Living in the End Times? Eco-Anxiety and the Ethics of Hope
Introduction
What does it mean to feel anxious not about your future, but about the future itself? Eco-anxiety—a deep, often paralyzing concern about environmental collapse—is no longer a fringe emotion. It’s a generational condition.
Rising temperatures. Melting ice caps. Vanishing species. Some of us grieve a world we never even got to live in. Others mourn one we know may not survive. The Anthropocene has not only altered our ecosystems—it has changed our inner lives.
This post explores a question I’ve been wrestling with: Is it ethical to have hope in the face of planetary crisis? And if so, what kind of hope?
The Emotional Landscape: From Climate Awareness to Climate Grief
Unlike regular fear, eco-anxiety is diffuse and existential. It’s not just what will happen to me?—it’s what will happen to us all?
Psychologists increasingly recognize climate grief as a legitimate emotional response. This grief doesn’t follow linear stages. It loops through helplessness, rage, guilt, and sometimes—numbness.
But as with all grief, we must ask: where do we go from here?
Donna Haraway: “Staying with the Trouble”
In Staying with the Trouble, feminist scholar Donna Haraway offers a provocative alternative to despair. She argues against the fantasy of apocalypse or salvation. Instead, she urges us to stay with the trouble.
What does this mean?
- Accept that we are already in a crisis
- Abandon the dream of returning to a pristine, pre-human nature
- Engage in sympoiesis—a process of co-making with other species and systems
- Hope, not as escape, but as entangled response
For Haraway, hope is not naïve. It is situated, active, and messy. It is hope within trouble, not beyond it.
Naomi Klein: Crisis and Capitalism
In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein reveals how the climate crisis is inseparable from capitalism’s logic of endless extraction. Hope, for her, requires structural change—not just awareness.
Klein reminds us:
- Hope without action is denial
- But action without hope is burnout
She warns against “greenwashing” and individualist guilt, but she still believes in a future shaped by collective resistance. Her ethics of hope is political, organized, and urgent.
So—Is It Ethical to Hope?
Hope, in the traditional sense, can be dangerous:
- It may lull us into inaction
- It can be used to justify complacency
- It can serve as a marketable illusion
But a redefined hope—one that acknowledges collapse and still insists on dignity, care, and mutual aid—may be ethically necessary.
“Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline.”
— Mariame Kaba
Personal Reflection: Hope as Refusal
For me, choosing hope is not about believing things will turn out fine. It’s about refusing to give up on the possibility that what we do still matters.
It’s planting trees knowing we may not sit under their shade. It’s teaching, writing, building—not because we’re certain of outcomes, but because the act itself is ethical.
Sometimes, hope is just getting up and doing the next right thing.
Conclusion
We might be living in what feels like the end times. But that doesn’t mean we stop living—ethically, meaningfully, and together.
To stay with the trouble is not to despair, but to listen, to respond, and to co-create futures we cannot yet name. That kind of hope may be the most radical act we have left.