Floods tear apart the land and our lives. They cause everything to come undone and leave us grieving, with no choice but to remake our worlds. In her powerful book Becoming Kin, Patty Krawec reflects on the persistence of flood stories, alongside creation stories, in cultures around the world. She tells us that while creation stories tell us how we began, flood stories teach us how to rebuild. She tells the story of Nanaboozhoo, the shape-shifting trickster and creator who one day awakens and finds himself floating in the water on a log with a group of animals. He realizes there has been a flood. Water surrounds him as far as the eye could see. He comes up with a plan. Remembering the Anishinaabe creation story, which tells of the first woman who fell from the skyworld and with a handful of mud created the Earth, he dives into the water and attempts to reach the ground. He has no luck, and gasping for air turns to the animals. A small muskrat volunteers and disappears for a long time. At last, he arises through a cascade of bubbles, no longer breathing but clenching in his paws ‘the mud that became the land . . . and the world was made anew.” The future lies in the mud, in the soil where the roots rest. The story shared by Krawec, a story of collaboration and redemption, is also a story of grief. Grief that is ever present in our own collective story. Grief, she tells us, is “the sound of thunder you feel deep in your chest” and also “the persistence of love.” This grief, a grief that holds within it both despair and hope, must take us deep into the flood. Far enough so that we might also grasp a handful of Earth, and surface with the makings of a new world. 

 

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We have, to various degrees, awoken as Nanaboozhoo did, to find ourselves drifting on floodwater. With future deluges making their way over the horizon. This awakening has been a slow and confronting experience. We teeter on our rafts, unsure whether to make the leap. Silencing the rumbling, crashing, and thundering in our hearts, many of us find comfort in admitting defeat.

Why must we dive when we are surely going to die?

We stubbornly continue life on the raft, waiting to be submerged by the rising tide. As Krawec writes of our survival, we tremble with fear asking, What if we can’t swim? Without asking, What if we can?

Paraphrasing Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism who gave us the famous line “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” it seems that many find it is easier to accept the end of the world than to hope and act for its survival. While conversing with Rebecca Solnit, we reflected on the nature of hope and the irony of a specifically Western, middle-class hopelessness. Over- whelmed by the anticipatory grief of climate chaos, not yet having been physically or personally impacted, those living relatively safe lives give up all hope of a liveable future. What Rebecca finds striking is the way in which “people on the frontlines don’t surrender easily, because surrender for them means your children are going to starve to death, you’re going to live and die in a gulag, or a displaced persons camp, you’re going to lose everything, and real horrors are going to happen to you.” While those experiencing climate disaster first-hand fight for their lives, and in so doing fight for ours too, we indulge in the biased, destructive and deeply negative news cycles or well-meaning but scaremongering social media videos, all of which etch a permanent image of hopelessness and despair in us. We lap these images up, feed on them, and spew them back out into the world. They fester, pollute, foam, and froth at the edges of our mouths and consume our minds.

As we talk, Rebecca asks me to imagine that we are in a sinking ship, thrashing and panicking in the water with countless others. We see some lifeboats in the distance, yet many around us are certain we are all going to drown. There is no sense in swimming to the lifeboats. But, at the same time, if there are a hundred people in the water, and if we get to a lifeboat, maybe an individual can pull out six kids and another can rescue another three: “It’s not a total victory, but it sure is victory for those nine kids.” 

When we are faced with the possibility of hope, we discard it as naïve, frivolous, and out of touch. We point to the world’s many terrors, its ugliness and pain. Not realizing that in our defence of the end of the world, shines through our deep care and grief for that world. Care and grief we have thrown deep into the water, to be buried far out of sight, too fearful of the unknown potential they hold. Certain failure feels much more comfortable than uncertain triumph; than to act without the knowledge or promise of safety. “Defeatism is a form of certainty and hope is a form of uncertainty, hope is that we can get into the lifeboat, and it leads to possible survival or possibly being wrong,” Rebecca tells me. Defeat tells us that if we can’t save everything or everyone then we can’t save anything. Although despair is a very natural response to the immensity of the interlocking social and environmental disasters we face, Rebecca reminds us that it is “best not confused with an analysis;” you can “feel terrible and remain committed, be heartbroken, and know the future is being made in the present.” 

We often confuse hope with optimism—the idea that everything will be okay—but optimism and defeatism hold the same space. Both outlooks, Rebecca says, “are a form of confidence in that you know what is going to happen and therefore nothing is required of you.” Her comments reminded me of a conversation I had with Báyò Akómoláfé, who highlighted the perils of divorcing hope from hopelessness; of the incapacity to hold them both simultaneously. He described how blind hope “pays no mind to shadows, dips and grooves, places we don’t know” while “hopelessness released from hope starts to misbehave. It becomes this navel-gazing pessimism that is all doom and gloom, that also does not notice that the world is surprising [and] too promiscuous to fit easily or neatly into our stabilized linearities of change.” What our hope must do, is go to work. Our hope has to be active, not merely by existing, but by fueling our diverse and unique approaches and dedication to change.

This book began with a reflection that our natural connection—cultural, historical, interpersonal, and ecological—is inhibited or nurtured by the roots of our relationships with each other and the living world. That in order to usher in a safe, thriving, and abundant future, we must move away from our obsession with individualism, guilt, perfectionism, and saviorism toward an existence of interconnectedness, interdependence, diversity, and kinship. The six sections of this book represent a complex web of stories, ideas, and teachings that can ground us as we enter the unknown of a world facing climate and ecological breakdown. They are roots to hold on to and be held by. They have taught us that we must transform our rage into action and that there is power in resisting the logics of colonialism and capitalism that keep us from imagining more just futures. We have explored the need to place nature and the wisdom of the past at the centre of radical environmental innovations and how investing in theory is a means of generating new ideas to resist systems of oppression. Within these pages, we have recognised our collective grief as an opening to transform our connection to each other and the living world and that we must cultivate a universal ethic of care by looking to the planet’s neglected nurturers.