Planting Seeds of Hope for 2024

01.02.2024

We are living through a time of conflict and hate, and so it often feels as though society is moving backwards, writes Atmos contributor Riley Black. But the looming dark in front of us can also be an opportunity to cultivate the world we wish to see.

I’ve never managed to make my peace with winter. I’ve tried. I remind myself that a time of rest and recuperation is as necessary as springtime extravagance. The thick winter coats of fat fox squirrels and plush mule deer make me smile when I see them among the denuded forests. I think about all the small creatures bustling around beneath the leaf litter, the small stories that continue when all seems frozen. But if I’m honest, I envy the hibernators—I wish I could simply sleep from the winter solstice to the spring. Perhaps never moreso than this year.

It’s not just the chilly evenings that feel especially dark. Everywhere I go, the exhaustion feels palpable. It’s almost as if there is a tension hook beginning to grow just a little more audible each day as we approach the turn of the year. We are still living in a pandemic that has claimed millions of lives despite the danger being declared “over.” Genocide continues in Gaza no matter the tears shed as the war between Ukraine and Russia is set to enter its tenth year and dozens of other armed conflicts continue around the world. Authoritarian and fascist politicians continue their press for control, from the election of Javier Milei in Argentina to next year’s U.S. election—a replay of the 2020 election that has already made so many despondent for the choice between a self-styled moderate who has failed to repair the damage done by his predecessor and a wannabe dictator endlessly promising to make life hell for anyone but himself. And this is to say nothing about the continuing devastation of human-caused climate change, continued attacks on reproductive freedom, widespread racism, and a push by Christian white supremacists to run queer people out of public life.

The torrent of fear and bad news keeps coming, not at all helped by the proliferation of misinformation and the continued decay of journalism. In the face of all this, I’ve had more than one friend take a deep breath and say: “Everything feels like it’s going backwards.”

The looming dark in front of us isn’t a return to life as it ever was before, but something unique that is going to require the best of ourselves to face.

That choice of word, backwards, has stuck with me. Because for there to be a backwards we must have felt we were getting somewhere. Before 2016, in spite of the horrors around us, perhaps it was easier to hope that our societies could keep building towards a more equitable and aware society. Now, it’s not hard to draw comparisons between the state of the world in the 1930’s as if we are returning to a disastrous script we already know the ending to.

I never want to correct my friends’ word choice in such vulnerable moments, but I do have a small suggestion rooted in years of following the story of life on Earth. The fears and horrific realities we presently face is not a matter of going backwards anymore than a mass extinction requires that life unspool to an earlier state. The looming dark in front of us isn’t a return to life as it ever was before, but something unique that is going to require the best of ourselves to face. And if we only see such matters as a difference between progress and going backwards, we’re going to overlook the places where we might cultivate the world we wish to see.

Just as we might wish our society to make constant and consistent progress towards something more fair, more peaceful, and more nurturing than what we know, the winding trail of life on Earth was once thought of in similar terms. Geologists of the 19th century informally divided the past 400 million years into an Age of Fishes, an Age of Reptiles, and an Age of Mammals, capped off by an Age of Man. Life appeared to progress in its complexity, diversity, and behavior over time. When evolutionary ideas were overlaid on this framework, phenomena like natural selection became engines of improvement that could turn the lowliest worm or mollusk into something grander through time—a notion that worried social conservatives of the day who preferred to think of a god-ordered universe for life as well as human experience. Even Charles Darwin’s peculiar formulation of evolutionary theory emphasized a sense of progress, in which old species would be supplanted by new, better-adapted organisms through competition. There were no mysteries about why creatures such as the great dinosaurs should vanish, for example—reptiles were inferior to mammals, the logic went, and so the “terrible lizards” were shown the door by beasts whose time had finally come.

In times like these, it is the small things we can do for each other that can help set the roots of what we hope for and will likely never live to see.

The story was never so simple, of course. Accidents and catastrophe are as important to the history of the living world as finely-honed adaptation. Life is constantly responding to the conditions it finds itself in with no ultimate goal or point where all would be settled. You might as well argue whether Cretaceous species were better than that of the Jurassic or if the Cenozoic improved on all that had evolved during the Mesozoic. When we let go of our fixation on progress, however, we can not only appreciate the unexpected across the depths of time, but perhaps learn from the times when life had to contend with rapid climate shifts, incredible volcanic outpourings, asteroid strikes, and all the other causes that brought about life’s most challenging and dire moments.

I’d hoped I could look forward to the coming year as one that would feel freer from so much of the pain and horror we keep playing out, societies shaped by the hard lessons of years and decades past. What I am struggling with is the expectation of another year when no one can truly thrive, not when there is so much hurt to be addressed and horror to be stopped. Demoralized is too mild a word for the feeling. It’s not hard to feel powerless against global crises we can do little to affect. And that is what makes me think of the countless species that survived Earth’s harshest and catastrophic times, the forgotten founders of the world we live in now.

In times like these, it is the small things we can do for each other that can help set the roots of what we hope for and will likely never live to see. A small kindness like checking in on a friend, donating needed supplies for the unhoused or speaking up for the importance of libraries. Whatever good you can do among the people you know, your community, can help build something meaningful just as all the small interactions of the ancient past, like a prehistoric bird digging a seed out from under the ash or an ancient tree joining a shading canopy, helped keep life alive in the wake of inescapable disaster. Such moments can always be found, if we look for them, but it’s these willful actions that can do something to build what we wish to see even if the world beyond the headlines feels impossible to assist. We are already living through a time of conflict and hate we never wished for, and in such times it’s the most important to plant what small kernels we can so that there is something to greet the thaw if, when, it comes again.