H is for Hopium

My hope derives from a different lived experience. Ecovillages are not imaginary.

One of the Easter eggs in Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest masterwork, H is for Hope, is the uncredited cameo in the audiobook by Christiana Figueres, UN midwife of the Paris Agreement, reading her own quote. There was barely a trace of her Costa Rican accent to give her away — you’d have to know her or have listened to her podcast.

A long-time environmental reporter for The New Yorker, Kolbert won the General Nonfiction Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History in 2015. I loved her Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. I devour everything she writes.

Each of the 26 chapters of the new book begins with a letter of the alphabet. Chapter D is particularly striking. It is just 9 words or 12 seconds in the audiobook.

Despair.

Despair is unproductive.

It is also a sin.

I could compare that to haiku but it does not follow the traditional form. It is more of a koan. One mediates to grasp a deeper meaning but there is not much to grasp. It is just simple and straightforward. In a later chapter (R is for “Republicans”), Kolbert relates that in the summer of 2022…