Thought you might like to see the text of the reading we did at the end of our new year, new decade, walk in Parry Sound. It is not, in fact, the message seen in the above image, but was condensed from the document: ‘In 2030 we ended the climate emergence. Here’s how’ — by Eric HOLTHAUS . The condensed version can be found at this link to our .org website: https://www.climateactionparrysound.org/…/in-2030-we-ended…/
While a superficial response to our reading might see it as a message of passive and ‘realistically faint’ hope, the intention was quite the opposite; it was meant to be a very powerful exercise in “Optimism as a Political ACT”. The object is therefore to be real, rather than realistic. We did the reading in three voices. Someone called out each year (2020, 2021,… etc.) and then a male and female voice would alternately read the imagined decarbonization successes for that year. This gave the whole thing a sense of communal participation.
Could it be that our coming to understand the subtle but profound difference, between hope, and optimism-as-a-political-act (so eloquently expressed in the old-fashioned paper post above), is just what’s required of us at this time? So that despair becomes activism as the 2020s unfold?
