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WE ARE LIVING amid a planetary crisis. “I am hopeless,” a student in an environmental study graduate program recently told me. “I’ve seen the science. I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless.”

It’s not surprising she feels so depressingly fatalistic. In his speech at the start of a two-week international conference in Madrid in December 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”¹ And this student isn’t alone in her feelings. I often give public talks and no matter where I am in the world, I begin by inviting people to share how they are feeling about the environment with the person sitting beside them, and then, if they are willing, to call out some of the words that capture these feelings. I have done this hundreds of times, and every time, the answers shock me. When I look out at these audiences, I see bright, healthy, relaxed-looking people who have somehow found the time to come to a public lecture. Yet their answers convey an unnerving level of grief and despair: “Scared,” “Hopeless,” “Depressed,” “Numb,” “Apathetic,” “Overwhelmed,” “Guilty,” “Paralyzed,” “Helpless,” “Angry,” call out the voices. Whether the room is filled with adults, university students, or kids as young as grade three, whenever I ask, the words remain the same.

Not long ago, I found an almost identical collection of words. It’s a list published in a research journal by Johana Kotišová. The words describe the emotions that crisis reporters feel when they are covering horrific events such as the Haitian earthquake, the Brussels or Paris attacks, the war in Ukraine, the war in Liberia, refugee camps, 9/11, famines in Central African countries, or the aftermath of the Greek debt crisis.²

The same words. What I am saying is that ordinary kids and adults regularly describe their everyday feelings about the environment using the same words that journalists use to describe what it feels like to report on the worst imaginable crises.

The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope.

This crucial idea drives this book. My agenda is absolutely to spread hope. I believe the way to do that is to collectively challenge the tired narrative of environmental doom and gloom that reproduces a hopeless status quo, and replace it with an evidence-based argument for hope that improves our capacity to engage with the real and overwhelming issues we face.

The power of hope and beliefs

When everyone around you is shouting doom and gloom, actively choosing to be hopeful—and to do the hard work of seeking out and amplifying solutions—is difficult. But it’s also essential, because hope really matters.

It matters to your individual health and well-being. Many studies underscore the value of feeling hopeful in all sorts of situations. If you have hope, you’re better able to tolerate pain. You’re more likely to follow through with physiotherapy or other recuperative treatments following an injury or illness. Feeling hopeful leads to better recovery from anxiety disorders and cardiovascular disease.³ The capacity to hope has been shown to provide a therapeutic quality that helps refugees overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges as they move forward and resettle.⁴

Being hopeful also matters to how we collectively influence what happens on the planet. That’s because thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and beliefs are so powerful, they actually shape objective outcomes.

The placebo effect

I had the opportunity to think more about the power of expectations when I was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2018. A researcher named Parker Goyer at the Mind & Body Lab generously talked me through the breakthrough work the lab’s founder, Alia Crum, and her team were doing.

You’re probably familiar with the placebo effect. Though not named as such at the time, the concept dates back almost five hundred years. “There are men on whom the mere sight of medicine is operative,” wrote the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne in 1572,⁵ referring to situations in which a person experiences relief from pain, anxiety, or other symptoms because they believe they have taken medicine or received treatment, when in reality, they have not.

The placebo effect demonstrates the power of our minds to produce physical changes in our bodies. Clinical trials demonstrate that if we believe we are taking a real medication, then something as simple as taking a sugar pill can lower our blood pressure, reduce anxiety and pain, and boost our immune system.⁶

Placebos work by triggering a host of specific neurobiological effects. As Alia Crum explains it, “The power is not in the sugar. The power comes from the social contexts that shape our mindsets in ways that activate our bodies’ natural healing abilities.”⁷

Think of a mindset as a lens or frame through which we view the world. Our mindsets orient us to particular associations and expectations. Our mindsets don’t just color our reality. Rather, the way that we look at reality changes what we pay attention to, and what we expect. Believe it or not, those expectations and associations actually change that reality.

Mindsets impact objective reality

Take this study involving hotel cleaning staff. Early in her academic career, Alia worked with Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer on a study that involved women hotel-room attendants. Cleaning all day involves lots of physical activity, but the women doing that job didn’t think of their work as good exercise. The researchers divided the hotel-room cleaners into two groups. In one group, they did no intervention. But with the second group, they showed the women how the work they did cleaning actually more than met the US surgeon general’s recommendation for daily physical exercise: detailing, for example, how fifteen minutes of vacuuming burns fifty calories, fifteen minutes of scrubbing sinks burns sixty calories, and so on. They posted this information in the staff areas at the hotels where only those room attendants in the second group would see it.⁸

A month later, the researchers checked back. That simple intervention—no changing of diet or exercise regime, just promoting the mindset that “work is good exercise”—produced dramatic results. Hotel-room attendants in the second group lost weight and lowered their blood pressure on average by ten points.⁹

These findings demonstrate the capacity of our inner dialogues and self-perceptions to manifest themselves. Objective health benefits depend not just on what we do, but what we think about what we do.

These days, many of us know the benefits of a plant-based diet for our health and the environment. So, what’s the best way to help someone choose to eat vegetables? The most common method for encouraging healthier food choices is to prominently display nutrition information. But Alia and other researchers at the Mind & Body Lab found that focusing on health but failing to mention taste unintentionally instills the mindset that healthy eating is flavorless and depriving.

In 2016, they tried a new approach and applied it to the food sold on the Stanford campus. The researchers chose adjectives that popular restaurants used to describe tasty but less healthy foods, and then used those same words to name vegetable dishes that were both nutritious and tasty. Decadent-sounding labels—like “twisted, citrus-glazed carrots” and “ultimate chargrilled asparagus”—persuaded more people to choose veggies.

They took the study nationwide, testing the same idea in fifty-seven US colleges and universities. They tracked nearly 140,000 decisions about seventy-one vegetable dishes. It turns out diners put vegetables on their plates 29 percent more often when those vegetables had tasty-sounding labels than they did when the vegetables had health-focused names, and 14 percent more often than when the veggies were given neutral names.¹⁰

Yummy labelling works because it makes eating healthy crave-worthy. Knowing that veggies are healthy and that eating them is the right thing to do isn’t enough. We are more likely to do something good when it also feels good. Our feelings about eating vegetables are not fixed. It’s not that we either love or hate vegetables; rather, our decision to eat them is influenced by labels that appeal to a delicious and indulgent mindset.¹¹

People, too, can exert a placebo effect. When British doctors in a now-famous empirical study gave patients (who were suffering from minor cold symptoms or mild muscle pain) a firm diagnosis and positive assurances that they’d feel better in a few days, 64 percent of those patients got better. But when patients with the same symptoms were seen by doctors who told them they were uncertain of the diagnosis, and that if the patient still felt ill in a few days they should return to the doctor, only 39 percent said their health had improved.¹²

What we expect can cause negative consequences. Back in 1962, Japanese researchers did an experiment on thirteen boys who were hypersensitive to the leaves of the Japanese lacquer tree.¹³ Contact with leaves from these trees can cause a painful, itchy rash similar to poison ivy. The researchers touched the boys on one arm with leaves from a harmless tree and told them they were from the Japanese lacquer tree. They touched them on the other arm with leaves from the Japanese lacquer tree but told them the leaves were harmless.

All thirteen arms that had been touched by the harmless leaves showed a skin reaction. Only two of the arms that were touched by the poisonous tree produced a rash. Even more surprising, the reaction to the harmless leaves was stronger than the reaction to the leaves that were actually poisonous. Simply thinking that one is being touched by a poisonous leaf brought on a rash more often than actually being touched by one. Health professionals sometimes see the same phenomenon happen with patients who fear uncomfortable side effects to a prescription. The capacity of inert substances to bring about pain and other negative responses, simply because we expect them to do so, is called the nocebo effect.¹⁴

So, what does all of this have to do with hope and the environment?

Suffering headline stress disorder

Think of the environmental stories you’ve consumed recently. How do they make you feel? What’s the impact of being bombarded by the climate crisis, species extinctions, wildfires, plastics pollution, and so many other urgent, global issues?

We are exposed to horrifying events more today than at any other time in human history. Twenty-four-hour news cycles, alerts on personal mobile devices, and social media feeds bring incessant predictions of a bleak future.¹⁵ The percentage of adults using social networking sites jumped tenfold in the past decade. Much of our news consumption now occurs on these digital platforms. A mobile phone image taken by Alexander Chadwick, a survivor of the 2005 London subway bombings, jump-started what is now the everyday practice of reporting news in part through user-generated content. Our increased exposure to real-time, on-the-ground knowledge of things happening all over the planet can help build connections with people in different circumstances, but it also places us in perpetual, intimate contact with tragedies, which leaves many feeling cynical, desensitized, and ineffectual. Life has always been stressful and terrible things certainly happen, but personal exposure to horrifying events occurring any place on Earth is a new and disturbing phenomenon. What is also new is our heightened exposure to images and videos captured by ordinary people on their smartphones detailing the devastation of climate change, along with a clear message from our most trusted scientific sources that if we do not act fast, even more dire consequences are coming.

The anxiety, exhaustion, and difficulty sleeping many experience in response to the news has become so prevalent in recent years, psychologist Steven Stosny gave it a name: headline stress disorder. It’s the state of anxiety and fear people experience in response to an intense deluge of terrible news. Caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of doom and gloom, people experience a range of emotions, including fear, anxiety, anger, and depression. As Steven Pinker puts it, “Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will make us think it is.”¹⁶

It’s a matter of quantity—seven in ten Americans say they feel worn out from too much news, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study—and orientation. As numerous communication studies reveal, almost all of the news that we hear about the environment is bad. It feels like the world is falling apart.¹⁷

That’s a problem for you, and for everyone in your social network. Emotions are contagious. Not only in face-to-face situations, but online too. Every time you click on a terrifying news story about the state of the planet on social media, you are actively “catching” emotional despair, and every time you post or share that message, you’re spreading it.

We hear a lot more news about environmental problems than solutions

Climate change is an urgent, global-scaled problem. In October 2018, the world’s leading climate scientists—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—released their most dire report ever: the world is currently 1 degree Celsius (1.8°F) warmer than preindustrial levels, and every fraction of additional warming will worsen the devastating impact of climate instability.

Yet worrying about a problem that is way too big for you to tackle inevitably feels discouraging. It’s disempowering. It breeds apathy. The same phenomenon happens in politics. When someone says, “Why would I bother voting?” they may be finding it hard to see how their single ballot among thousands or millions makes a difference.

To counter this feeling, psychologists say it’s important to see how our individual actions make a collective positive impact.¹⁸ Indeed, research demonstrates that when the news focuses on success stories about entrepreneurial activism and actions ordinary people are taking in local contexts we can relate to, we feel more enthusiastic and optimistic about our capacity to tackle climate change.

But unfortunately, that’s not the way climate change is typically reported. Less than 19 percent of climate change coverage on major nightly news programs in the US in 2017 and 2018 mentioned climate change solutions.¹⁹ We might assume that negative news will shock people into action, but instead it’s been proven that it can cause them to disengage. Stories that emphasize the failures of climate politics intensify people’s feelings of despair and cynicism. Journalist Elizabeth Arnold, in her five-year study of national media coverage about climate change in the US Arctic, found that almost every story perpetuated a narrative of “fear, misery, and doom” that left the public feeling powerless.²⁰ The effects of this on our personal health and well-being are profound. As David Bornstein (journalist and co-creator of the Solutions Journalism Network) put it: “If the news were a pill, and all the known effects of the news were given in pill form, the FDA probably wouldn’t approve it.”²¹

In a 2017 review of more than fifty thousand abstracts from articles published in ocean and coastal science journals between 2006 and 2015, Murray A. Rudd of Emory University determined that the vast majority of articles did not propose actual solutions to environmental-change challenges. Because environmental reporters often base their reports on journal findings, those reports are heavily weighted toward presenting problems without solutions.²²

In many ways, the negative skew of climate change media stories is also a reflection of the general tendency for the media to focus on negative news. Plane crashes, for example, are always covered in the news, but car crashes hardly ever are, even though they kill more than 125 million people (and injure and maim 20–50 million more) every year.²³ The likelihood of dying in a plane crash is extremely low. In 2019, the fatal accident rate was on average one death for every 5.58 million flights.²⁴

Studies reveal that news all over the world has grown gloomier in the past two decades. Major US newspapers, studies show, are far more likely to report on unsuccessful climate actions than they are to cover climate action successes.²⁵ The same is true internationally. Maxwell Boykoff directs the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Center operates a Media and Climate Change Observatory, which monitors how climate change is reported across 117 sources (newspapers, radio, and TV) in fifty-five countries. They’ve found that problems caused by climate change are deemed more newsworthy than solutions, and that this coverage drives a sense of hopelessness. “There’s still a pervasive doom and gloom,” Boykoff said in a 2018 interview. “When these stories just focus in on doom and gloom, they turn off those who are consuming them. Without being able to find their own place as a reader, viewer, or listener in those stories, people feel paralyzed and they don’t feel like they can engage and have an entry point into doing something about the problem.”²⁶

These findings are worth paying attention to because the number one way most of us learn about the environment is through the media. Media shape the stories we hear, which, in turn, become the mindsets that we use to understand the world.

Catastrophe narratives in pop culture

Climate change fatalism is so ubiquitous it’s made its way into pop culture. In the HBO series Euphoria, for example, a teen addict defends her drug use, saying: “The world’s coming to an end, and I haven’t even graduated high school yet.” It’s just one of a seemingly endless stream of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films and television series that emerged over the past decade. The surge of catastrophe narratives led New York Times film critic Anthony “Tony” Scott to quip, “Planetary destruction and human extinction happen a half-dozen times every summer” in his 2014 review of the movie Snowpiercer.²⁷

Popular culture provides a lens through which we can see how, as a broader society, we are thinking and feeling. It both influences and reflects societal concerns and desires. Fears about climate change, and the profound ecological uncertainty and change it engenders, are so resonant they’ve given rise to a whole new genre of ecological-disaster-themed entertainment, commonly referred to as “eco-apocalypse,” “eco-catastrophe,” or “climate porn.”²⁸

In 2019, Shauna Doll and Tarah Wright of the Education for Sustainability Research Group at Dalhousie University²⁹ did a thematic analysis of two hundred artworks related to climate change from across Europe and North America. Only four artworks were coded as expressing “hope.” This is a problem, particularly given the findings of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. They studied the impact of the art displayed in Paris in association with the 2015 United Nations climate change summit. They too found that the vast majority of the pieces were dystopian and gloomy, and that those works left people feeling uninspired to take action. Only three of the thirty-seven works on display left people feeling hopeful that they could do something about climate change—all three of those works focused on solutions.³⁰

Any narrative that is so deeply embedded should raise alarm bells. There should never be just one dominant story. In a well-functioning, democratic world, there are multiple stories competing with one another for our attention. The idea that something as complex and extraordinary as all life on Earth could ever be encapsulated by a single grand narrative just doesn’t make sense. It’s as if “the Earth is dying” has become a sort of apocalyptic platitude. We repeat these things because we’ve heard each other say them, but it’s possible we say them without really thinking about what they actually mean. We have massive, terrifying, urgent environmental problems. But we also have powerful successes that we need to amplify above the din of hopelessness.

Whenever we straitjacket an idea or an issue into a single, monolithic story, whether it’s “environment” or “Africa” or “gay” or “terrorist,” we lose the nuance and specificity of context. We miss positive developments and shifts in perception. We are left with an oversimplification that is so generalized it becomes inherently inaccurate. Because we are told that the planet is doomed, we do not register the growing array of scientific studies demonstrating the resilience of other species. For instance, climate-driven disturbances are affecting the world’s coastal marine ecosystems more frequently and with greater intensity. This is a global problem that demands urgent action. Yet, as detailed in a 2017 paper in BioScience, there are also instances where marine ecosystems show remarkable resilience to acute climatic events. In a region in Western Australia, for instance, up to 90 percent of live coral was lost when ocean water temperatures rose, causing the corals to jettison the algae (zooxanthellae) living in their tissues—what scientists call coral bleaching. Yet in some sections of the reef surface, 44 percent of the corals recovered within twelve years. Similarly, kelp forests hammered by three years of intense El Niño water-temperature increases recovered within five years. By studying these “bright spots,” situations where ecosystems persist even in the face of major climatic impacts, we can learn what management strategies help to buffer destructive forces and nurture resilience.³¹ Rarely do the media return to profile the astonishing return of life after a catastrophic event.

Beware fatalistic mindsets

When the student I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter said, “I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless,” she believed that to be true, and I felt sad for her suffering. But I also saw her statement as an example of just how taken-for-granted and powerful the mindset of doom and gloom is. She described both her hopelessness and the hopeless state of the planet as non-negotiable, fixed, facts—as reality. She wasn’t saying, “I feel hopeless.” She was saying, “I am hopeless.” Just as she wasn’t saying, “I am worried that the state of the planet is hopeless,” she was saying, “It is hopeless.”

The vast scale, complexity, urgency, and destructive power of biodiversity loss, climate change, and countless other issues are real. Yet assuming a fatalistic perspective and positioning hopelessness as a foregone conclusion is not reality. It is a mindset, and it’s a widespread and debilitating one. It not only undermines positive change, it squashes the belief that anything good could possibly happen. Record-high numbers of Americans worry about climate change, but only 5 percent of them believe that humans can and will successfully reduce it, according to a 2017 study by researchers at Yale University and George Mason University.³²

We need to decouple the enormity of the crises we face from the ongoing construction of hopelessness. Doom and gloom is so synonymous with the environment, we fail to recognize it as a frame, as a way of seeing things, as a mindset. The mindsets we hold influence the outcomes that will result. Whether we are consciously aware of them or not, our mindsets affect what we pay attention to. Mindsets change what we are motivated to do and even what we believe is possible. We need to remind ourselves of this over and over and over again because, as we’ll see in the next chapter, our blindness to hope is extracting far too heavy a toll.