This is republished from The Revelator, an excellent online resource of stories for anyone interested in the environment and conservation/restoration.
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The Seduction of Despair, the Persistence of Possibility
January 9, 2026 – by Rick MacPherson
Some mornings despair arrives before coffee.
Not dramatically, not like a crashing wave or a siren, but quietly, like a fog: soft at first, then everywhere. It shows up on my phone, in headlines, on social media: policies rolled back. Protections stripped. Science defunded. Expertise ridiculed. Species disappearing. A political climate that feels more handheld flamethrower than democratic process. And beneath all of that, the quiet exhaustion of living through cascading crises without a pause button.
It’s especially loud now, at the turn of the year, a time when we’re told to make plans, set goals, and imagine better futures. But imagining can feel dangerous when the world feels fragile. The idea of resolve can seem almost laughable.
Despair is seductive because it offers a strangely rational refuge: If everything is collapsing, then nothing is required of you anymore. And there’s relief — brief, dangerous — in imagining the story is already over.
But despair isn’t neutral. It doesn’t just describe reality. It shapes it. Despair hands momentum to the forces counting on our fatigue. To the industries that benefit when we withdraw. To leaders who flourish when we believe we are powerless. It masquerades as honesty. Underneath it is permission — not to feel, but to quit.
Why We Stay in the Work
There have been days — fieldwork days, policy days, loss-of-another-species days — when I thought: Maybe the wild world will outlive us. Maybe the most we can do is bear witness to the ending. But then I think of future generations forced to inherit a planet stripped of its complexity and wildness, and bearing witness feels too much like quiet betrayal.
And then something interrupts. A headline — quiet, almost buried — about wolves returning or a coastal ecosystem recovering faster than expected. A student’s email saying they never realized nature was part of their story too, even from a city block surrounded by concrete. A grainy livestream of coral spawning — imperfect, but undeniable evidence that life is still trying. A community cleanup that began with six hesitant strangers and somehow became a recurring ritual people now protect on their calendars. A message from someone I’ll never meet saying they felt less alone because I didn’t give up.
And then, perhaps most powerful, I sit in a folding chair at a community meeting. The room isn’t glamorous. There’s no dramatic soundtrack. People are tired. Some are angry. Some are afraid. No one knows everything. But they showed up anyway. And in that small, imperfect room, I remember: Despair isolates. Community builds momentum.
We Are Not at the End — We Are at the Fork
This is a threshold moment. The kind future generations will study — not because we were certain, but because the uncertainty cornered us into choosing who we were willing to be.
History is full of inflection points when the future could have veered toward collapse or reinvention. And in those moments, there were always people who refused to leave the page blank: people who showed up tired. People who acted without guarantees. People who believed — not because the outcome was certain, but because living without trying felt unbearable.
That’s us now. Not the first generation to fight for wildlife, rivers, forests, or ocean. Not the last. But the generation with the least time to hesitate.
So what do we do when despair feels stronger than resolve? We don’t banish it. We don’t pretend we’re immune. We learn to feel it — and then move anyway.
Here’s how we keep going — not perfectly, but sustainably.
1. Shrink the Horizon.
Not everything needs to be solved at planetary scale. When the global feels unbearable, go local. This isn’t evasion, it’s strategic retreat. When we successfully restore one stream, one prairie, one forest patch, one shoreline, we break the logic of despair that says our efforts are futile. We create our own momentum. Small work is not small if it moves the world forward.
2. Build Belonging, Not Just Awareness.
Loneliness is one of despair’s most reliable accomplices. Hope doesn’t thrive alone. Find your people — the conservationists, scientists, artists, kids, elders, divers, farmers, fishers, hikers, hunters, dreamers, pragmatists — anyone who still believes a living planet is worth fighting for.
Community transforms despair from a boulder into a load shared. Show up to talks. Host a nature walk. Make space for questions, grief, curiosity, laughter, failure, and trying again. Movements don’t survive because they are correct. They survive because they are connected.
3. Let Awe Recalibrate You.
Get on your belly at the edge of a tidepool and watch barnacles open, each one waiting for the right moment to feed as the tide breathes in. Watch ants rebuild a colony after rain. Follow animal tracks in the snow. Stand beside a river and notice its pull. Watch a storm build over a lake and feel how water holds mood and memory. Plant native grasses and discover how soil — quiet, unglamorous soil — becomes an ecosystem. Grab a map and trace the flight paths of migrating birds overhead. Watch a livestream of a loud, chaotic romp of giant river otters in the Amazon and feel how wildness doesn’t apologize for taking up space.
Awe doesn’t erase the grief, but it reminds us why grief exists in the first place: because we love something worth protecting.
4. Act Anyway.
Even when discouraged. Even when unsure. Even when afraid. Action is not the opposite of despair — it is the antidote that makes despair bearable.
Write. Vote. Volunteer. Donate. Protest. Teach. Repair. Create. Speak up in rooms where silence is easy. Hope grows where footsteps repeat.
5. Rest. Seriously.
Burnout doesn’t make you a martyr. It makes you absent. Rest isn’t quitting; it’s recharging the part of you that refuses to give up.
Even ecosystems rest: Seasons shift, fires reset forests, tides withdraw, storms spend themselves. Your rest is part of the rhythm, not a deviation from it. Rest doesn’t pause the movement. It preserves the mover.
The Persistence of Possibility
Here’s a truth: Despair is honest.
Hope is honest, too. The difference is that hope participates. Hope has calluses. Hope stumbles and keeps going. Hope is the quiet refusal to surrender the future. The living world is not gone. And neither are we. This story isn’t finished. We are still writing it… species by species, action by action, community by community.
So as we step into 2026, maybe the resolution isn’t flashy or tidy. Maybe it’s this: Show up. For the wild. For each other. For the future. Some days that will mean attending hearings. Some days that will mean protecting your rest. Some days it will simply mean refusing to say “It’s too late” even when despair feels convincing.
Hope isn’t something we wait for. It’s a discipline we practice.
And as we cross into this new year — with uncertainty in one hand and possibility in the other — we make a quiet, stubborn promise: We will not hand the living world over to despair. Not this year. Not while we are here. Not while there’s still something left to protect.
