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Lauren Stuck
On Being a Hopeful Pessimist; or, Why I Privilege the Small
I believe the earth is probably doomed. Or, more accurately, I believe the earth, as
a habitable environment for humans, is probably doomed. I believe there are steps that
society can take to prevent large-scale environmental disaster, but I also don’t believe
such steps will be taken. Or, more accurately, I don’t believe such steps will be taken in
time to make a significant difference. Common questions include: "How?" and "Why?"
and even "What?" As in, "How do you wake up every morning if you think the world is
going to end?" Or, "Why do you go to school and read books and prepare homework and
job search if the future is so uncertain?" Also, "What is the point of your reusable canvas
grocery bag if the world is doomed?" My answer is that I am hopefully pessimistic; I
know that bad things are going to happen, but I still wake up every morning. How? Well,
I set my alarm the night before and I didn't die when I was asleep. I know that bad things
are going to happen, but I still go to school, and I still want a job. Why? Well, I put
four years into a psychology degree, cultivated an interest in childhood PTSD, and know
that a few hours of genuine interaction can intervene in a lifetime of trauma. I know that
bad things are going to happen, but I still use my canvas grocery bag. What is the point?
Well, even if it doesn't really help, it also can't really hurt. Despite all of this uncertainty,
and for some cosmic reason, I woke up this morning. And I will continue to wake up
every morning (until I don't); and I will walk to school every morning (even when my
backpack is too heavy); and I still love Tacoma (especially when it rains); and listening to
my favorite song always makes me smile; and I still believe in the importance of trying to
lessen one's environmental impact. So, maybe I'm not a pessimist at all. Maybe I am a
cautious optimist, or a realistic optimist, or just a really tired optimist, because while I
believe that we are probably doomed, I also know that we're alive today, and than means
something, and we should do something with that.
***
I wrote the above piece after a class period during which we (the students)
revealed that we were (in terms of numbers) overwhelmingly pessimistic about the future
of the earth and about the likelihood that anything will change. After hearing our
answers, our professor posited: how do you keep living your lives with this kind of
worldview? After that class period, I started to wonder the same thing, and in my creative
piece, I attempt to capture that strange and unlikely motivation to keep living a fulfilling
life when faced with almost certain ecological doom.
***
In her 2014 book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein reports, “If we continue
on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will
change everything about our world. Major cities will likely drown, ancient cultures will
be swallowed by the seas, and there is a very high chance that our children will spend a
great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme
droughts.” When faced with this grim future, I find myself wondering how activists
maintain their motivation. In the psychological field of behaviorism, the term “learned
helplessness” refers to a behavior state in which, after being repeatedly forced to endure a
painful stimulus, the subject becomes unable to avoid said stimulus (even if escape is
possible); they simply give up. The theory is that the subject has learned they cannot do
anything about what they are experiencing, and so they stop trying. Given the obvious
and desperate state of the earth as a result of anthropogenic climate change, and the lack
of sufficient support, recognition, and response, I’d expect to find environmental activists
in a state similar to that of learned helplessness, given that society has proven they do not
want to make the massive lifestyle changes necessary, and governments have similarly
shows they don’t want to make the necessary policy changes.
Surprisingly enough, I do not see learned helplessness in myself, despite my
belief that “the earth, as a habitable environment for humans, is probably doomed.” More
importantly, I do not see learned helplessness in the many thousands of environmental
activists who work every day to change the policies, mindsets, and practices that are
harmful to the environment. So, my questions is: How are people motivated to continue
environmental activism when they are faced with the crushing truth of the human impact
on the planet, and with the realization that it is likely too late to do anything less than
massively change our way of life? Even though the scope of the problem seems to be too
large to comprehend, people all over the world are motivated to address it; where does
this motivation come from? In short: why has learned helplessness not kicked in?
To try to answer these questions, I turned to my other field of study: psychology. I
conducted a brief literature review on behavior and motivation as it related to
environmental activism—also called “ecological behavior” in the psychology literature—
and what I found was not entirely surprising. One study that looked at volunteerism and
activism tied the motivation to serve social causes to an individual’s interpersonal
orientation and personality traits. The authors report that those with a “universal
orientation”—the view that connections across individuals are salient and humans are
viewed as fundamentally equal and similar—are more likely to engage in activism
(Omoto). Similarly, an “other-focused” motivation predicted AIDS activism and civic
participation more so than “self-focused” motivation did (Omoto). Omoto also
hypothesized that certain personality traits are connected to an individual’s propensity
towards activism. Using the Big Five model of personality—which stipulates that the
underlying structure of personality is expressed across five fundamental and universal
traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (Emotional Stability),
Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience —Omoto found that AIDS activism was
positively correlated with extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness. Though
Omoto’s focus was volunteerism within the AIDS community, he notes the linkages
between other forms of specific volunteerism, overall activism and civic engagement.
Another study found that self-affirmation increased participant motivation to
recycle (Sparks). For this study, the self-affirmation group was asked to choose their
most important moral value from a list that included such values as kindness, forgiveness,
and altruism. Supposedly, this manipulation “affirms the self by making salient values
that are central to the individual’s self-image” (Sparks). Researchers also gave
participants information about recycling and the risks associated with not recycling, and
then measured recycling behavior via a questionnaire that measured participant intentions
to increase the amount of recycling done at home. The participants who recited selfaffirmations showed a greater increase in intent to recycle than the control group did. In
order to explain the connection between self-affirmation and increased motivation to
recycle, Sparks suggested that self-affirmation may “serve to promote less defensiveness
(or more openness) towards information that might be construed as threatening in one or
more ways.” Thus, the participants were not defensive towards the threatening
information associated with not recycling and so they recycled more. In a way, this
research may work to explain how people sustain motivation to be environmentally
active; since their actions affirm them as good, moral people, they are less threatened by
the hopelessness of the situation.
Overall, I found a good amount of information about what type of person gets
involved and why they get involved, and none of it was that surprising. Omoto attributes
volunteerism to universal and other-focused interpersonal orientations, high extraversion,
high agreeableness, and high emotional stability personality dimensions. Sparks suggests
that self-affirmations can influence motivation to engage in specific pro-environmental
behavior. Last, Nancy Newhouse succinctly reports, “Internal locus of control, a strong
sense of responsibility, a solid understanding of issues and action strategies, and a
positive attitude are contributing factors for more responsible [environmental] behavior.”
These traits can be combined in many different ways to produce the type of
person who is likely to become environmentally active. However, I found less about what
makes that person stay involved, even when the situation seems helpless, so I can only
speculate based on other conclusions the researchers drew. I think the same traits that
cause people to start to help make it hard for them to stop helping. This speculation is
rooted in Omoto’s claim that “social action may create identities tied to that involvement,
one consequence of which is that social action may predict future identity-consistent
behaviors.” In other words, once you become involved in a cause, it has the potential to
shape your identity, which will in turn lead you to continue to participate in the cause.
Similarly, Sparks’ self-affirmation research suggests that recycling, and other forms of
environmentally-friendly behavior, function as self-affirmations because the person doing
the behavior knows that it is a good thing to do. Self-affirmations then function
cyclically; if a person is affirmed, they are more likely to participate in environmentallyconscious behavior, which then affirms them even more because they know they are
doing something that is good, and so they are even more likely to continue that behavior.
Thus, the cycle continues, and the motivation is sustained, even when confronted with the
threatening reality of anthropogenic climate change.
So, why hasn’t learned helplessness kicked in? For now my answer is this: once
someone becomes involved in a cause, that cause becomes a part of their identity, and
that cause affirms their identity. In a way that is strikingly similar to Cronan’s The
Trouble with Wilderness, Omoto implicitly suggests that we cannot separate ourselves
from the causes for which we work. Thus, we cannot afford to give up on the
environment because we cannot afford to give up on ourselves; our motivation to keep
living and keep practicing conservation, even in the face of almost certain doom, stems
from the fact that our identities are deeply, deeply tied to the cause.
Works Cited
Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2014. Print.
Newhouse, Nancy. “Implications of Attitude and Behavior Research for Environmental
Conservation.” The Journal of Environmental Education 22.1 (1990). PsycINFO.
Web 1 May 2015.
Omoto, Allen M., Mark Snyder, and Justin D. Hackett. “Personality and Motivational
Antecedents of Activism and Civic Engagement.” Journal of Personality 78.6
(2010): 1703-1734, PsycINFO. Web. 1 May 2015.
Sparks, Paul, et al. “Pro-Environmental Actions, Climate Change, and Defensiveness: Do
Self-Affirmations Make a Difference to People’s Motives and Beliefs about
Making a Difference?.” British Journal of Social Psychology 49.3 (2010): 553568. PsycINFO Web. 1 May 2015.