Climate of hope

Global warming is the worst news of our time. But pessimism saps our will. It's time to embrace the challenge, and call boldly on Americans to win the fight of a lifetime.

By Kevin Sweeney

Read more: Al Gore, Opinion, Global Warming, Climate Change

April 4, 2006 | Earlier this year in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to sit in on Al Gore's slide show on global warming. It's the most brilliant articulation of climate science I've ever seen. With time-lapse photography, excellent graphs and charts, snippets from cartoon shows, and vivid examples, the former vice president makes it easy to grasp the scale and the urgency of the climate crisis. His delivery is perfect -- he roams the stage, sometimes whispering and sometimes shouting. It's enthralling.

Gore's slide show is the subject of a forthcoming documentary and book, both titled "An Inconvenient Truth." It's also a welcome sign that climate change is finally a blinking red light of concern on the American radar screen. Two new books with rich and heartbreaking details -- Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" and Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers" -- also deliver an exceptionally clear picture of how global warming is already on us and what disasters lie in wait should we fail to act.

All of this should be good news because it offers Americans a better handle on climate change. But it's not all good news, largely because it's all bad news. Really bad news. Something is missing from all of these stories: hope.

I left the Gore event more energized than I had been in years. But I also left feeling a bit angry. Gore spent 91 minutes describing the crisis and six minutes on closing remarks intended to be hopeful. He described how America previously addressed seemingly insurmountable challenges -- ending slavery, enacting women's suffrage, winning two world wars -- to suggest we could solve problems that today appear even more daunting. And he offered a checklist of programs various governments had implemented.

The ending felt like an add-on, as if to say, "Now that the real show is over, let me give you a few quick ideas so you don't think all is lost." A storyteller that good -- and Gore has become a brilliant one -- should do more than find a glimmer of hope. The challenge is to find it, develop it and build on it.

The facts of climate change can be overwhelming. I recently observed focus groups in South Carolina, part of an effort to create messages to help moderates and conservatives understand the urgency of climate change. I saw lively conversations progress to a point when, abruptly, some of the participants began to shut down. As they grasped the urgency, they couldn't envision solutions or the political will to bring them about. They looked depressed.

Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, wrote, "It is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions." While this is a notion most American generations haven't needed to understand -- ours has been a fortunate history -- it may be time for us to learn it. When we tell stories of potential desperation, we must also find ways of offering hope. Always.

How would such a hopeful story go? There can be many versions, just as there are many cultural variations of the hero myth. The best stories will vary in style and tone, but all will be ambitious. Hugely ambitious. Admitting that ambition is not always linked with skill, Ill offer my own stories to show how hope might be distilled from the news about global warming.

Next page: Like hopeful cancer patients, we can be transformed by the news