Beyond Hope Response

Pete Hall

Beyond Hope is a push for action and awareness of our environment and the issues we face and the crisis’s we have created for ourselves. Jenson pushes for immediate and through action to save our environment and he believes so passionately in the need for action, that his article is desperate in it’s call to action. He champions the environmentalists in their plight to save plants and animals ruined by humans and their actions. What keeps them diligently working, Jenson argues, is not a hope that the animals with thrive or the plants will survive but the action. Jenson surmises that they do not hope, but take action. They don’t wait for someone else to do it, they do it themselves. To Jenson, hope is the loss of action, the giving up on action and hoping someone else fixes the problems of the world or they all work themselves out. It is “a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”

I believe that Jenson has seen to many people just talk about saving a tree or changing the world and perhaps he has become bitter towards those who do not have the call to action of the environmentalists he champions. I to believe that hope can be a damaging article when it is not followed by actions. When we simply think to ourselves that something should change and then do nothing, nothing will change. Chances are good that most other people have thought the same thing and done nothing. However, the thought that hope is thus inherently evil I do not agree with. Without hope, we would never have the call to action and then action would never ensue. Perhaps Jenson believes this as well, but his article is to attention grabbing to take the time to make the distinction that hope without action is the real evil.