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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.