Finding Hope in the Trinity of Despair

I find it really hard to go to class and listen to all the terrible things man has inflicted on the Earth. Whether it be international environmental politics or issues in marine science, when it comes to solutions it seems like the majority of what I hear and read about are the many failed attempts to try and do good. 

So when Maniates brought up the “trinity of despair” I thought. Oh man. Not again. I know we failed and are failing but please, give us solutions, not dead-ends. And he did. He pointed out what had to be changed to go in the right direction. Although he stressed the fact that mainstream environmentalism is sending out the wrong message to the global community, he spurred ideas in our heads as too how we should changed out outlook on things to be more positive and effective. So I thought his concept was brilliant, and it really made me think positively and, most importantly, constructively.  

I’ve been reading a lot lately about flawed “plant a tree” environmental strategies and completely agree with the fact that asking people to do little will eventually makes difference is a flawed assumption. However, I never thought of the fact that people think humans is inherently selfish as being a problem. Nor of the fact that social change can be done by small groups of people. I never looked at things this way but now that Maniates made us think about it, I think he has a very good point. 

Still, I’d like to make a couple of points about HN and SC. First, I don’t think people are inherently selfish but I do think that those situated at the top of the production chain are greedy, especially those in control of resource extraction, and that it is creating a big obstruction to the environmental movement. Similarly, even though I understand that you don’t need a lot of people to make a big change I am still skeptical about the power of social movement in a world where the “mean guys” are in control of the very infrastructure environmentalists want to tear down. Our system is built in such a way that big companies have almost more power than governments and the people (esp. true for countries that rely on  resource extraction) so my question would be—what do you do to make that change? how do you change the power structure?

As Maniates pointed out, Ghandi and Martin Luther King managed to turn their  country’s values upside down thanks to small but powerful group of citizens so why couldn’t we?

 I would need more tangible facts to be one hundred percent positive about climate change action but I definately see hope in the "trinity of despair."