Abstract
This special section seeks to reconsider our troubled times and their histories of irreversible toxic pollution through the lens of hopeful yet critical ways of engaging with this unprecedented condition of life. Thinking with “hazardous hope” as a tool of analysis, the five contributions—combining perspectives from ecocriticism, environmental philosophy, film studies, visual arts, and history—showcase alternative presents and futures of living responsibly with a permanently polluted planet. Writing from the perspective of hazardous hope, the section’s editors argue, includes a plethora of conceptual and methodological repositionings to embrace the ambiguity that comes with living responsibly on a permanently polluted planet. Among them is a shift in focus on the acts and modes of hazardous hope as a relational practice that is focused on reorganizing established processes in radically different ways rather than wishing to achieve a predefined outcome, while at the same time remaining mindful of the polluted status quo. Contributions in this special section are situated across the entire troubled planet, from Chernobyl’s exclusion zone to Brazilian oil fields and from Canada’s tar sands to British asbestos-loaded homes.
Introduction
Hope as a subject has gained traction in environmental humanities research. In 2017, in a series titled “Hope and Environmental History,” produced by the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), historian Tina Adcock asked what hope is and why it matters. Revisiting William Cronon’s opening remarks on hope as the “antidote to despair,”1 Adcock surveyed how successfully the field had been in a campaign to write in a “more hopeful key” to fight “the good fight against declensionism.” Concluding, she asserted that historians should revisit that particular emotion and consider joining scholars from other disciplines of social sciences and humanities in “exploring hope’s potential not merely as a subject or motive force, but also as an analytical tool or framework.”2 Already a decade earlier, the concept of radical hope had sought to push researchers to go where imagination could not.3 In 2019, Graeme Wynn opened the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) conference with a presidential address framing an ecology of hope with which we could address our present circumstances.4 That same year, Christof Mauch published “Slow Hope: Rethinking Ecologies of Crisis and Fear,” responding to Adcock’s query with the patience of a historian assessing that hope could also unfold slowly and almost invisibly.5 New perspectives on hope in the environmental context were also created by engaging with voices from the civil rights and social justice struggle, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, exploring how these actors continued their fight despite persistent racism.6
As scholars working on the global dimensions of waste, contamination, and hazardous trade—topics that at first sight do not readily lend themselves to hopefulness—we, too, felt triggered by Adcock’s question.7 Drawing inspiration from cultural anthropologist Eben Kirksey, who had powerfully stated that “in the aftermath of disaster—in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple catastrophes—it is still possible to find hope,”8 we wanted to explore what a critical hopeful perspective entailed in hazardous places.
Hope and Its Pitfalls
Talking about the great heuristic potential of hope, one has to start with its pitfalls. In everyday environmentalist conversations, being hopeful about the problems that surround us is often equated with being naive or uninformed about the gravity of the situation. Indeed, the latest news from the summer of 2023 about extreme weather events all around the world—including fires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, and cyclones—and scientific studies confirming growing plastic pollution and planetary contamination do not easily translate into hopeful narratives. In fact, there is a lot wrong with hope as a mode of being in our troubled times that are characterized not only by unprecedented planetary degradation of a world appearing to head straight toward global warming of three degrees Celsius but also war and terror.
Anthropologist Kirksey argued that “as an empty political slogan, ‘hope’ has bulldozed over our dreams.”9 In times of despair, hope may become a tool for distraction or denial so that it starts to feel like an emotion designed to calm the helpless. As Mauch argues, hope can be slow, and it might take decades before one can actually see the slightest changes.10 Meanwhile, it is possible that people lose sight of these slow changes and instead continue harping about the declensionist narratives. The environmentalist and author Derrick Jensen argues that hoping for change renders people inactive.11 They transfer their agency to make a change happen to someone or something else, be it a more liberal government, Greenpeace, or God, and so breed a complacent attitude. Consequently, Jensen calls us to stop hoping for external assistance and start working to resolve the issue ourselves. Similarly, the feminist geographer Natalie Osborne dismisses the idea of hope. There is no reason for it given the current state of the world, she argues. She writes from a position of conscious political depression where neither direct action nor critical reflection can change the world or even make herself feel better. In Osborne’s view, the politics of hope failed, and “in grief, loss, and trauma, we cannot always talk ourselves back into hope or optimism. Sometimes hope is entirely pointless, a form of denial.”12 For her the loss of hope, however, does not mean to also give up action but instead to ground activism in these feelings of grief and loss.13
Despite this criticism we still see hope as a productive and activating mode of research. Hope, to speak with Thom van Dooren, “suggests that the world does not have to be this way.”13 For us, being hopeful while working on toxicity and pollution means envisioning alternative futures, moving away from declensionist narratives, and finding evidence-based solutions to what we see as one of the most pressing issues on a permanently polluted planet: how to live responsibly with it.14 Being hopeful is being active. For a scholar working on waste and contamination, being hopeful also provides a purpose to our research.
Hazardous Hope and Methodological Repositionings
During a conference at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and together with other environmental humanities researchers who also work on contamination and pollution, we explored the conceptual and methodological potential of hazardous hope, asking which new narratives it would open up. We concluded that writing on our permanently polluted planet from a positionality embracing hazardous hope includes a plethora of conceptual and methodological repositionings. Conceptually, hazardous hope marries the emancipatory trait of hope with critical thinking. Hazardous hope is imminent, focused on the present, without being presentist. It is focused on modes of activism without neglecting the power of ideas, and it explores alternate modes of engaging with contamination while at the same time remaining mindful of the polluted status quo and the prevailing inequalities as toxicity is distributed unevenly in the age of global capitalism.
Hazardous hope hence demands the willingness to engage in practices, rather than evoke emotions, that aim to (radically) change those economic, social, or environmental processes that have led to today’s status quo of environmental degradation. This makes hazardous hope markedly different from optimism or wishful thinking, two behavioral strategies that focus, we argue, on evoking a particular emotion that helps people deal with a particular, often dreadful situation—such as climate catastrophe—while allowing for the possibility to continue with business as usual.
Methodologically, engaging with hazardous hope calls for a relational practice that is focused on reorganizing an established process of how to live with a permanently polluted planet in radically different ways. Rather than wishing to achieve a predefined outcome, such as cleanup or remediation, this means engaging with the contaminated status quo in novel ways. In their piece on tar sands, for instance, art historian Siobhan Angus and artist Warren Cariou illustrate how art can generate critical spectatorship to frame discussions on how extraction makes our world. As a tool of analysis, hazardous hope furthermore involves a shift in focus on the acts and modes of hazardous hope as a relational rather than a binary practice. Hannah Klaubert, for instance, beautifully illustrates the Babushkas’ multiple ways of being with and caring for the permanently polluted landscapes of Chernobyl.
Moreover, the conceptual and methodological repositionings involve a shift in the focus from linguistics of deterioration, degradation, and ultimate ecological collapse to stories of resilience and resistance as well as to hope—emphasizing ways of narrating our toxic lives beyond victimhood. Humor, as Nicolai Skiveren demonstrates in his piece, should be understood not only as an efficient mode of communication in environmental discourses but also as a mode whose ability lies in troubling anthropocentric paradigms of thought and offering new models of future modes of coexistence. By critically reading Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones, Arthur Rose suggests the role of asbestos in offering hope through solidarity and activism.
Less visible, probably, is the reconsideration of which and whose story to tell, which archives to tap into, and how to evaluate actions of resistance and being with or caring for a permanently polluted planet. Critically hopeful visions and hazardous hope also have the potential to promote agency and emotional health for affected communities, activists, and engaged scholars, as Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya showcases with her piece on the workers in the Brazilian oil industry by attempting to introduce individual human stories that move beyond oil barons and state actors to energy histories and that make peace despite the hazardous status quo.
Finally, we see hazardous hope as a state of mind for us as researchers. When studying hazardous waste, there is almost no way around telling stories of suffering and injustice—yet we wish to also keep our minds open for hopeful aspects without trivializing the issues at hand. Therefore, hazardous hope can be used to rewrite environmental history and keep our own mental sanity when researching toxins and toxicants. It has the potential to enable environmental change, instilling the perpetual volition of moving forward.
Contributions
In this special section, “Hazardous Hope: Repositioning Troubled Research (and Researchers) in Times of a Troubled Planet,” five authors join our thinking process, placing both themselves and their research on pollution anew in a context of critical hopefulness. Looking through the lens of hazardous hope, they seek to detect both present and future hopescapes in places where hopeful paradigms are difficult to find or notice. From different disciplinary vantage points of the environmental humanities—ecocriticism, environmental philosophy, film studies, visual arts, and history—they examine the efficacy of conventional environmentalist discourses that depend on doom and gloom narratives in their outreach and the potential of hazardous hope to environmental research and alternative futures. Geographically speaking, the contributions of the special section are situated across the entire troubled planet, from Chernobyl’s exclusion zone to Brazilian oil fields and from Canada’s tar sands to British asbestos-loaded homes.
All the contributions engage with hazardous hope as a tool of analysis. They ask the following questions: How do human and nonhuman actors experience forms of pollution in their everyday lives? How can practices of resistance and resilience inspire hope? How have narratives of hope challenged the prominent narratives of declensionism? What are the dangers of adopting hopeful narratives? And what can our role as researchers and writers be in all of this?
In the first article, “Humor as Hope? On Critique and Affirmation in Ecological Parody and Satire,” Nicolai Skiveren examines the use of humor in contemporary environmental films about waste. The article responds to debates about the immobilizing effects of apocalyptic rhetoric and the growing antipathy toward the didacticism of crisis discourse, arguing that humor, as a representational strategy, presents a hopeful alternative to the confining strictures of mainstream environmental discourse and is capable of fostering new perceptions and sensibilities. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how humor offers one way of mobilizing the kind of affirmative, ecological visions that may counterbalance the affective dynamics of despair and fatigue that accompany environmental discourse today.
In “Asbestos: A Lesson for Hazardous Hope,” Arthur Rose takes the case of asbestos, which has long been a staple lesson for the precautionary principle. As a toxic material, it is often something people hope not to encounter. But before this, it often appeared as a substance of hope, carrying the promise of safety and economic rewards. Rose uses these conflicting accounts of asbestos’s hope as a starting point for thinking about the conditions of hazardous hope. Turning to a vignette about an asbestos facility in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, Rose considers how stories of hazardous hope may produce a diminishment of hope. Rather than dismiss this as insufficiently hopeful, however, the article addresses the form of the novel as an exemplar of accessible experimentalism, suggesting it models new ways of communicating complex problems. If narrativizing hope demands an openness to multiple possible futures, then the form of such hope might need to defer resolution in much the same way adopted by modernist writing.
Siobhan Angus and Warren Cariou, in “Tar Remedies: Methods of Return and Re-vision on Colonized/Contaminated Land,” turn to the landscapes of bitumen mining in the Athabasca tar sands in western Canada. Starting from the premise that the extraction and burning of this bitumen was and is not inevitable, this dialogue locates hazardous hope in the landscapes of the Athabasca region. To do so, the first part of the article is an analysis of artist Warren Cariou’s photographic practice, situating his work within themes of toxicity and hope. Written by art historian Siobhan Angus, it argues that we can read the petrographs through a mode of critical spectatorship that generates questions about how extraction makes our world and how these processes are historically contingent choices based in what society has chosen to value. The second part is a short reflection by Cariou on his practice and how he theorizes hope in the context of pollution.
In the next article, “Marooned: The Case of João de Deus and the Abandoned Drilling Machine in Southern Bahia,” Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya examines the case of Mr. João de Deus, an elderly Afro-Brazilian man who worked on the ground and contributed to the beginning of the modern Brazilian oil industry. His is a story of environmental hope and personal resilience with roots in the deep past and outcomes that reverberate to the present. João de Deus’s story reveals many layers of history beyond human activity, weaving together different temporalities and kinds of hope.
Hannah Klaubert, in “Beyond an Environmental ‘Hermeneutics of Suspicion’: The Babushkas of Chernobyl,” takes a close look at the debates about “hopeful” critical scholarship in the environmental humanities via an analysis of the figure of the “Babushka of Chernobyl” in literature, film, and photography. The argument for hazardous hope unfolds in two steps in her work. First, she discusses how contaminated environments like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where the Babushkas live, invite an interpretative move that has been problematized as the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Such a move involves a mistrust of what is at the surface, calling for the exposure of hidden material agencies beyond what can be sensorily perceived. Second, Klaubert proposes that the cultural texts she examines not only model a “suspicious” gaze but also can easily be read suspiciously—as glossing over the harrowing realities of a precarious life in a sacrifice zone. In that, they invite us to leave behind, if only temporarily, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and to explore hazardous hope in a contaminated environment.
The articles in this special section were first discussed during a workshop titled “Hazardous Hope: Exploring New Ways of Narrating Toxic Bodies and Landscapes,” organized by the DFG Emmy Noether research group “Hazardous Travels: Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy” and hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2021.15 For the hazardous travels research group the discussion on “hazardous hope” has served as an entry point into the much broader issue of how to live—and do research—in an increasingly toxic world. “Hazardous hope” is our contribution to write against the long legacy in environmental writing, of stories of doom and gloom that render you speechless—if not hopeless. Instead we propose to look critically at the history of global toxicity and look at it through the lens of hopeful and engaging ways at this unprecedented condition of life for humans and more than humans.
Acknowledgments
This research has been generously supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group fund for “Hazardous Travels: Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy.” The special section has grown out of a conference hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich.
We would like to express our gratitude to anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at Environmental Humanities for their constructive suggestions and valuable comments on the earlier drafts of the essays. In addition, a special thanks to Maximilian Feichtner and Jonas Stuck, the other two key members of the #HazTrav team who have been thinking along with us on hazardous hope and who have provided valuable feedback on the earlier drafts of the introduction.
Notes
Adcock, “Hope and Environmental History.” See also Loo, “Field Guide to Hope”; Wight, “Hope beyond Progress”; McLaughlin, “Potential of Hope”; Adcock, “Declining Declensionism”; Schreiber, “Hope and Expectation on Turtle Island.”
Cork et al., “Exploring Alternative Futures in the Anthropocene.” This is connected to the notion of toxic commons that has grown from our work. See Müller, “Toxic Commons”; Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo, “Toxic Politics.”
