July - Hope, an Orientation of the Spirit

June 8th is celebrated annually as World Ocean Day, and to raise awareness this year David Attenborough, broadcaster filmmaker and Earth Champion, created the documentary "Ocean". Our Monday eco-study group viewed it on June 9th, benefitting from Attenborough's 99 years which have coincided with the great age of ocean discovery.

While we were entranced with spectacular views of coral reefs, kelp forests, and abundant fish life, we were dismayed when we saw bottom trawlers dragging nets with heavy chains across the ocean floor to catch bottom dwelling fish to take to market. We learned that scraping the ocean floor is of course a highly destructive fishing technique, and seeing it in action was difficult, evoking the desire for a diet without ocean fish.

In the rest of the film Attenborough showed that our ocean can recover if we give it a chance, and this raised a hope spot in us, but just a spot. The phrase "hope spot" does not come from this film; rather, it arises from Mission Blue, a project initiated by Dr. Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist whose 90 years have also aligned with the age of ocean discovery. (Click on her name to listen to her informative and inspiring TED talk about Mission Blue.) For Dr. Earle, hope spots are ecologically unique areas of the ocean critical to the health of our planet and requiring protection. The health of these places is known to spill over, creating positive effects for surrounding areas.

When thinking about David Attenborough and Sylvia Earle and how they have maintained enthusiasm for their work for so many decades, I wondered how they could possibly have any hope because the condition of our ocean each one presents is so very grim. This is a quandary I have carried around a long time: how to live with hope in the face of serious devastation and dire predictions. In my exploration I came upon Vaclav Havel's helpful words: "The kind of hope I often think about...I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it's a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for success; but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Yes! This is the kind of hope I see around me at La Vista; in the volunteers who labor monthly removing honeysuckle against all odds, in the young people who joined the trash removal project last month, and in all of you who continue your efforts for the health of Earth. Thank you for the hopeful witness of your lives, and thanks to Attenborough, Earle, and all those world figures who have been faithful to the task for so long. Each one is a hope spot on our rare and precious planet while their efforts spill over, creating positive influence all around us.

Photo credit: Ocean Kelp by Josh Chiodo on Unsplash