments section isn’t your style, drop me a line to let me know what is resonating: hopecology@gmail.com.

Thanks so much for being here.

A

The familiar sound of helicopter rotors thumping low over our house in the middle of the night was not a good sign. I rolled over, grabbed my phone, and immediately checked the neighborhood Facebook group to find out what was going on.

It took several minutes for the story to come into focus among the speculative rumors, but soon I knew that I could check the locks on the windows and doors and return to bed, instead of grabbing the go-bags and evacuating my family to safer ground.

Since the Thomas Fire, our neighborhood Facebook group has been an important source of up-to-date information on local dangers far in advance of official emergency notifications. This is just one example of how social media has become an important tool in modern life.

Great tool; terrible master

What we consume, either nourishes or consumes us.

Some weeks ago, I deleted most1 of the social media apps from my smartphone. I was distracted to the point that I was unhappy with the effect it was having on my quality of life.

We’ve known for awhile now that constant distraction and screen time have led to changes in the brain, affecting how we think, how we interact with each other, and how we engage (or don’t) with the world around us.

My constant distraction had created a kind of dulling film over my life—I was beginning to wonder how many of my thoughts and imaginings were really my own. Outsourcing my fallow, idle time to distraction, I was robbing myself of the treasure that resides in interstitial time, though I hadn’t quite discovered this yet.

Intellectual historian and author of the book The Extinction of Experience,2 , writes in a guest post for :

When mediated experiences co-opt our idle time, we are left with fewer and fewer of these fallow moments, moments that are central to the experience of being human… Reclaiming our idle time and reorienting ourselves away from screens is one of many small yet radical acts that have the potential to improve the quality of our daily experiences… We must, every day, try to reclaim the time that technology has colonized.

The increased level of addiction to my phone was no accident. Coping with my relatively new life with my Loved One had me grasping for connection as I’d previously known it in the spaces when I wasn’t caregiving. While the impulse for connection is natural, reaching for my phone to fill it comes with unintended consequences. Rosen writes,

The distractions we seek don’t only consume our time... They also degrade many habits of mind that require time and patience to form, such as empathy, awareness, and emotional regulation.

Though my craving for connection couldn’t have been more human, my seeking it in the quick fix of social media scrolling may have been having the opposite effect.

I kind of knew all of this but wasn’t really interested in doing anything about it—until early June when I realized I had lost a conscious choice in the matter. I would find myself, phone in hand, wondering how I had arrived there. I had not wanted to pick up my phone, but I had anyway, completely unconsciously—as if in a liquor-induced blackout.

Disinterested in cold turkey, I decided to go in soft: I would start with the low-hanging fruit (i.e., the app I don’t even use anymore because it’s awful), deleting one app per week. As it turned out, deleting apps was nearly as addictive as the dopamine hit of scrolling on them.

Once I had deleted one, the next got easier, until I deleted some of my favorites. In moments of idle time, I would reach for my phone, only to realize halfway there that I wouldn’t have a social media feed to check if I did pick it up. So, relaxing my arm, I returned to the analog world, looked around, and proceeded to think my own thoughts.

After nearly two months of this, my brain has returned to me in ways that I didn’t know I had lost it. Protecting it from an onslaught of information I didn’t ask for has given it space to dream, create, and hope again.

Producers and consumers

Your thoughts are an amalgamation of what your mom said, your third grade teacher told you, and what you were fed by the algorithm this morning.

- Vinny Ferraro, Big Heart City Dharma talk, 4 July 2025

Some successful creatives suggest that the key to a rich creative life is to produce more than one consumes. My social media use alone was an indicator light that I was practicing the opposite.

If I am consuming less, I have more of my own thoughts, and more opportunities for inspiration to organically arise in the space between doing things.

My phone still provides a source of intellectual nourishment when needed: I have two library apps that I use to read eBooks and listen to audiobooks, and I’ve left the Substack app on my phone because it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on essays from writers I follow, and to discover and connect with new ones.

Instead of scrolling through tiny bits of information, I’m now consuming writing, most of it quite good. And this amounts to the vegetables of what I want my mind consuming, rather than the junk food of social media.

Vegetables require more work to prepare, and often to chew, than Doritos. But they are infinitely more enjoyable in both the short and long-term, if I’m curating them well.

Everything in its place

I’m not one to decry technology or social media. Unlike many who are understandably concerned about the way things are going and have been for quite some time, I haven’t deleted any of my social media accounts—I still access them from my desktop.

It is a useful and sometimes joyful tool, but for me, it needs to stay put away in the toolbox most of the time. I still use social media when the tide of energy and desire meet high enough for me to go to my laptop, login, and do whatever it is I want to do there. It requires more consciousness.

Creating space between my increasingly precious mental real estate and the habit of scrolling on my phone is more important to me now than it has ever been. I want to have more control over what I’m consuming, because that will change what, how, and when I’m producing.

Not only that: I want to be more of a producer than a consumer.

“Wait—aren’t producers at the bottom of the food chain? Isn’t that bad?”

Hierarchies of consumption

In ecology, the producers—who turn light and carbon dioxide through photosynthesis into oxygen and sugar that feeds consumers—are at the bottom of the trophic pyramid. These autotrophs—specifically named because they produce their own food from sunlight and carbon dioxide—include plants and phytoplankton.

At the very top, shown as “secondary predators” in the trophic pyramid illustration below (A), are the apex predators—those animals who eat the other animals nearer the top: say, sharks and wolves.

In the middle are the in-between organisms—frogs, squirrels, birds, for example—that both provide food for the predators above them and consume what’s below them.

The hierarchical view is helpful to a point, wherein organisms can be grouped by trophic level (A). In reality, however, ecosystems are composed of complex webs of interactions that cannot be organized in a linear way (B).

I came across a brilliant illustration3 of the difference, and its relational human implications, in a recent post by :

Hierarchy and linearity are oversimplifications designed to assist humans in predicting and controlling the unpredictable and uncontrollable. That’s partly why ecology is such a challenging scientific discipline4: the natural world is generally referred to as “messy”, because it doesn’t fit well into linear structure. Increasingly complex statistical modeling has “helped” with this over time, but the inevitable gaps and misunderstandings can be consequential on many levels.

This is fine for ecology, because we are trying to better understand our world, and we (hopefully) accept that models are only approximations of the real thing. But what about the rest of how we relate to the world, outside of science’s mandate to predict and control? Linearity can be slyly sinister.

The binary nature of the algorithm that we surrender to when we consume social media is robbing us of the richness of the logarithm.

As writes in ,

In opposition to Nature’s logarithm, we are expected to live in the binary of the algorithm. A world reduced to zeros and ones, with time as a straight line leaving the past behind as it barrels into the future. This is the geometry of the patriarchy… The binary dehumanizes, and, worse, it enforces our separation from the living world by insisting that humans are superior to “all that stuff out there.”

Here’s the not-so-secret secret: there is no “out there.” Surrendering to the algorithm takes the lifeblood out of life itself.

“Does being a ‘producer’ mean you’re productivity-obsessed, destined for burnout?”

Of course, we aren’t actually autotrophs.

I hitched on a sizable resentment once when I read someone’s reference to the “industrial self-care complex.” This statement was made by an individual who has, by all measures, benefited from some of the most extreme privilege on offer in the world. They, perhaps, deride self-care precisely because they don’t need it, because the world is set up to meet their every need and desire.

For the rest of us, working hard to prove ourselves to get ahead, burnout happens.

Wanting to be more of a producer than a consumer is not about calories in-calories out. There are different modes of producing. Burnout results from something out of balance: working too hard with not enough rest, nourishment, replenishment.

If, on top of work, there are other stressors—such as finding food, shelter, or safety, even if safety simply feels unachievable due to the haunting of past events rearing up into the present—work is a whole lot harder; it takes a bigger toll.

To be a producer in these conditions, without burning out, is really hard. It requires what can seem like monumental amounts of tending to the self.

Sometimes recovery means deleting the social media apps from your phone so you can have your mind back. Sometimes, as recently wrote, it means giving oneself permission to go about one’s days without a particular goal. These are vital times for absorption, not production.

I can produce, I can give, I can share—but only if I’ve had, quite literally, enough water and sunlight.

A note to subscribers:

Hi! I’ve missed you! How are you doing out there? I wanted to leave a note to say thank you for sticking around, for following along on the Hopecology adventure, for supporting Hopecology. I’m learning that creativity refuses to stick to a schedule, and squeezing that logarithmic reality into a linear culture is tough indeed. So thank you for sticking around, even when the space between posts seems to linger. Know that I’m always cooking something (usually many somethings) for you, and even the smallest level of engagement on your part is acknowledged and appreciated. There is more to come in the Life with L.O. series; at least one more post in the relatively near-term. In the longer-term, I’m not sure yet. Fortunately, L.O. is doing very well right now, especially considering all they’ve been through. I’m grateful every day for that. Thank you for being here! -A

Love in a time of crisis

All the times I’ve heard it said that “love makes you do crazy things,” I thought it was a reference to puppy love—that hormonally-driven, questionable decision making one encounters early in a romantic relationship.

Then L.O.’s stroke happened, and I realized it doesn’t have to be romantic love at all to make you do things that you wouldn’t ordinarily do—if you love someone enough, you will go to great lengths to ensure their safety and survival.

At night in the ICU, L.O. was excruciatingly uncomfortable, not able to shift their own body in the bed to redistribute their weight. There was a tarp with handles under the sheet, which allowed the nurses to transfer them to the gurneys to be shipped out of the room for further tests.

I would tug on the back of the tarp with all the strength I had. Surprisingly, it worked—it would shift L.O.’s weight in the bed and provide relief so we could get back to sleep.

After I’d done this five or six times, L.O. exclaimed, “I can’t believe you can do that!”

Being able to relieve even a little of their misery became a surprising source of strength.

I had enormous amounts of energy for the first several weeks with L.O.—an adrenaline rush in which the lack of sleep and food didn’t matter. I was drawing on a previously untapped, unnamed source of energy, like the mothers who can lift cars off of their babies.

L.O., in fact, did this—lifting a car that had rolled onto their sister when they were both kids, saving her.

There is superhuman strength in love.

Rehab in the springtime

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

- Zora Neale Hurston

In mid-May, I rode in the ambulance with L.O. from the hospital to the subacute rehabilitation facility half an hour away. L.O. stared out the back window, identifying the cross streets of a lifetime of memories, having spent nearly their whole life in the same town.

The transition to rehab was uneasy. A series of events led to my having to advocate for L.O.’s medical care in a way that I had not expected would be necessary. I learned to walk the knife edge between ensuring L.O.’s safety and wellbeing, and keeping the peace with caregivers and medical staff.

Eventually, as the quality of L.O.’s care gradually improved, I made sure we got outside.

I pushed L.O.’s wheelchair right up to the edges of the pavement and locked the brakes, fetching objects to engage the senses: flower petals, tree buds, maple seeds, oak leaves, beetles. I handed items to L.O.’s left hand, encouraging connections in the right hemisphere of the brain.

The simplest moments in nature seemed to bring a little bit more of L.O. back each time. Our outdoor adventures, however tame, brought an ease and joy to L.O.—and still do.

Before the heat and bugs of summer descend, late spring in Michigan is a time of nearly-always perfect weather, from azure skies to earth-shaking thunderstorms. I marveled at the timing for this stage of L.O.’s recovery. I kept telling them: “Thanks for not having your stroke in February.”

I didn’t know what lay ahead for L.O. at the time. I hadn’t done the research into L.O.’s prognosis based on the seriousness of their stroke. I didn’t want that knowledge to get in the way of the cultivation of hope that I needed to be the most present, optimistic care advocate I could.

Prognosis and love

The stroke gave me the chance to appreciate, in a much deeper way, the preciousness of the love that surrounds me. The stroke created more love than I had ever seen before—even people who don’t like me sent me their good wishes….I saw all these hearts opening all around me…. I felt love coming from all directions.

- Ram Dass, Still Here

Ram Dass lived 22 years after his stroke. Thich Nhat Hanh lived seven years after his. A famous actress told me that after her father’s stroke, he moved in with her and had full-time caregivers, and he lived another eight years. Their medical cases were not exceptional; rather, they had the resources and community for the best possible care.

The first physical therapist that came to see L.O. in the hospital was compassionate with L.O.’s limitations in a way that I’ve never seen with a healthcare provider. When she turned to leave, L.O. said, in the most sincere way, “Thank you—you’ve given me hope.”

There it was, ringing in my ears. That word—hope—that hasn’t meant much of anything to many for a while, as it’s become associated with the idea of false hope. But here it was, coming from L.O.’s lips.

I was recently reminded of something I wrote in the Hopecology Explainer via ’s recommendation of Hopecology:

And I’m most definitely not going to try to instill false hope that everything will be okay. Because we don’t have evidence that it will. Yet herein lies the rub: we don’t have evidence that it definitely won’t either. One thing that will ensure it won’t? Giving in to our despair.

The physical therapist didn’t tell us that everything was going to be okay; she simply said that the extent of L.O.’s recovery remained to be seen, and that some recovery may be possible.

As the late spring days got progressively longer and warmer, L.O. continued to improve. I spent most of the summer there, busy every day managing L.O.’s medical and other aspects of their life.

I took on more and more responsibility as L.O.’s life necessitated. Before I knew it, I was indispensable to L.O.’s business of living. As a result, I essentially canceled my own.

While L.O. was in therapy sessions, I sat in the hallway and put the final polish on a manuscript I was the lead author on—a beast of a collaborative effort for the previous four years. I made the edits and sent it off sans fanfare. It felt as though the world kept turning, without me on it.

In times of frustration (which were frequent), I’d collapse into doubt. What am I doing? I’d ask myself. Am I sacrificing my own life for L.O.’s?

The choice/no choice

For the first six months after L.O.’s stroke, I felt as though I had been driving along in the car of my life, taking my lessons and growth at a reasonably ambitious pace for the most part, then moving on to the next—thinking, naively perhaps, that whatever I had accomplished or grown through was continually shrinking toward the horizon in the rearview mirror.

When L.O.’s stroke happened, I slammed on the brakes, and everything that I thought I was “past” came flying forward—hitting me in the back of the head, tangling in my hair, cracking the windshield. The rest of the backseat rummage sale landed in my lap. It wasn’t even all my own stuff.

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There have been countless lessons, some of which I intend to share on Hopecology as the aftermath of this event continues to unfold—lessons about cultivating hope in the midst of crisis; the American healthcare system; the way elders are treated; and much more.

Because the aftermath of the crisis is continually unfolding, and because it involves some sensitive subjects, I’m going to keep it closer to heart. As I mentioned in the Hopecology explainer, there will be times that, to put some compassionate boundaries around more personal stories, certain posts will be for paying subscribers only.

If you’re already a paying subscriber, your generous commitment to Hopecology will be paying new dividends. If you’re not, but would like to follow along, I hope you’ll consider it. If a paid subscription isn’t possible for you right now, the referral program is one way to earn one. I also offer gift subscriptions to anyone who recommends Hopecology on their own Substack. Finally, if none of these work for you, send me an email and tell me a little about yourself: hopecology@gmail.com. I don’t want the paywall to be an insurmountable barrier for anyone who wants to read Hopecology. Let’s chat.

For those of you not joining us past the paywall, here is the TLDR:

• One of the people I love most in the world had a stroke.

• Circumstance led to my managing all of their business and medical affairs.

• Overnight, I went from a childless scientist to a caregiver for a hemiplegic octogenarian.

This may sound like a burden to some. That’s not a word I use to describe this experience; besides, most often, it is an exciting, invigorating, heartbreaking, heartwarming, stunning, surprising, ever-evolving, hope-cultivating undertaking.

Though I’ve been at this for nearly a year, the energy required to keep going somehow regenerates itself—if I consciously manage to get enough rest, which isn’t easy.

I didn’t at first. I crashed and burned—hard—a few times last summer. In July I almost lost everything (and I mean everything). But I’m learning what I need to do in order to keep going, and that means taking care of myself in new ways.

Where to start?

With multifaceted, megalithic stories, it’s often difficult to know where to begin.

In 2017, beneath the pale mid-afternoon light of a Pacific Northwest December, I took respite from the Thomas Fire as it continued to rage through my community. As soon as the plane pierced the thick Seattle cloud cover, and I caught a ferry to the Olympic Peninsula, my friend Kirie and I began doing what we know to do in crisis: we walked.

As we strolled along the Dabob Bay mud flats, I breathed in the fresh air deeply, the first untainted by ash and smoke for weeks.

After we had walked side by side in silence for the appropriate amount of time, she asked tenderly, “So what happened?”

“I don’t even know where to start,” I said.

“Start at the beginning.”1

Her answer was obvious, yet revelatory. It is this kind of logic that I must borrow from others when the exhaustion of crisis sets in.

And so, here, I will take Kirie’s suggestion. Let’s start at the beginning of the story of my journey with L.O.—my Loved One.

T₀ - T₁: How it began

On the evening of May 2, 2024, my husband and I went to dinner to celebrate our fourteenth wedding anniversary. We sat outside under the twinkling string lights, picking at half a roasted chicken, talking over our plans for the rest of the year: what we hoped for, what we would like to do. Our future seemed nearly as rosy as the sunset that warmed the backdrop of the Topa Topa mountains in the distance.

On our walk back to the truck, I was admiring the effects of golden hour, so my husband snapped a photo of me. His jacket, thrown over my shoulders because a chill was settling into the valley, seems to dwarf me as I stand there, unfinished bottle of sparkling water in hand, having not a clue that this would be the last day of that version of my life.

Like the baseline photos taken before a treatment begins in an ecological experiment, May 2 represents Time Zero.

T₁

I thought my dog died. In the early morning hours, my husband came into the room and said, gently, “I’m sorry to have to wake you with this, but…”

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We were at a lively bar in a little town near Lake Michigan. I was months away from moving to Prescott, Arizona, to transfer from a large state university to a small liberal arts school where I hoped to learn and be challenged more, and to drink less.

My friend, James, came rushing up to the high top where I was sitting, a joyful face beaming out from under his corralling arm.

“This is Susan!” He shouted, in the early, giddy stages of drunkenness. “She lives in Prescott! Isn’t that where you’re moving?!”

Susan had a warm glow. Dewy from the humidity of Michigan summer, her demeanor was generous and loving, even though we had just met. She told me how much I was going to love Prescott, what lovely and interesting people were there.

I couldn’t wait to spend more time with her. We exchanged numbers and parted ways. I spent the night in jail for consuming alcohol two months before my 21^st birthday. Susan did not.

A few months later, I drove cross-country to Prescott with a relative. We met Susan at a bar that seemed luxurious compared to the one in Michigan—with rich, saloon-style decor and, behind the subtly twinkling shelves of glass bottles in the dim light, a large, speckled mirror that looked ancient.

My relative and Susan hit it off. We were having a great time, the three of us. I learned what “top shelf” meant. Our revelry escalated to taking shots of Patrón. We bought the bottle. We finished it. We ended up at her place. I slept on the couch.

I woke up with the worst hangover I’d ever had before or since, not knowing what the dry Arizona air mixed with a night of heavy tequila drinking could do to an unaccustomed Midwest body. I learned quickly how to prevent these because I didn’t want to wake up wishing I were dead ever again.

Susan walked into the room in a silk kimono, beaming down at me. “How’s your head?” she asked so gently and empathetically that it put any semblance of care my mother had ever given me to shame. Susan didn’t even look tired, let alone hungover.

Susan was magnetic. She had a way of making you feel seen and loved without a drop of gush. Everything about her oozed authenticity. She was unapologetically herself, and brought that self into every situation. I instantly admired her. I wanted to spend more time with her. I wanted to know how a person got to be like that: so sure of herself, so relatable yet entirely unique.

Susan seemed free of self-doubt. She was an artist and creative and seemed to know everyone in town. I should have made more of an effort to see her, but I didn’t.

I spent two years in Prescott. She moved to Portland. I graduated and moved to Mexico. Thirteen years later, I noticed that she had published her award-winning novel, Hot Season.

Reading the jacket copy, I remembered Patrón Night and feared some of me might appear in Susan’s novel. I’ve always wanted to read it, but, as yet, have not.

From afar, I was happy for Susan and her literary success. I started following her on social media. She started teaching workshops and coaching writers. I always meant to reach out to her, to say hi, to congratulate her on her success, to sign up for one of her workshops. But I didn’t.

A few months ago, I saw a post from Susan on LinkedIn in which she opened up about a harrowing health journey she had been living through.

Last summer, I stopped publishing Hopecology essays because I was attending to one of the biggest, life-screeching-to-a-halt crises I’ve yet encountered. Susan’s honesty and the way she vulnerably laid it all on the line was deeply inspirational.

I took her post as a sign that I needed to publish on Hopecology about what had been going on. But my nervous system was also fried and I could not find the time or the bandwidth to write, edit, and publish a post. Like a newborn, it was not quite ready to have all eyes on it just yet, before its own eyes were even open.

I’m glad Susan’s on the mend, I thought to myself. I should drop her a note and tell her how much her honesty means right now.

But I didn’t.

Last week, Susan died. I felt the grief and loss for her family, the writing community, the Prescott community, the stories she had yet to put into the world, grief for the things I had always meant to do and say but didn’t.

I thought I always had more time. I thought that she would always be there and I could reconnect with her… someday.

Now that I’m more strikingly faced with all the things I haven’t done, I’m asking myself: what else am I putting off, when the time is now?

It is time for me to tell you about the crisis that struck last spring1. I’m not the same person I was this time last year, and because I always write from my lived experience, to write Hopecology without it would either not make sense, be writing a lie, or both. Facing one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do has taken me to the depths of despair and taught me how to hope again.

I can’t say for sure, but if I could tell Susan about this, I think she would tell me to start now. Write—and publish. She would want me to be fearless as she was, lay it all bare, fuck the consequences, because the consequences of not telling our stories are worse than what might happen if we do.

As author of Shame on You: How to be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, wrote this week:

Suppressing parts of ourselves and our stories leads to a loss of authenticity, internalized shame, and missed connections. It creates mental and emotional strain, stifles creativity, and reinforces harmful social norms that keep others feeling ashamed as well. Even as it holds us back from transformative experiences, and leads to a life of regret, we continue to silence ourselves, prioritizing external approval over internal truth…

Our writing may be seen as disruptive or rebellious, but it is also a vital act of self-expression and authenticity— a gutsy assertion of our voice and truth, opening new possibilities for both ourselves and our society.

It is fitting, then, that I’d open this post by telling the Hopecology community that I spent the night in Oceana County Jail one hot August evening in 2000.

Giving me the extra nudge I needed, yesterday I met a woman who wrote a book about her journey of addiction, prostitution, and recovery. She started a charity to provide drug treatment and life-skills education to victims of sex trafficking. I told her about my hesitation to write this post and those to come.

She said, “When I was hesitant writing my book, I told myself, ‘If this can help one person, it will have been worth it. So I kept going.’”

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As time goes on it only becomes more clear to me how true it is that hope is an action.

This week I came across a resource2 that helped transmute my anxiety and overwhelm about what’s happening in the USA into meaningful actions. These tasks aren’t necessarily all that difficult. For example, I’m participating in the Minute of US, at 12:53 pm local time on Wednesdays—taking a minute of silence for all those suffering. It’s a little something, but it’s a something, and when I’m doing a few somethings, the knots of despair begin to loosen.3

As the world tumbles deeper into chaos and increasingly rapid change, it’s clear that the luxury of later is behind us: now is the time.

Send the card, say the I love you, take the trip, visit the public lands while we still have some, fight the fascism, buy the book, read the book, WRITE the book, hit the goddamn “publish” button. And then—this is important—rest, recalibrate, nourish. This is a marathon.

wrote in her tribute to Susan:

What we can take from Susan’s example is to fully inhabit our own lives. To let our beliefs guide our work. To not be afraid to WANT things and to strive for things. And to do it with love and energy as long as we can.

Even posthumously, Susan can teach us how to live out loud more; to make the most of the time we have left.

That is one powerful woman.

Resources and more info:

• Susan’s courses

• Go fund me to support Daniel and Calder after loss of Susan

• About Susan

I’m delighted to share this interview with . Nina is the author of In this Ravishing World, just released in early July, which was awarded the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Nina teaches creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies and elsewhere. Her Substack, , explores a stunning sentence from a published work, once per week. Paid subscribers gather with Nina once a month on Zoom and write a handful of stunning sentences, then read some of them and marvel at their beauty and originality.

Through a series of short stories, In this Ravishing World covers an array of human behaviors, perspectives, and responses to the climate crisis. The book provided solace to me during an acutely difficult time–I really looked forward to nesting down with the stories at the end of each harrowing day to find out what the characters would do next, and discover how they were interconnected. Each story is woven so beautifully with the others, much like our own human and planetary tapestry.

I had a conversation with Nina about what prompted her to write this work of exploratory climate fiction now, how we orient ourselves toward hope and hopeful perspectives in a world that feels like it’s on fire all the time, and the role storytelling has to play in all of it. This interview expanded from that conversation.

Andrea Joy Adams: What do you think is the relationship between spirituality, nature, AI, and the human desire for control?

Nina Schuyler: I love the big stretch of this question! I’m going to respond by relying on the research and thinking I did for my collection, In This Ravishing World.

As I was writing the stories that swirl around the climate crisis, I became curious: How did we end up here? How did we end up with ecological destruction and collapse? The easy answer is the Industrial Revolution and the rapid emission of CO2. But what ideas and worldviews led to this moment? Here’s what I’ve pieced together so far.

In the collection, I included the voice of Nature. I anthropomorphized it, assigning it human characteristics, hoping to create a bridge via empathy between humans and the natural world. Anthropomorphism isn’t done in serious fiction. Anthropomorphizing is relegated to fantasy, science fiction, or speculative fiction, kept far from the pristine palace of serious fiction, which is under the umbrella of realism.

That umbrella emerged in the late 19^th century in reaction to romanticism and, coincidentally, coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Realism literature aligns with a scientific framing of the world and stories are focused intensely on the drama and dynamics of humans. As Amitav Ghosh writes in his thought-provoking book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, “It was exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human.” 

So our dominant paradigm through which we see reality is science. As my science friends remind me, anthropomorphizing is banned in science because of the fear it will bias the results. What is studied—insects, mammals, birds, ocean life—is turned into an object. This is the dominant paradigm. What we’ve done, in essence, is ban ourselves from the natural world and any kind of meaningful relationship with it. (No wonder we’re in an epidemic of loneliness.) The philosopher Martin Buber wrote in his 1923 book, I and Thou, that humans have two modes of existence. There’s the I-It relationship and the I-Thou. I’d say we’re primarily in an I-It relationship with the other-than-humans and with many humans. We look at the color or details of the tree, for instance--or its movement, or we categorize it by type.  The tree is an “It,” an object that is separate from you, and the resulting relationship is a thin thread of utilitarianism. It’s anemic. Everything and everyone is turned into a resource. And here, now, we come to the question of spirituality.

The word “spirituality” clutches a bag full of historical associations. I’m going to refer to its etymology. It’s derived from the Old French, espirit, which comes from the Latin word spiritus—soul, vigor, breath. It means "animating or vital principle in man and animals.” 

In the I-Thou relationship, other-than-humans are not turned into objects but experienced as alive beings. We are, in my view, in the realm of spirituality. The “I” is not separate from the other but deeply intertwined, so enmeshed that the “I” disappears.

Turning to artificial intelligence, which was what my novel, Afterword, was about, I see this new technology as the ultimate effort to know everything. Nietzsche declared God is dead. Well, the AI leaders are trying to revive God. They’ve made hyperbolic statements that AI will solve all intractable problems—education, health care, finance, energy, on and on. But at what cost? The tech leaders also talk about (not openly or often) universal basic income for all the people who will lose their jobs to AI.

A big concern is that as humans compete with AI and technological advances, we further become like technology itself, adopting its values of efficiency and productivity. Heidegger warned about this in his 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning Technology.” In it, he thought humanity could very well be flattened into these distinct values, shedding the fullness of being human--beings who care, love, who are compassionate, who feel and create art. Essentially he worried we’d operate at all times in the I-It realm and accept that we are an “It” and nothing more.

To complicate the AI picture, I have to add that AI may play a positive role in helping forge an I-Thou relationship with nature. (Nothing is all good or all bad.) In her fascinating book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, Karen Bakker discusses how scientists are using improved sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a wide range of species, including plants, are talking. For instance, they’ve found bats argue over food; they distinguish between genders when they communicate with one another; they have individual names or “signature calls.” Mother bats speak to their babies in an equivalent of “motherese.” So maybe anthropomorphism isn’t the right term at all. Maybe we’re in the realm of realism—we didn’t have the technology to listen and hear. Everything, it seems, is talking.  

Something you said in our conversation really struck me: “Facts don’t matter anymore. We need stories.” I agree–more recounting of dire statistics is not going to rouse people to action, but relationships will. How do you think storytelling can shape the collective worldview?

I kept hearing that from my environmental friends: “Facts aren’t working. Write something. Do something.”

What well-crafted stories do so well is create experiences for the reader. It’s a completely different way of acquiring understanding and knowledge. It’s a felt knowledge, a bodily knowledge. If the story is written well, the reader engages with the fictional characters, who confirm the reader’s understanding of experience and change it by presenting what the reader can’t or hasn’t articulated. Well-drawn characters engender our sympathy, despite ourselves, by rendering experiences the reader didn’t imagine but can believe.

When writing a story, the building blocks are powerful nuggets called scenes. Scenes take place in a particular time and setting and are lush and ripe with sensory details. I think it was Flannery O’Connor who said if you include three or more sensory elements–sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound—the reader will experience the moment. These experiences speak directly to the reader’s body, and, unlike facts, what the body feels is an undeniable reality. 

I’ve gathered from our conversation and from your writing that you see hope as an action, rather than a feeling. Would you agree? What words of wisdom would you offer to those who think there is nothing they can do that will make a difference?

Absolutely. To create the feeling of hope, you need action. Action leads to hope. I think there’s a real line of causation. There’s something about the human condition that when one has agency, one feels fitted to the world to change it, improve it. The world no longer feels alien or absurd. If you do nothing, if you worry and fret, despair settles into the bones and the blood. Despair corrals and captures the mind, sending it into a cage of apathy and deeper despair.

The incredibly astute Rebecca Solnit said the future is not yet written. If you look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations, their reports always show four graphs that project possible futures. What we do now decides which trajectory we will be on in the future.

So what do we do? When asked this question, Bill McKibben always answers: Stop acting like an individual and join an organization. I asked my ecology friends for names of groups that are working on alternative energy because that’s what I’m interested in supporting. 

I’m really excited about your next book project, which continues in the vein of giving a voice to nature. Can you tell us a little bit about your next book?

It’s still in that incubatory stage, and I’m protecting it so it can grow and flourish. I will say I’m excited about it, too, and I’ll say I’m still immersed in the world of nature and the other-than-human. Because I need to do something different for each big project, I’m in the realm of what’s called magical realism. Remember what the German art historian and critic Franz Roh (who coined the term) said of magical realism: it displays “calm admiration of the magic of being, of the discovery that things already have their own faces.” Magical realism is fascinated with a kind of magic that doesn't descend from outside of the objects but “hides and palpitates behind the objects themselves.”

In our conversation you said, “The thing that gives everything meaning is time: if we are finite, everything matters.” How do you take this lesson to heart in your life, and how do you think readers can use its wisdom?

Oh, to leave this ravishing planet! Heartbreaking! But with the limit on my time here, everything is excruciatingly poignant. I think by now I’ve sloughed off what doesn’t matter to me and spend a great deal of time with what does matter. Every day I write--it brings me such pleasure! I love teaching writing and sharing what I find with other writers, so I do a lot of that. I love guiding my children to become who they want to be. I have a very good friend who is now in assisted living, and I visit as often as I can. You see, my mother died early, and my husband’s parents died early. We’ve both stared at that beast for a long time, and it forces you to rid yourself of the delusion you have all the time in the world. You get on with it.

How do you cultivate hope/or, what brings you hope?

Here’s what’s happening at my book events and it’s utterly beautiful and fills me with hope. After I read and discuss the making of the book, the audience begins to talk: How can we cut back on plastics? In Australia, fast food places don’t provide plastic forks or cups. You bring your own. I ripped out my lawn and planted a pollinator garden. Now my neighbors are doing the same thing. How can we get out the vote to ensure we elect political leaders who will address climate change? I’ve cut back on meat consumption. I’m limiting my airplane travel. What kind of earth will exist for future generations? On and on, and the room fills with questions and responses, and slowly what felt like isolated people sitting on metal chairs becomes a gathering with a focus and something charged in the air.

This is what the climate scientists say needs to happen: we need to talk about it and share from the heart why it matters. As environmental journalist Sara Peach wrote, “Talk is the fertile field in which cultural change begins; in its absence it’s impossible for a group of people to solve a problem.”

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Michael Hawk is the host of the Nature’s Archive Podcast and founder of Jumpstart Nature—an innovative, tech-centric conservation organization. I wanted to learn more about Michael’s story of how and why he shifted gears during a 20-year career in tech to start a nature-oriented podcast in 2022.

He is clearly a mission-driven person, and our conversations are always a fun, two-way street of ideas, owing in part to our backgrounds in tech and ecology, as well as our shared values for the conservation of nature.

In a world where technology is increasingly woven into our everyday lives, I’m interested in examining how it can assist us in more deeply valuing and connecting with nature. If this seems counterintuitive to you, you’re not alone! And yet, that’s why I’m excited about Michael’s work—he is finding inspiring ways to employ tech in service of the environment.

I aim to make Hopecology a source for nuanced, “both-and” conversations, where there is ample room for exploration between supposed opposites. These conversations offer fruit for both contemplation and the wise action that follows.

The beginning of the 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi’s poem, The Great Wagon, comes to mind:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there…

Onto the interview with Michael!

Andrea Joy Adams: Leaving a lucrative job in the tech industry to start a nature-themed podcast must have taken a big leap of faith or conviction, or something else. Can you tell us more about what led you to make this life-altering decision, and how you took the leap?

Michael Hawk: It was the culmination of a few things. In general, I’ve had a long and continually growing love of nature. I got into hiking and nature photography, and I’d plan vacations around National Parks and other scenic areas.

Conservation and ecology first started calling to me as a possible career around 2010 or so, but the birth of our second child deferred any serious consideration.

But by 2018 it had simply grown too large to ignore, so I started telling my manager and some colleagues that I was planning to leave in 5 years. I took some ecology classes, started volunteering with nature groups, and eventually started Nature’s Archive Podcast.

The podcast wasn’t “the plan”, but rather it was a way to learn, make connections, and share with others. As a result, I didn’t treat it like a business - I didn’t market it at all. It started primarily for me, and anyone like me who wanted to learn too. But it has slowly gained a respectable audience and a stronger reputation.

Around 2021, based on what I’d learned, I started putting a broader environmental communications vision together, leveraging media and technology. I actually had an offer to take my vision to a local mid-sized nonprofit, so that was the trigger for me to leave my tech job in 2022. I felt pretty confident because I’d been able to save a bit of money to give a couple year buffer, given the anticipated lower pay.

Unfortunately, that job offer fell through due to some, I’ll say mismanagement, at that nonprofit. So it was on to plan B - make a go if it myself, as Jumpstart Nature.

I think about the future my kids will inherit, and that I want to demonstrate to them what I think “doing the right thing” looks like. I didn’t want to regret not trying. It’s still unclear whether this will all “work out”, but at least I’m doing it!

Absolutely! What are the major differences between the two different podcasts you produce, besides the fact that you’re the host of Nature’s Archive?

Nature’s Archive is a conversational interview style. It’s long form—about one hour, where my guests and I get into a specific area of interest. 

Nature’s Archive covers a lot of topics - sometimes it’s pretty mainstream, like wildlife crossings, wildfire, water management, and bird migrations. And sometimes it’s somewhat esoteric (yet fascinating!) stuff, like phorid flies, lichens, and slime molds. Sometimes those esoteric topics are really popular! 

One thing I really like to do with Nature’s Archive is to ask my guests about their communication styles, what works for them, and what approaches they find to be most impactful. I want to be the best environmental communicator I can possibly be—and also share those tools with my listeners.

The Jumpstart Nature podcast is, as they say in the industry, a short form narrative podcast. It runs 20-30 minutes, and looks at a topic from multiple perspectives. We interview multiple people, and tie it together with a narrative that our host, Griff Griffith, reads. Our goal with this podcast is to reach “beyond the choir”. I often think of what we do as filling in the gaps of ecological knowledge that should have been taught in school, but in a fun, entertaining, and actionable way. 

One of the things I appreciate most about Nature’s Archive and Jumpstart Nature is it’s clear you and your team work hard to dispel misconceptions and show various angles of an issue. Is there an episode that you think really exemplifies this the most?

When it comes to dispelling misconceptions, I think some of our best ideas are still ahead of us. So, I’m going to take the easy way out here and name two. The Nature’s Archive interview with Lenya Quinn-Davidson was an amazing look at wildfire—all thanks to Lenya’s deep knowledge and her communications experience. 

On the Jumpstart Nature side, we have a smaller sample of episodes, but we got a lot of feedback on the “Plant Your Birdfeeder” episode, which highlights the many pitfalls of backyard bird feeding. We recognize that people do the things they do because they care, so we never shame or lecture, but we do try to reveal a path forward—a way to channel that care in a more productive way.

In Plant Your Birdfeeder, we made a strong case to support more than just seed eating birds (which represent a surprisingly small minority of birds), and reduce disease spread at feeders. We didn’t tell people to take their feeders down forever—rather, only use feeders when you can really take on the responsibility of caring for wildlife.

I enjoy how our conversations often turn to the ability to hold multiple truths at once, and the drawbacks of “either-or” thinking in environmental discourse. Can you expand on this for Hopecology readers? 

Something that really resonates with me is just how complex biology and ecology are. There are so many permutations and combinations of organisms, relationships, soil, weather, and more.

It’s probably easier to say that every “rule” or expectation in biology has an exception - maybe multiple exceptions. On top of that, nature is always changing. New species are introduced or extirpated; weather is changing; succession is in-progress; and on and on.

So that tells me that I should be open to having my preconceived notions upended.

How do you cultivate hope/or, what brings you hope?

For me, the most important way I cultivate hope is by doing something. There is nothing worse than feeling like things are out of your control - that quickly spirals into a defeatist attitude. Author Margaret Atwood has a quote in The Year of the Flood that sums this up: “We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

And Jumpstart Nature is all about inspiring action - helping people cultivate an identity that aligns with their sustainability values, and then giving actionable steps they can take.

Yes, that first step, or even those first ten steps, might not make a major change, but that is true of any journey. You must always take that first step to get to where you want to be. And while you’re taking those initial steps, you can immediately see the impact, no matter how large or small. It’s self-reinforcing.

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Dr. Elizabeth D. Hilborn, DVM, is a bee veterinarian and an environmental scientist based in North Carolina. She has published scientific reports in epidemiology and environmental health. Her book, Restoring Eden1, was released in 2023.

When Dr. Hilborn noticed disturbing changes to the wildlife on her thriving farm in the spring of 2017, she knew something had gone seriously wrong.

Restoring Eden tells her riveting story about how she had to work—hard—to get to the bottom of what had caused the silent spring in her own back yard. She also shares how she cultivates the hope necessary to move forward despite the stark realities of the nature-damaging consequences of modern agribusiness.

With an interest in contaminants and their effects on the environment and people, I once thought I would become an environmental toxicologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I expressed this interest to my supervisor at the time, who said, “We’ve already got someone working on that—but we need someone to work with this salamander…” and that is how I ended up working with amphibians instead of contaminants.2

Restoring Eden brought me back to my root interest in environmental toxicology, which is borne of the One Health concept—that everything we do to nature, we ultimately do to our own wellbeing. There is the unfortunate reality of this, but there is also hope: it shows that we have the power to stop—and in some cases reverse—these harms.

I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr. Hilborn!

Andrea Joy Adams: How did your training as a scientist help you tackle the devastating poisoning of wildlife you observed on your farm?

Elizabeth D. Hilborn: It’s important to understand that I reached out for help as a citizen, not a scientist. I didn’t know why the animals were dying or had left, so I contacted many experts and specialists, most were not scientists.

We were initially baffled that officials in agriculture, water quality, and pesticides couldn’t help us. Looking back, I think it may have been due to two reasons. The first is that we were dealing with so many unknowns, the investigation took time and resources. To be fair, the US has approved about 500 active ingredients for use as agricultural pesticides and these can perform differently when in mixtures with each other, with other chemicals or in certain environmental situations. Little is known about how they perform and any unintended effects they may have when used out in the field. We asked for help from state and local officials who never have enough resources. Realistically, I think that our whole situation was too much to ask of them.

The second reason is that current pesticide regulations in the US combined to make our situation almost untouchable. In some ways, I think, officials couldn’t help us. In 1977, an exemption was written into the Clean Water Act to exclude regulation of run-off pollution from agricultural fields. An exemption to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act makes an exception to pesticide laws: once seeds are coated with pesticides, use of those seeds is no longer regulated as a pesticide application.

These two separate regulations interacted in devastating ways to mostly prevent an official investigation of our land. I wish that early on the officials would have talked to me openly because it took me months to find out for myself. Our farm was contaminated by runoff from our neighbor’s corn field and we ultimately learned that we were victims of pesticide contamination.

The way I think about it now, from a regulatory standpoint, nothing was out of the ordinary. The concentrations of insecticide found in our water were similar to concentrations measured in water near crop fields around the US and in many areas of the world where these newer insecticides are used. Our farm’s food production was crippled. I disagree that all was working as it should just because no rules were broken.

Agriculture has really changed over the last twenty years in the United States and the laws haven’t kept up. Now, these potent pesticides are used most of the time and many crops are grown with them whether they’re needed or not. Most people don’t know this. I didn’t know this until it happened to us. Seven years after the event and we still haven’t regained the numbers of wildlife that used to live here. Due to a lack of insect pollinators, many plants here have not borne fruit or have borne scant fruit since 2017. That’s a major reason why I wrote Restoring Eden.

Although I love wildlife, I also need healthy wildlife populations to be a successful fruit grower. So even from a purely selfish viewpoint, I (and many others) agree that we need to minimize use of these toxic agricultural pesticides, because by killing the wild animals around us, we are also hurting ourselves.

Thanks for elucidating all of this—I learned so much from reading Restoring Eden. It must have been so confusing and frustrating to not be getting any support from the agencies. Is there anything else you would really like readers to know about pesticide use and regulation? What do you think is the single most important thing the average person can do to help shift these trends (besides read the book)?

I’m learning as I go about pesticide use and regulation; it’s a complicated topic and I’m frequently surprised. What I think is important to know is that in the United States, pesticide use is the norm.

Buying food grown with fewer pesticides, like organic food, creates demand and encourages farmers to use fewer pesticides. I started buying organic food and growing more pesticide-free food for our table when I became a new mother. Insecticides, one type of pesticide, are neurotoxins (poisons that harm the nervous system). Low concentrations of neurotoxins are most likely to seriously harm us when we’re young. The most critical time is when a fetus is growing in the womb through pre-school age. I fed organically-grown foods to my young daughter to do the best I could to protect her growing brain.

If someone’s concerned about pesticides in food, I refer them to the Environmental Working Group. They publish lists of fruits and vegetables with the highest, lowest, and medium amounts of pesticide residues. The list can change a bit each year, so we learn about trends from the last year with each list. For people who wish to reduce their pesticide exposure, the lists may be helpful. Organic diets are another option. Organic foods have been shown to reduce the body burden of pesticides. Organic agriculture also preserves biodiversity better than conventional agriculture.

If someone wants to support wildlife, preserving or planting more trees and flowering plants can make a difference. Grass lawns dominate landscapes in much of the United States. Pollinators need more flowers. Pollinators are sensitive to insecticides, so if you want to support bees and butterflies, choose pesticide-free plants so that bees and butterflies are not poisoned when they feed from them. When consumers ask for pesticide-free plants at local nurseries, we encourage producers to reduce their use of insecticides that harm the pollinators.

One of the things I like most about Restoring Eden is that it reads like a detective story—you take us along as you make discovery after discovery. You seemed to remain open to what the data had to show at the time, which led you to ultimately finding the truth. Do you think someone who already had their mind made up that it was indeed pesticide would have missed what you uncovered?

It was a mystery and I lived it. As you say, when I considered how to tell the story, I wanted readers to walk with me on my journey.

I had to keep an open mind because I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know that our farm was contaminated by pesticides. It was a consideration from the beginning because of the fact of the cornfield uphill, but the damage seemed so extreme, it didn’t make sense to me. Cornfields are everywhere in farm country! Now I know how it could be possible: One pesticide-coated corn seed is covered with enough poison to kill over 80,000 honey bees. I know now that many scientists implicate these newer pesticides with the steep insect345 and bird678 loss experienced in many areas of the world9.

I think that I was able to solve the mystery because I didn’t give up. My neighbors and the farmer helped me, and I had access to scientific reports. I’ve been trained to investigate mysteries―I worked as a disease detective at CDC. My priority was to collect evidence as soon as possible and to preserve it, then I followed every potentially related lead. Analysis of the water samples I collected ultimately allowed me to understand what had happened.

One of my favorite aspects of Restoring Eden was the nature writing. I felt like I was right there on the farm with you! How do you think your relationship with nature has shaped your life and career?

Oh my goodness, thank you! The natural world is so precious to me. It’s been my place of refuge, joy, and wonder since childhood. I think that’s why I was so determined to understand what had happened. I knew the affected animals. I lived among them.

My love of life absolutely shaped my career. I’ve always been fascinated by animals, and my parents indulged me; we had many house pets during my childhood. Maybe as a result, I’d wanted to be a veterinarian since I was twelve years old. Along the way, I became a registered nurse to support myself through school and have had a thirteen- year career as a nurse.

Nursing expanded my world view of how interesting living creatures are. My understanding of how we work on a physical and psychological level grew when I studied human medicine. The emotional and spiritual aspects of life and death developed during my nursing practice when I had the privilege to work with people as they gave birth.

Gazing into a newborn’s eyes as they opened for the first time gave me a feeling of wonder and magic, similar to what I experience in ‘nature’. My senses wake up, I’m fully engaged and emotionally invested. These experiences showed me that love of life was the common thread for me throughout.

That is so beautiful. I was also moved by the descriptions of your nursing experiences in Restoring Eden. I think a lot about how an orientation toward nature (or not) shapes the everyday choices people make, which can add up to a huge environmental impact. Do you think the kind of reverence for life you describe is something people can recover if it’s been lost? If so, how?

Some people love plants, some may love a specific kind of animal, some people love children. I think that how people may or may not feel a connection to nature and to life is very personal and may be situational too. I wonder how much our capacity for connection is determined by what else is happening in our lives. We instinctively prioritize survival over connection.

I remember one busy year, I was building my career, developing the farm, and caring for our animals, our child and a critically ill parent; I was stressed and overextended. It was spring, my favorite time of year, and I could not ‘see’ the beauty of the flowering trees. I distinctly remember looking at them, but they might as well have been wallpaper. They held no emotional resonance for me.

In my experience, modern life can be overwhelming, not leaving much room for free time or the kind of inner peace that affords the ability to deeply connect with nature, with life or with other people. Many people are fully occupied working to cover the basic requirements of life.

To be healthier global citizens, as we move into the 21^st century, we need to prioritize building stronger societal support for humane living and working conditions for all. I have hope, because in the last few years, we’re already seeing some change. People are demanding more from their employers―more flexibility, higher wages and more equitable treatment in the workplace. Change can be slow, but if we want to be happy, healthy, and connected, we can be.

What advice do you have for people who might want to enter into small-scale agriculture for themselves as a way to live more sustainably and closer to the land? What should they consider? Where could they start?

We chose this lifestyle for many reasons, but we didn’t have a functional farm immediately, we eased into it. I’ve kept a vegetable garden since I was a teenager and that gave me good experience to draw upon. Then I planted some fruit trees at our first house. That was a great learning experience because the mistakes I made, such as planting a sweet cherry tree here in North Carolina, linger year after year and ingenuity is required. Note: pie cherry trees do better in the hot, humid climate here. As our daughter matured and I had more time, I was able to expand the gardens and orchard here at the farm. I kept livestock. By 2017, before our farm was contaminated and our production failed, we were producing about 60% of the fruits and vegetables we ate.

Ultimately, I grew the farm until it was big enough to be a second job. I loved the work, I loved the fresh food, but it used most of my free time. If someone is curious about the lifestyle, I suggest starting small. Learn to grow things that will do well at your place and that you love to eat. Give it a try.

That’s such great advice. One final question: How do you cultivate hope/or, what brings you hope?

This experience has taught me a lot about the challenges we face with agricultural reform. The powerful agri-business community seeks to protect agricultural practices because they’re very profitable for them. But today’s agriculture is not always profitable for the farmer. In USDA’s most recent 2022 report of farm statistics, the median family farm income from farming was -$849.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed this imbalance. As I worked on the book, my research into agricultural trends showed me how many farmers are choosing to farm a different way, to use fewer pesticides. Organic agriculture is the best-defined method, but many others are choosing to buy (and use) less fertilizer and pesticides. Farmers can make more profit per acre by using these kind of conservative approaches to grow food; approaches that work with nature rather than seeking to subdue it.

Now I understand that I’m not the only one noticing the destruction of the living world alongside pesticide-intensive farming. We have a close-up view here in the United States because the US is one of the largest pesticide users on the planet. I can see how many farmers, scientists, and advocates are working to protect the living systems we depend upon to keep plants (and us!) healthy.

Preserving beneficial animals such as bees, birds, and soil organisms increases our chances of a secure food future: these animals contribute billions of dollars of value per year globally by enabling us to grow food. US consumers are helping: we’re buying native, pesticide-free plants that support pollinators, and we’re buying lower pesticide foods like organic foods. If we push and pull together towards the goal of supporting life on earth, I know that we’ll get there. That gives me a lot of hope.

In Nayarit, Mexico, last week, I was in the jungle without a field guide. I considered buying one before I left, but instead opted to surrender to my lack of knowledge.

I couldn’t name most of the birds. There were whales far out to sea, the shape of whose spouts I couldn’t discern to make a species ID. Once I got over the frustration of this, it left room for the miracle that I had just seen a whale—regardless of species.

I walked the trails, stopping to watch the lime-green parrots boisterously land in the trees above. Bright orange butterflies overtook me like sports cars in the passing lane.

While the urge to want to know the names of these species was strong, it was also fun to let myself off the hook—a hook I’ve been on since I learned how to use binoculars.

Ignorance is bliss?

The tropics are extremely biodiverse. Unless you’ve worked in a particular tropical region for years, you’re unlikely to be able to identify everything you encounter.

Fourteen years ago, when my partner and I were exploring our options for where to go on our honeymoon, I suggested Hawaii.

“Nah—too depressing. Too many invasives,” he said.

The funny thing about this is that neither of us would likely have been able to identify most of the invasive species we encountered—especially the plants.

We went to Costa Rica for our honeymoon, and if we encountered any invasives1, we didn’t know it. We enjoyed our adventures in the jungles of the Osa Peninsula immensely, marveling at the tree frogs and the howler monkeys, the macaws and the sloths.

Bliss.

The curse of knowledge

The counterbalance to this blissful ignorance is the burden of ecological knowledge, as Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac2:

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

This sentiment has been my experience, and partial impetus for my starting Hopecology—because not only does this knowledge impart the burden of its pain, but the responsibility for educating the greater community.

For ecologists, to know the “marks of death” is to be able to do something about them. Without this knowledge, ignorance is just…ignorance.

But what about when ignorance is not just ignorance?

Technically, ignorance is simply the lack of knowledge or information; there is no inherent value placed on it. This comes later, as culture adds a layer of judgment to not-knowing as bad, perverse, or somehow…stupid. This judgment is a symptom of addiction to knowledge, of putting it on a pedestal above all other ways of knowing.

Knowledge in the Information Age

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

- T.S. Eliot, from The Rock, 1934

In the Information Age—when the answer to nearly any question is as close as our pocket—curiosity takes work. To refrain from indulging in instant information can feel like a kind of fast, something that increases the hunger pangs for knowledge.

Knowing stuff is great. It’s led to an increasingly equitable society—where anyone with a smartphone or internet connection can access the same information as everyone else. No longer do the halls of academia hold the keys to the library of humanity’s knowledge for a privileged few.

And yet there are times that knowing stuff may hold us back from our full potential.

I wrote recently about what happened when I abandoned my phone, all media, and speech for four days on silent retreat. By not having answers and stimulation at my fingertips, my brain got to rest, which led to a mind-blowingly direct experience of reality.

At the same time, learning how to recognize and name species can be a revolutionary experience in itself.

The transformative power of natural history

If there is a naturalist’s analog to the idiom, “up a creek without a paddle,” it might be “in the jungle without a field guide”.

Naturalists and ecologists generally love to identify everything in the natural world. For me, it offers a sense of belonging, akin to knowing my neighbors, even if I’m a visitor to a place for the first time.

One of the most profound instructor evaluations I ever received was at the end of the Vertebrate Zoology laboratory that I taught in graduate school. In this course—which consumed an entire day each week—I would take the students birding at local parks and beaches in the morning, and in the afternoon we would study specimens.

Most of the students had never used binoculars before, so we started there on day 1. I had been birding for quite some time at that point, so I took the ability to find and identify local birds somewhat for granted.

Then, one day at the end of the quarter, the evaluations came in. One student wrote: “This has been my number one favorite class of all time. It’s so strange to think that birds have always been around me, but I never had the ability to really see them. Thanks, so much, Andrea, for opening up a whole new world! This class changed my life.”

That is the power of natural history—to learn to see our world in new ways, to open up to the nature that is always around us by relating to it differently.

In this sense, knowledge is bliss—and it mirrors my own experience of natural history: that new pair of glasses offered by curiosity; being able to know what is around me by the power to name it.

Welcome to the jungle

Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.

– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

I thought for a moment before I left for my trip to Nayarit last week that I should purchase a field guide. If I don’t identify the spectacular species that will be all around me, I wondered, will I have experienced them at all?

I wondered if choosing to remain ignorant about the biodiversity of the place I was about to visit would make me a bad ecologist. It is, after all, my job to know stuff.

But I wasn’t going on this trip for work: I was going in part to unplug from my everyday responsibilities.

I was surprised that I didn’t want the field guide. Had I lost my curiosity for nature? My edge?

Counterintuitively, I found that it was the curiosity that kept me from buying the field guide. I wanted to really see things without the pressure to name them.

Reflecting back, I wonder how many fascinating creature behaviors I’ve missed because I had my nose in a field guide instead of looking up and watching. In the drive to name them, and check them off a list, I had actually lost the spirit of curiosity.

Can knowledge be worse than ignorance?

Can knowing the name of something actually hinder us from experiencing it? Jiddu Krishnamurti seems to have thought so. He said,

The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.

At the surface level, this sentiment could be seen as the worship of ignorance. But there was nothing surface-level about Krishnamurti.

The Upanishads—sacred treatises that originate from 800-200 BCE—mirror a similar sentiment and point to something much deeper:

Into great darkness they enter,

those who worship ignorance.

Into still greater darkness enter those

who are addicted to their knowledge.

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.10 and Isha Upanishad 9

This isn’t to be against knowledge; rather, it’s to highlight knowledge as just one way to understand the world, when there are many other levels of understanding at our disposal—including direct experience and observation.

It seems to be an invitation to go beyond open-mindedness to a kind of expansive-mindedness, which cultivates opportunity for curiosity, creativity—and, perhaps most importantly, problem solving.

Over-identification with knowledge makes it increasingly difficult to admit we are wrong, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Curiosity for the win – in practice

There is a way to have both: to remain in curiosity and not-knowing for a time, to obtain value from that experience, and then to satiate the quest for knowledge.

It’s about understanding the world in two different ways: first, by direct experience; and then, to know something more shared in common about it—for example, its agreed-upon name.

In , recently wrote about this in practice:

When Heather leads nature walks and someone asks about a particular plant, she prefers not to name the species – white pine, sphagnum moss, ghost pipe, for example – until she has had the participants touch, smell, and look closely at the plant. Then she describes some details of how the plant lives or who it lives in relationship with. Names, in our fading relationship with the living world, can be invitations to know more or mere boxes to check off. Heather has learned to personalize the invitation.

To have knowledge without being too attached to it as the end game, to have it but to also leave room for the mystery of the species that goes beyond its name—this is the both-and.

Knowledge can provide freedom, a new lens on the world. It can also cause suffering.

That doesn’t make it bad. But an addiction to knowledge can limit the ability to experience the wisdom that is beyond knowledge.

To be in the jungle without a field guide is, perhaps, more like being up a creek without a paddle than I originally imagined.

Instead of being really hopeless—which the creek idiom suggests—it’s an opportunity. After all, if you’re up a creek, then the creek is flowing down—you don’t need a paddle.

It’s easy to find your way home: it actually takes less effort, not more. Just surrender to the flow of the water.

On the morning of my departure from Nayarit, two little, familiar-looking birds caught my eye: one, blue with a heavy beak; the other, with lemony yellow on its breast starkly contrasting the blue-grey on its back.

I knew their names—they are neotropical migrants that spend their winters in the tropics and their summers in temperate forests. Like me, they were on their way north.3

It’s not easy, though—we can be sensitive and defensive because we are human. We’ve also been conditioned to believe that it’s not a good idea to admit when we are wrong.

But this has dire consequences: when we don’t publish our negative findings, for example, it skews the scientific literature, producing a misrepresentation of reality.

I keep returning to the concept of evolving our modes of thinking—from the kind that created the myriad problems we face, toward those that will enable us to effectively address them.

These shifts can offer us resilience and adaptability for an uncertain future.

But it’s going to require that we have the ability to admit when we’re wrong. Neither academia nor society at large, unfortunately, reward such behavior.

In a culture where only self-assuredness will do—even if it is not warranted, we should fake it until we make it—the cautionary approach may be perceived as weak or ineffective.

But that perception doesn’t make it so.

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Confusing science with value judgments

Some believe science and scientists to be infallible. This thinking is problematic because it reinforces science as a belief system, which may tempt some scientists to become defenders of “their cause” rather than seekers of the truth.

As I wrote recently, a defensive response is understandable, especially in disciplines—such as the natural sciences—which are increasingly dismissed and defunded1.

Some scientists may feel the need to defend their previous research findings, even as new evidence mounts that those findings are no longer valid.

In the late 1990s/early 2000s it became increasingly clear that a newly discovered amphibian chytrid fungus was causing catastrophic amphibian declines and extinctions around the world.

There was resistance to this revelation by some researchers, however, because it meant a radically new worldview would be required in order to proceed in amphibian science and conservation.

In the past, disease had been generally understood in ecology as a natural process that didn’t have much of anything to do with conservation.

As time and research progress, however, we are learning that human actions impact the spread and severity of wildlife-sickening pathogens, devastating some populations.

Denial persists in a few scientific corners today, despite substantial evidence for pathogens’ pervasive effects. Why?

• Scientists are imperfect human beings (like everyone else) and sometimes (or often, depending on the person) can be self-serving.

• A flawed academic reward system practically demands severely self-serving approaches to research (especially publishing).

• Truths can be inconvenient, even for the truth-seekers.

Nature deficit disorder

Compounding the above is another—mostly solvable—problem:

• Basic biology—once as accessible as the backyard pond—has become increasingly exotic in a world where nature and its societal valuation are in severe decline.

Two examples from my own experience with this latter phenomenon:

• A 35-year-old, well-educated person asked me if frogs were animals. When I said “Yes—what else would they be?” they replied, “I don’t know—insects?”

• A 20-year-old biology major was shocked and horrified when I explained—as I was teaching in anatomy lab—that the meat they eat does, indeed, come from muscle, just like those of the rabbit on the dissecting tray in front of us.

The result: Science as an interest group

A relatively recent dearth of proper education in general biology at the secondary level created a petri dish within which vaccine misinformation could grow. It led many people away from trusting science and scientists, choosing instead to believe conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

Politics undoubtedly had a lot to do with the subsequent polarization that took place, but the conditions for this outcome were sown decades earlier by an education system that began to devalue the natural sciences.

The refusal of the public to accept scientific evidence in favor of the opinions of their favorite podcaster has been devastating for some scientists—many of us, actually—because our dogged search for truth has suddenly been culturally relegated to the level of a subjective belief system.

In light of this, it’s understandable that scientists would want to double down on what they know to be true, adhering to their understanding of the world like a life raft in an abysmal sea of unsubstantiated doubt.

When we give in to that urge too intently, however, we may lose our way. This can weaken, rather than strengthen, science. It can further erode public trust. At worst, we can become that which we reject.

One scientist’s derailment

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene 2 3, clicked evolutionary theory into my mind in a way that stuck. This was true for many, and the book thus became immensely popular.

Unfortunately, in response to incessant attacks by religious fundamentalists due to the widespread popularity of his book, Dawkins’ career mission derailed into a counterattack on creationism.

It was no doubt difficult for Dawkins to face the onslaught of criticism and hate mail, and I can only imagine what else, from staunch detractors of his work. Still, he was in a position to take the high road, and opted out.

When I went to see Dawkins speak on the UC Santa Barbara campus, a handful of creationists were picketing, mostly peacefully, outside the auditorium. Some attendees (presumably students/scientists, but I don’t know for sure) gave in to jeering at them.

Responding in this way debases science to the level of fundamentalism and reinforces the idea of science as a belief system rather than the fact-finding mission that it actually is.

This fact finding is based on the premise of doubt—which is baked in to the scientific method intentionally. But this otherwise healthy doubt can get misused.

Doubt gone sour

Doubt makes science vulnerable in a world where beliefs drive the choices we make—from the polls to the paper products aisle.

Etymologically, doubt comes from the Latin dubitare, meaning “to question, hesitate, or waver in opinion.”

Doubt has become a tricky word for science and scientists, because its inherency has been exaggerated in order to give the impression that it’s more widespread when it’s really quite marginal.

Some entities—those Merchants of Doubt, from Big Tobacco to oil companies—have benefited immeasurably from sowing unsubstantiated doubt in scientific discussions, stirring “debate” when there really isn’t much, or any.

The both-and part

And yet, scientific institutions and procedures cannot be unassailable. When they are, it undermines the very nature of science itself.

Doubt must stay, or science wouldn’t be science.

When some scientists become advocates for that which only benefits them personally, the ideal4 of an objective search for truth that is at the foundation of science erodes.

Brian Resnick recounts in his excellent article on intellectual humility:

Even among scientists — people who ought to question everything5 — intellectual humility is hard. In some cases, researchers have refused to concede their original conclusions despite the unveiling of new evidence. (One famous psychologist under fire recently told me angrily, “I will stand by that conclusion for the rest of my life, no matter what anyone says.”)

Adherence to ideology in spite of evidence to the contrary can lead to a lack of imagination that holds science back from coming up with novel solutions to the planet’s most pressing crises.

Currently many “solutions” are actually worsening the problems we face. In ecology, this phenomenon stems from entrenchment in ideology combined with nature illiteracy (more on this in a future edition of Hopecology).

Still, most scientists are interested in doing the right thing. That includes maintaining a culture of scientific integrity that is independent of ideology.

The hope part: taking action

Hope is about empowerment to act. What can be done?

Everyone—not just scientists—can contribute to a world that is more curious than defensive at the start.

Some suggestions for what could be useful:

1. Listening. Am I listening to be offended, or to understand?

2. Compassion. Yes, sometimes people’s misinformed opinions can be infuriating. But they are usually so angry or opinionated because they are hurting. What might be underlying that hurt? Being dismissed, feeling like they’ve been lied to, not knowing whom to trust? What if instead a scientist or nature lover tried to build a foundation of trust with them?

3. Respect. As abhorrent as someone’s opinions may seem to me, can I disagree with them while also respecting their right to think what they want? Do we have anything in common? (See building trust, above).

4. Educate, kindly. Nature literacy is often not learned in the classroom. Many people today did not have the experience of running free in open fields and catching frogs as children. Can I offer to take a walk with them outside?

5. Equanimity. Are there other possible explanations for what I think I’m seeing or understanding that can help me balance my emotions? (See a previous Hopecology post about this concept. at also offers two comfortingly unintuitive approaches to equanimity).

6. What if I’m wrong? This may be the hardest of all, because it goes against our cultural reward system. Some people are more culturally conditioned to doubt themselves than others; they may doubt themselves too much. But I can attempt to honestly look at my convictions: do I know them, for certain, to be true? What evidence am I using?

7. Can I go easy on people who admit they are wrong? Can I even celebrate it, instead of jumping on the bandwagon of punishing them for appearing so “weak”? On the contrary, it takes tremendous courage to admit errors. We can all help create the cultural shift toward admitting we are wrong when it’s warranted.

I started Hopecology because so many people were asking me—an ecologist—what they could do about the devastating state of the environment.

Everything that can be done within one’s reach—however seemingly small—counts.

Hard conversations count. Every nature walk—where you drink in the beauty that is still here, despite all that has been lost—counts.

Inviting your insufferable climate change-denying neighbor on that walk—counts (DOUBLE or more).

Please let me know in the comments: what would you add?

At least twice yearly I put my phone in airplane mode and camp in the desert for the better part of a week. I usually go somewhere that doesn’t have cell coverage anyway, but such places are dwindling, so airplane mode is a kind of safety feature.

This tradition started by default—17 years ago, my partner and I began camping in Death Valley National Park over Thanksgiving weekend. We never had cell service back then. It was just us, the pickup truck, and the tent—and very few, if any, fellow visitors.

That changed in 2020, when, with few other options and cabin fever to the hilt, many people discovered camping as a reasonably tolerable alternative to bingeing Netflix.

So we switched our weekends, and swapped out the natural areas. We discovered that surrounding Death Valley National Park and beyond is a vast network of Bureau of Land Management lands that are minimally visited (especially on weekdays) and wide open for free camping, hiking, stargazing, and exploring.

More than just empty space

On each return to a week-long sojourn in the vast openness of these landscapes, I find an ever-deepening sense of peace.

The desert has always been a meaningful place for me—since living in Arizona in the early 2000s, I’ve noticed that the desert feels like home in a way nowhere else does.

For most of 2005, I snowmobiled, snowshoed, and drove ATVs through what remained of the Boreal forest in northwestern Ontario, Canada. I was studying American marten—a svelte mammal in the weasel family that is more commonly known as sable when it’s used to make fur coats.

On one of those seemingly interminable drives to a field site one day, a coworker was curious why I spoke of the desert so reverently.

He asked, genuinely and innocently, “Isn’t it all just…dead?”

I explained how the desert is actually full of life adapted to extreme conditions; how I love the honesty of the mountains that are just there, naked, for all to see; and how I didn’t think it was any coincidence that many faith-based traditions have originated from desert regions.

He was silent for a while. Then he responded, “Oh. That’s a good answer.”1

The magic of the desert ecosystem combined with a freedom from being reachable appears to be one alchemical solution that radically supports my wellbeing. This has become increasingly true as disconnecting seems to be getting ever-more difficult.

What is a digital detox?

Rather than being against technology, a digital detox is for freedom—to think and simply be, uninterrupted, or to not think at all.

I’ve found that the freedom to think all my own thoughts without taking in new ones from anyone (or anything) else is a rare and precious, beautiful thing. It is excellent for the creative process. The brain can only do so much.

A true digital detox leaves behind all digital devices, and while I typically have my phone in airplane mode on desert camping trips, I still use it to take photos, videos, and notes. I give these tools a waiver because I derive so much creative value from their use.

One drawback to taking photos, however, is the act of putting a device between my direct experience of something and the thing itself.

writes in :

If an influencer takes a selfie, but there’s nobody around to like it, did he take a selfie?

No doubt, he had a virulent case of that modern affliction: the Fear of Missing Out. This box-ticking disease is everywhere one looks. At concerts, out are the lighters, and in are the smartphones recording footage nobody will ever willingly watch. At every major landmark in every major city, swarms of standardised faces jostle for selfies. We’d rather prove we were present than be present. We’d rather be seen than see. Ironically, by fearing we’ll miss out, we miss out.

For me, it’s less about showing others what I’ve done and where I’ve been (though I often enjoy sharing these things), but to remind myself what I’ve seen and done. Which makes me wonder: why don’t I trust my memory to do that for me? Perhaps it’s not about memory at all, but something else.

The “real-deal” digital detox

Last spring, I had the opportunity to do a true digital—and media—detox: no phones, no books, not even journals were recommended. It took place near the tech epicenter that is South Bay Area of California.

On that four-day silent meditation retreat, we were given the option to turn over our phones. I elected to place a sticky note with my name on it and tuck mine gently into the wooden crate the smiling woman held out in front of her just for that purpose.

Over the course of the retreat, I was startled to learn how often I had the impulse to reach for my phone.

I learned how frequently I check the time. (A lot.)

On a walk in the woods, I’d see something beautiful and want to take a photo. Realizing my phone wasn’t there, I’d take the time to appreciate the object or scene in the moment, knowing I would likely never see it again, and if I did, on the next trip around, it would be different.

It made very clear the ephemerality of…just about everything. Perhaps the compulsion to snap a photo is a way of detaching from this ephemerality, giving in to the illusion that if I preserve it in my pocket (which isn’t really my pocket, but the cloud) it can’t end; the precious moment can’t die.

To have my full attention on little more than my own thoughts for four days—in the absence of speaking, conversation, writing, or any kind of media—was at first troubling to say the least, but by the end it was nothing short of psychedelic.

The psychedelic stream

The words in this section cannot accurately convey the experience, because it was beyond words. Still, I will try so that you can read some kind of approximation about it.

At the end of the second-to-last day of the retreat, I enjoyed a walk around the beautiful grounds. I discovered a new trail, which took me down a steep bank, across a meadow, and to a bench hidden behind some willow branches next to a bubbling stream.

Amazed at my good fortune, I took a seat and began to watch the water. I felt as if I needed and wanted absolutely nothing, other than to be exactly where I was. More like complete contentment than elation, it was uplifting yet calming at the same time.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the water. The early afternoon sun was hitting the ripples in such a way that the light danced. The shapes on the water shifted and changed into otherworldly forms.

It was sort of like the 3D optical illusion posters from the 1990s.

Beginning my drive home the next day, I calmly merged onto the busy freeway. I elected not to turn on an audiobook or podcast. I enjoyed the silence and the scenery, and marveled at the way traffic flowed smoothly, like an expertly choreographed dance.

If you’ve ever been to the South Bay, you know these words don’t typically describe the traffic there. Clearly, this experience changed my perception for a while.

It wore off.

But its memory has pointed the way to a bit of freedom from what some spiritual traditions might call the “small self”—that part that is self-centered, self-consumed, self-serving, and selfish.

I did not have a psychedelic experience on my desert digital detox last week. But the peace I find in the vast desert landscape continues to bring a magic all its own, every single time.

Mojave Trails National Monument

This 1.6 million acre natural area is managed by the Bureau of Land Management and protects the important wildlife corridor between Joshua Tree National Park to the south and the Mojave National Preserve to the north. It is also home to the longest remaining contiguous stretch of historic Route 66.

My partner and I never know exactly where we are going, and just trust that somewhere in the millions of desert acres we will find a nice place to set up camp for the night. This time was no different: we arrived just before sunset, popped up the truck camper, and set out for a walk in the direction of the most beautiful wildflowers.

The dogs pranced around, happy to be off-leash, as this is the only place it is safe enough for them to do so, with no cars around for miles. Our dog came running up to us with pollen dabbed on her head.

The scent of wildflowers drifted on the breeze. The setting sun turned everything gold, then ochre.

On a typical vacation, it can take a few days for the nervous system to settle. But in the desert, it appears to begin calming as soon as I arrive. I found myself breathing more deeply, and my shoulders softened as they relaxed away from my ears. Simply fixing my eyes on the broad distant horizon instilled a sense of safety. Like arriving home.

I was exhausted. I had stayed up late the night before working on a project, and the last two months have been intense. I slept nearly 12 hours the first two nights as my body got the signal to begin to play catch-up.

The next few days were filled with hiking, rock and wildflower discovery, stargazing, cloud watching, and staring at the horizon. They went incredibly fast. Soon, it was time to pack up the happily tired-out dogs and merge onto the freeway home.

Traffic did not feel like a graceful dance, but I enjoyed watching the snow-capped San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains fill up more and more of the windshield as we headed west.

Today we are just emerging from another series of storms in southern California. An exit route from my mountain home is completely blocked by a mudslide. Fortunately, there is one alternative route, which also intermittently closes as the mountainside moves.

These moments don’t bother me much; in fact, it harkens back to my days growing up in Michigan, when snow days were commonplace and we knew we just wouldn’t go out for a spell.

It was part of life—living with weather that could dictate our plans. I’ve missed it, in a way. It’s a little too easy to fall under the illusions of stability and control when most days are 70 degrees and sunny.

Personally, life has dished out a very intense six weeks. In addition, the last Hopecology post—excitingly—sparked quite a bit of discussion and I’m still reflecting on those responses.

This week’s post will therefore be a brief update, as I work to bring everything together into a fully baked Hopecology serving for you next time.

After all, if I’m going to extoll the virtues of radical self-compassion, it would be hypocritical for me to not apply it to myself when I need it most. Neither would a half-baked post serve you, the reader.

If you’ve been reading Hopecology for awhile, you know that this space is about anything but forced positivity. (To those of you for whom this is your first post—there are at least a couple dozen of you—WELCOME! ♥️)

I firmly believe in finding the lotus from the mud, the diamond in the rough—when they’re there. And honoring and being honest about when they are not.

Hope can be derived from that honesty, because it is a true foundation.

Sometimes more time in the mud is needed.

Yet hope abounds

Quite often, I come across stories that inspire hope, and have been pondering how to best share them with you.

I created the Hopecology Facebook Page for these stories and the discussions around them. I hope you’ll follow along, and please share new stories when you find them.

Over there you will find articles about, for example, a Tasmanian parrot rebound and farmers finding value in restored wetlands.

This week, I found hope in a post by , wherein she describes how a school mascot—a diamondback terrapin—anchored her campus community in a time of grief. Even artists’ representations of nature can bring out the best in us.

My dear friend, the social entrepreneur , is about to—once again—revolutionize mental health care, and this time we get a front-row seat on her new Substack, .

In future newsletters, I’ll be featuring interviews with folks like Lisa and Julie who are inspiring hope on many fronts. If there is someone you would like to see interviewed, please let me know in the comments or email me: hopecology@gmail.com.

Some tiny beautiful things

Over the weekend I went for a long walk to clear my head, and found my attention drawn to the tiniest things—gifts of all the rain we’ve been having: the very beginnings of the sprouting annuals; mosses; ferns; turkey tail mushrooms; the tiniest wildflowers.

Please enjoy these images, and I look forward to sharing some new ideas with you next time. I hope those of you in the northern hemisphere are finding some space to rest in this second half of winter.

Warmly, Andrea

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