The Sustainability Project is currently seeking a Narrative of Hope for our landscape in Grey Bruce. This project is funded by the Greenbelt Foundation, whose goal is to increase the native plant cover in the Greenbelt and the Niagara Escarpment and its connecting areas.
A Narrative of Hope
Hope, by itself, is a projection into the future: the possibility that a vision may turn into reality. We neither should tie our hope to an expectation (or even right) that our vision will fall into place. Rather, hope is our choice to chose a path because we know it is the right thing to do, regardless of the outcome. We certainly expect that our vision can become reality if others chose to act as we do – and we have hope that others will act like us.
Active Hope is a practice. Joanne Macy writes:
Like tai chi or gardening, active hope is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps. First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.
“Since Active Hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be our guide.”
A Narrative of Hope is a perceived truth that we share in our culture about why we live and how we make decisions. For what Joanne Macy calls active hope, the Narrative defines the direction we’d like to move in… for Christians, “Accept Christ and live according to his teachings, and you will receive the gift of eternal life in heaven” has carried believers through centuries. “Work hard and you will have success in life” was the promise of the American Dream that served many generations well (there are many versions of this American Dream, which we subsume as “Narratives of Individual Merit”). These simplified formulations of a Narrative of Hope guide our lives: they provide a compass for every decision in our day – why we get up in the morning, how we relate to others, how we make decisions. Without a Narrative of Hope, life and all of our decisions becomes aimless, short-term, and reactive.
Today, our youth can no longer identify with these narratives: in the age of science, the idea of heavenly afterlife no longer appeals to many. With increasing inequality, hard work seldom leads to opportunity and success – in most cases, it just makes you tired. Those who still believe in Narratives of Individual Merit, like the “American Dream”, tend to be people who benefit from family privileges and assets – studies have shown that America is better described as an aristocracy of the professional class than the land of equal opportunity. If harder work just makes the boss richer and makes your bones ache, why should youth push themselves further? For those who don’t have the privilege of well-off parents, saving money will never result in owning land or a dwelling. So what is the point of trying hard?
Also, Narratives of Hope frame how we signal success within our community. Within narratives of individual merit, success signals good character, but failure becomes a sign of personal flaw. We want to avoid failure at all costs, because we don’t want to be regarded as flawed characters… so we act against our better knowledge. We keep lawns sprayed and tidy for our neighbours and guests – even if we silently love flowers, deep inside our hearts. We fear living in a tiny home – what would mother say about her failed son? Males act within the patriarchy narrative of dominance – not because they love it, but because they fear the embarrassment from acting differently. Farmers blame themselves for their financial struggles in a system designed to crush them – rather than recognizing the flawed economic system that they are embedded in. So farmers push themselves harder, extract more from the land – short-term gains over long-term degradation. All too often, degenerative behavior is driven from our need to conform with the dominant narrative of success! And even if morals and values are already shifting, it needs critical mass to transform real-world behavior.
Given all of that, a Landscape Narrative of Hope is the way that we understand our role as humans when interacting with our landscape. This narrative defines our responsibilities as stewards, our rights around benefiting from the landscape and the ecosystem services it provides. Such landscape narrative is not about the looks of the landscape itself, but around the responsibilities and rights that we, as the community that benefits and interacts with the landscape, assume for ourselves. Two dominant yet related narratives are “landowners have the right to extract resources and shape the land to their own likings”, and “conservationists who have the responsibility to people out of the land”. Slowly returning is another narrative that regards the human role as “stewarding managers of land” who recognize and respect land’s intrinsic needs for being healthy. These stewards intervene in a landscape to simultaneously benefit us humans and the land’s biodiverse living world.
No Narrative of Hope?
Without a Narrative of Hope, we humans lack a compass to guide us. Aimlessness and reactive decisions leave us depressed, in an abyss of despair. We may escape this abyss with our behaviour – fantasy worlds, conspiracies, screen time, hedonistic celebration, and addiction are all thriving. The addictive design of Social Media may have contributed to these behaviours. But people who are firmly grounded in a hopeful reality are far less susceptible, while those without a Narrative of Hope spiral out of control.
Older employers and youth alike are estranging from each other: The older ones still live in the American Dream narrative, the younger ones no longer have a narrative of hope. Staff problems, high turnover rates, and interpersonal tension are reported whenever I turn on media. What if youth has a point? What if the low wages offered by workers – without the hope of a better life in future – no longer incentivises good work? Meanwhile the business owner reminds me that “he has built everything from scratch by working hard – no one has ever given him anything”. What looks like a clash of generations is really a clash of economic eras, and an incompatibility of life narratives.
As parent of three children, I believe that my main responsibility is to provide my kids with a Narrative of Hope. Such a narrative would give them guidance and protect them from the downward spiral of despair and addiction. Without a narrative, many parents desperately keep their children busy – driving them from school to one extracurricular activity after the other. Without ever letting a quiet moment happen, despair is not overcome, but at least it is postponed. Also, counter-factual narratives (“conspiracies and fantasy worlds”) abound, multiplied by the echo chambers of social media. While these strategies are somewhat successful during early childhood, they infantilize our children and fail to create independent adults as free-thinking individuals who have decision agency and their own drive to succeed in life. In the end, there is no way of raising a healthy child without a Narrative of Hope.
The new challenges of the Anthropocene
We now live in an era where human activities are shaping the Earth and all geochemical cycles; scientists coined this era the Anthropocene. This era is characterized by three behemoths: (1) climate change, (2) biosphere degradation, and (3) inequality of income and wealth ([3]).
Climate Change generally refers to human-caused changes of the gas composition of our atmosphere. Human activities have increased some gases that trap heat and lead to a warming of our planet: the Greenhouse Gas effect that causes global warming. Most greenhouse gases stem from the burning of fossil fuels and from the degradation of our living biosphere. However, global warming is not just a slow and gradual warming process. Our Earth’s climate system is highly complex, with uncountable self-regulating cycles, negative and positive feedbacks. From analysis of historic records, scientists have learned that the Earth’s climate system also contains tipping points that translate gradual change into rapid, irreversible, long-lasting regime shifts. Our predictive models are fairly good at predicting gradual warming (e.g. average temperature, average number of growing days), but models are unable to predict these rapid shifts at “tipping points”.
Biosphere degradation is the killing of the living layer from our earth that used to cover almost all of Earth’s surfaces. The degradation of soil health turns soils that teem with life into dead dust. The disruption of the water cycle means that water is not held on the landscape and its soil sponge, it is not taken up by plants that cool the Earth with transpiration. In a disrupted water cycle, water immediately gushes downstream, taking with it our topsoil (erosion), causing immediate flooding and then leaving a dried out landscape prone to drought. Biodiversity is life’s insurance that ensures renewal after shifts in climate and after ecosystem disturbance (e.g. wildfire). With biosphere degradation, biodiversity is lost forever to extinction – one irreversible tipping point of our Earth’s climate self-regulation system.
Biosphere degradation also changes local climates: On a hot or very cold day, a parking lot feels very different than a closed-canopy forest. The parking lot absorbs sun radiation, warms up, and releases sensible heat as radiation. The forest also absorbs sun radiation and transforms most of this heat into latent heat, by transpiring water as vapour. The forest feels cool – a combination of shading, reflection, and cooling water vapour. A single large tree cools as much as 10 home air-conditioning units running 24/7. The heating above dead surfaces, and the cooling above healthy vegetation, also impacts the formation of clouds, winds, and rainfall. You may have observed birds cycling the updrafts above a fallow field, or the scorching heat in an urban centre? In fact, plants actually exude particles that cause cloud formation and rainfall – this way, our biosphere actively controls its own regional climate, its own water cycle. What we today experience as weather change is indeed a complex interplay of the Greenhouse Gas-driven global warming and human modifications of the biosphere.
The third behemoth is inequality in our human society. Inequality describes how humans differ in income and in their ownership – in particular savings and other financial assets, real estate, and land. While some differences in income and ownership is normal and stems from differences in luck, abilities, and priorities, the current level of inequality is unprecedented. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the richest 10% of the global population currently take home 52% of the income. Together, the poorest 50% of the global population earn just 8%. Inequality is even stronger if looking at asset ownership: The poorest 50% of the global population owns just 2% of the global total wealth, while the richest 10% own 76% of all wealth. Inequality is most pronounced around land: Today, it is estimated that there are approximately 608 million farms in the world. About 90% are family farms, which include all sizes of farm from the smallest to some of the largest, occupying 70–80% of all farmland: About 84% of all farms globally are smaller than two hectares, but together operate only about 12% of farmland, with little if any opportunity to be part of corporate supply chains. The largest 1% of farms in the world operate more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland ([1]). Large investment firms, such as BlackRock that manages funds worth US$7.43 trillion or twice Germany’s annual GDP, are massively investing into marginal agricultural lands, outcompeting individuals in their purchasing power and access to capital.
Regenerate our biosphere – A new Narrative of Hope?
For many people, the regeneration movement provided a beacon of hope. In recent years, humans across the world have learned that we can manage landscapes by balancing human use and biosphere health. For farmers and foresters, this can even be more profitable than the extractive use of the 20th century. Examples of small- and large-scale regeneration are abundant.
For example, the Biggest Little Farm tells the story of how biodynamic farmers can revitalize a degraded landscape. The ‘Waterman of India’ Dr. Rajendra Singh, a renowned community advocate and environmentalists, has succeeded to regenerate entire river systems. Without new technology, simply by reviving traditional water savings techniques and empowering communities, these communities turned desertified landscapes back into abundance. In Australia, soil microbiologist Walter Jehne has turned desert into rainforest, which withstood even the dire wildfires of the last years – an example of human management of natural ecosystems for resilience. John Liu documented the greening of a desertified Chinese loess plateau, Allan Savory elaborates how smart and eco-sensitive management of livestock can revive desertified grasslands and enhance habitat for wildlife. Myriad other examples of re-greening exist around the world. Common threads through all of these large-scale examples of planetary renewal and resilience: A shift in personal mindsets, a new Narrative of Life, a new-found spirituality around regeneration that catalyzed community action, a new and shared hope for a better future. Some readers may be surprised: neither technologies nor money ever played a significant role in landscape regeneration.
While re-greening a healthy biosphere and resilient Earth is possible if we manage for it explicitly, the Behemoth of inequality poses a fundamental barriers. In Ontario, young people can no longer become land stewards or ecological farmers: The big barrier is access to land, because speculators have driven land prices through the roof. Without access to land by those who want to regenerate, regeneration won’t take place. The examples in India and China all take place on commonly owned land, and most North American examples build on intergenerational wealth. Furthermore, I am not aware of a single example that was driven by government – regeneration is usually instigated and pushed by individuals and communities. Local governments may eventually join in support later… In Ontario, local communities have little agency, partly because land is privately owned, partly because of our narrative.
Most landowners today are of an older generation (as individuals, or through portfolio/pension funds) that is deeply embedded in the American Dream and its extractive imperative. For example, a former cash cropper explained the vicious cycle of cash cropping: 1) Farming pays too little so farmers often require a full-time “day job”. 2) To farm the land on the little time left during weekends and evenings, farmers purchase large equipment that dealerships are promoting. 3) They can leverage their land to finance this equipment, but soon realize that their land is not large enough to make monthly equipment payments. 4) So they begin renting more land. 5) They have to modify the farmland: equipment was designed for the wide open prairies, so farmers must now transform Ontario’s mosaic landscape into something resembling the prairies. Trees go, hedgerows and rocks are removed, fields are drained to accommodate for the new equipment. 6) To deal with erosion and soil degradation, more and more fertilizer is used, adding to production cost. 7) Agrochemicals and excavator fees accumulate, and farmers need to earn more off-farm, and farm even larger acreages. With this vicious cycle of industrialization of Ontario’s farming, landscapes are increasingly simplified, the biosphere degenerates, soil loses its carbon, and landscapes lose their climate resilience. Meanwhile, land ownership accumulates further and inequality rises. The landscape is depleted of windrows that protect roads from snow drifts and land from wind erosion, rivers turn muddy with eroding soil, insect and bird populations collapse, and our landscape’s ability to self-regulate our local climate vanishes.
When there is rain, it causes flooding, Otherwise we quickly have too dry conditions so wildfire risks increase. Without asset ownership, youth has no agency whatsoever to regenerate our landscapes, or to intervene in this situation. Youth can just watch in horror.
Advocates continue to promote “Biosphere regeneration” as a new Narrative of Hope – soil health, an invigorated terrestrial water cycle, conservation and rewilding. In theory, this narrative addresses the two environmental behemoths of climate change and biosphere degradation. It fosters a healthy lifestyle and even provides employment that is meaningful.
However, this story can only provide a Narrative of Hope for the privileged few that can access land and regenerate it. Today, white people make up 61% of the US population but own 98% of farmland. Black people, making up 13% of the population, remain with less than 1% of total land. This is not the result of better entrepreneurial skills of the white folks, but mostly stems from systemic racism and disadvantaging policies. Billionaires increasingly found land as a safe investment haven; the US’ largest owner of farmland is now Bill Gates owning over 240,000 acres ([2]). In Ontario, urban dwellers who are looking for a rural cottage have also discovered farms as investments; they purchase a farm, utilize the house only, and rent out the land to cash croppers. Local and global investment funds (portfolio and pension funds) also purchase land, driving up prices. As a result of these bidding wars the land is now priced speculatively, far beyond the financial return from any land use except urban development. Paying for farmland with farming is no longer feasible; farming is rather an intermediate strategy to save on land taxes, while owners wait on rezoning for development. Regenerating land within this market framework is financially impossible, unless a youth is privileged to access massive financial support from family or peers. Regeneration can serve as a new Narrative of Hope only for an affluent echo chamber – not for the majority of our community.
Why a new Narrative of Hope is fundamental for our community
A Narrative of Hope, if shared among a community, governs how we make decisions around our landscapes. If this narrative commands us to extract from the landscape, then the landscape will degrade and reduce resilience. If this narrative inspires regeneration and an increase in landscape resilience, then we can certainly achieve this goal and alleviate the hardships of inevitable climate change.
No Narrative of Hope for Grey Bruce’ landscapes
Today, the majority of people in Grey Bruce that we have spoken with either lack a Narrative of Hope for our landscapes, or believe that our region will not be impacted by the Behemoths of biosphere degradation and climate change.
Some people believe that climate change is not caused by humans – citing conspiracy theories, or their religious faith. For example, some Christian groups promote that the God is omnipotent and has total control over his creation, such that human impacts will not be consequential. Other people have no energy for long-term concerns as they struggle in day-to-day life. Yet others believe that our cold Canadian climate will benefit from warming, because it will extend the growing season and bring more heat units – so no preventative action is warranted! Even if our region may be less impacted than other parts of the world, the narrative of “benefits from gradual warming” is likely flawed: our models can predict these effects from gradual warming far better than they can capture stronger variability (heat & cold, dry & wet, storms & hail, flooding & drought, wildfires) and irreversible tipping points. It is well established that our scientific methods offer more certainty around the gradual impacts of climate change, while uncertainty remains high about how increasing variability will play out locally. This makes it easy to ignore variability impacts, especially for those enjoying a comfortable level of privilege. Furthermore, if other regions spiral into societal collapse as climate change and biosphere degradation become severe, our region will deal with massive migration fluxes that will overwhelm our institutions and may lead to violence and displacement. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” – the Narrative of No Significant Change ignores these societal interactions.
Biosphere degradation is another aspect. There seems general agreement that the ongoing simplification of our landscape is not desirable: people feel the impacts of deteriorating winter conditions as windrows are removed, which fosters snow drifts onto roads. People also lament how landscape features are disappearing that once created attachment during their childhood: temporary ponds on fields provided private hockey arenas, disappearing trees carry memories of first romantic encounters and happy family BBQs. Parents bonded with their children over camping, hunting and fishing – experiences that are increasingly restricted to small protected areas. Municipalities lament the rising cost of flood damages to road infrastructure, as bushes are cleared and soils lose their sponge functions. The few who offer Agritourism experiences lament the loss of beauty in a simplified monoculture landscape. Overall, there is no sentiment of agency over our landscape – degradation feels inevitable as humans must grow more food for cities, log more aggressively, and save on labour costs. Governments likewise cannot counter this degradation, because the sectors of construction, landscaping and farming are the few industries remaining.
Youth, mostly without owning housing or land, feels the impact of inequality most severely. The disparity of older and young generations seems stark. To the older ones, land property is sacred because they associate assets with hard work that was rewarded with financial success. To the younger ones, land property is out of reach and not even worth a serious attempt. These different viewpoints contribute to an estrangement of generations, even though our qualitative study design can by no means quantify the role of property ownership compared to other aspects. Simply put, inequality cements despair by those who consider the impacts of biosphere degradation and climate change.
Towards a new Narrative of Hope
While depressing and concerning, it is important to recognize how the lack of a Narrative of Hope impacts on our young generations. Only this clarity can form a basis for addressing problems that stem from a lack of hope into the future. Take, for example, addiction and mental health problems – if the root cause is the lack of a Narrative of Hope, then other treatments are bound to be short-term and ineffective. Also, as a community we lack a shared compass for our management decisions. Without a shared Narrative of Hope our politicians can only govern reactively to crisis with short-term responses, without laying the foundation for a long-term path of success. No election outcome can address this fundamental problem of poor governance as long as we lack a decision compass. No planning process can create a shared vision for future land use as long as we lack a community Narrative of Hope.
The purpose of a new Narrative of Hope is to empower our population (especially the young generations that no longer believe in the American Dream) so they have decision agency in managing our future. This agency must allow them to create a future worth living, while addressing the behemoth triplet that youth has inherited from us, the older generations – climate change, biosphere degradation, and inequality.
How could this Narrative look like? We don’t know. However, our scientific understanding of a limited Earth offers some framing.
A new narrative needs to lay out a lifestyle that mitigates climate change and otherwise reduces our personal footprint on the environment. This can be done by reducing the need for heating and cooling of our buildings, our emissions from transportation and energy use, and our environmental impacts from building vehicles and other consumer goods (e.g. mining, waste). The lifestyle needs to foster biosphere regeneration, enabling ways to reverse the ongoing degradation of landscapes for short-term agricultural productivity. And the lifestyle must create a path forward for those not endowed with family assets, without resorting to violence as last resort. Perhaps this new narrative will overcome our need to accumulate assets individually, which is currently the dominant Western strategy for financial security at an old age. Because land ownership has currently accumulated in the hands of few older fellows and some investors, transfer mechanisms are required that create more equitable access to land so that regeneration is possible. These requirements follow directly from our scientific understanding of the Earth’s future; these imperatives are not negotiable, they are simply facts that limit our operating space.
Ultimately, a new narrative is a spiritual quest – a way to bridge between generations, between faiths and races, and between classes. Narratives have always offered such bridges: The Christian narrative, by extending the rewards of good behaviour during our lifetime into the afterlife, and The American Dream narrative, by offering a path to overcome differences in origin (class, gender, religion, and race).
Formulating a new narrative must be a dialogue – including spiritual leaders, all generations (especially grandparents, parents, and youth), and classes. A narrative cannot just work for the affluent few, nor for the poor. The dialogue must recognize our predicament, and acknowledge that all three behemoths are real and not a conspiracy. It must be based on a fundamental respect for one another, even for those who don’t share our class, religion, sport, level of success or ambition.
And it is important that we engage in this dialogue – a Narrative of Hope is the biggest responsibility of parents toward their children. Without a new narrative, our children will never achieve independence, and they will never obtain agency to govern the world they inherit from us. We older generations need to support youth here, empower them with the skills, and endow them with the assets that they require.
The bible offers some interesting ways forward. For example, the old testament reports on the judaeo-christian tradition of th Year of Jubilee ( Leviticus 25:8–13 ) – every 50 years, Leviticus prescribes a land reform that returns land into an equitable ownership:
You shall count off seven Sabbaths of years, seven times seven years; and there shall be to you the days of seven Sabbaths of years, even forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. You shall make the fiftieth year holy, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee to you; and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee to you. In it you shall not sow, neither reap that which grows of itself, nor gather from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you. You shall eat of its increase out of the field. In this Year of Jubilee each of you shall return to his property.
Narratives change, new ones get born and old ones forgotten. We are only limited by our imagination, our ability to reframe our thinking. We can change, and we can adopt new narratives. It is time to do this – our youth needs it from us!
[1]https://www.landcoalition.org/en/uneven-ground/shocking-state-land-inequality-world/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland
[3] Folke C, Polasky S, Rockström J, Galaz V, Westley F, Lamont M, Scheffer M, Österblom H, Carpenter SR, Chapin FS, Seto KC. Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere. Ambio. 2021 Apr;50(4):834-69., https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-021-01544-8
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