I had an email in which I feel is worth answering in detail, about how to hold things together in your own head in the face of climate and fascism and all the other problems that the early twenty-first century is bringing us. That’s all of this issue.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! If you want to help keep the lights on, you can do so via Patreon or Ko-fi. All support is appreciated!]

“I’ve been reading about climate change and how little is being done to prevent it. Or to deal with what will happen. It’s only insurance companies that are taking any notice. There are people talking about complete Collapse and Deep Adaptation and none of that is really possible when you can’t leave your house because there are fascists taking over your city. As far as I can make out you seem to stay level-headed. How do you do it? How do you hold on to hope?”

(The actual correspondent here prefers to remain anonymous.)

My own approach to this is intensely practical. It’s not that I don’t have feelings, emotions, or other less tangible things going on, because there are plenty of those. I just don’t get a lot of value from expressing them outside of art (my arts are running tabletop RPGs and writing poetry, and I suspect anyone actually analysing my games would understand a lot about me), and I see a lot of value in getting on with life.

There are constantly people preaching in one way or another about the end of the world. In history (and for some, in the present) it’s a religious end; God taking the righteous away to heaven, or the war of the gods ending the world, or just some unspecified Doom. But a huge, huge number of those predicted ends of the world have come and gone with no impact, and I don’t think many people take them all that seriously any more. What we can do, though, is look at how people proposed to deal with those, but also how they dealt with real problems.

There are two possibilities, when it comes down to it: something happens to you, whether it’s Rapture or Doom, and you’re not around to deal with things anymore, or that doesn’t happen, and you’re still here to deal with things. And then, it’s rare enough that things happen suddenly. We only think things happen suddenly because we haven’t been paying attention; any event that has ever happened (with the exception of earthquakes, volcanoes and meteor strikes before we had the ability to - to some degree - predict those) has had plenty of signs it was coming. I call this “gradualism”, which isn’t a widely used term in history, but comes from biology and social sciences.

This is relevant because part of keeping sane in this age of historical events is knowing that people have come through historical events before, and that to a first estimation, the ones who did come through were those who paid attention to what was happening, and made sure they weren’t where the trouble was going to be - or alternately, were very well prepared to be where the trouble was going to be. So my first real piece of advice here would be to read some history. This is good for you in many ways, but really the core of it is that while the particular events of the present day are unprecedented, the overall shape of those events have plenty of previous examples. This applies to climate change as well as as politics, mind, although that’s a topic for another issue.

My areas of expertise are medieval and food-oriented, for the most part, but I do have a degree in History (and Literature), and they made me study some other stuff. So the very first thing I would point you at is the year 1848, during which there were revolutions, rebellions, and unrest across Europe. The next thing I’d indicate is a precursor to that, the French Revolution, starting in 1789. Then you can read a bit about the Black Death, and the Irish Famine. “But Drew,” someone says, “that’s the least hopeful reading list ever to exist!”. Sure, it’s pretty grim. But the point is, these things happened, and people made it through.

Now, “people made it through” is pretty close to survival bias, which is the logical error wherein you pay attention to the things that made it through a process, and not the ones that didn’t. But in this case I am all about survival bias; indeed, this newsletter is all about survival bias. You want you and yours to be among the survivors.

And that simple stated fact is the thing upon which my hope - which I feel is more confidence than hope - rests. People have gotten through bad stuff before. The people that got through were lucky, sometimes, but more often they were clever. They saw which way things were going, they made appropriate preparations, and they made it through. Often, that preparation was getting out of the place where the bad stuff was about to happen, and I encourage that; that’s what “move inland” is all about. A lot more people survived the eruption of Vesuvius than died in Pompeii, and they were the ones who looked at the early rumbles and smoke and said “let’s get out of here”.

There is an argument that we have a duty to stay and make things better where we are. I applaud that thinking; that’s the thinking of others of which conservatives seem essentially incapable. But you’ve got to look at whatever is coming your way, whether that’s likely wildfires, more frequent flooding, rising sea level, or a tide of fascism, and decide whether it’s possible to survive that. Despite everything fiction tells us, there are very few situations made better by you not surviving them. There is often a lot more hope in helping from the next county or country over than there is in being a statistic.

And once you have made that assessment, you need to act in line with it. Move, or don’t. Establish community. Make backup plans. Store some food. Learn what to do if you’re tear-gassed. Plant some herbs. Learn to knit. Go to protests. Find out where there are apple trees. Do volunteer work. Shelter people who are are being persecuted. Once you are acting, hope follows a great deal more easily, and it almost doesn’t matter what the action is, as long as you know that it’s a step, no matter how small, toward a better situation.

So: Read history. Use that to understand your situation. Decide what you’re doing. Do it.

That’s where hope comes from.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]