Giving Up or Letting Go

In September 2010, John Holdren, Harvard professor and Obama's science adviser, gave a speech on climate change arguing that people aren't aware enough of the ways we're affected by the changing climate: availability of water, productive agriculture, fisheries, forestry (paper and lumber), and the spread of disease. 

Almost four years earlier, in a New York Times article, he said, 

"We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We're going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be."

Some people think we're too late for significant mitigation, and we need to work on adaptation. Rupert Read takes a page from Vaclav Havel: 

"To change the narrative from the evidently-failed 'Yes we can' to 'Can we please just face up to how badly we've failed, and admit where we really are now' might sound to some like 'giving up'. It is the very opposite of giving up. For the energy which will become available once we stop rather desperately staving off grief, depression, despair at the state of our world and the extent of our common failure, the energy that then becomes available to us is incalculably huge. . . . emotional power that is latent within us all, but held back by a dam of fake optimism. . . . We have to acknowledge what must be let go of, such as hopes for a smooth transition and of staying within the climatic safe zone. It all begins with admitting our incapacity. . . . For what you are then picturing is the game being changed. Soft denial being punctured. The media and political leaders unable to hold back the tide. . . . Havel wrote brilliantly about the power that anyone can touch and become by naming the truth, and confessing their own incapacity to act directly on it so as to change it sufficiently. This power of the powerless strips legitimacy away from failed ideologies, false dreams." 

There's a small but real danger that some people will let the grief in and then be paralyzed by it. Some psychologists over the last century have referred to depression as being stuck in grief. And this isn't just grief over a loved one, but grief over all the potential for loved ones, the secure and comfortable futures of children and grandchildren, and all the many, many amazing plants and animals in collapsing ecosystems. 

But if we can get to the other side of that, to an authentic place that is able to acknowledge the impermanence of it all anyway, then our task isn't to hope to save any species, but just to do our very best each day to care, to offer help, to teach, and to love while doing as little harm as possible in the very short time we have here without any expectation of success or completion. 

From the Tao Te Ching (ch.29 - Stephen Mitchell trans.):

Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it....
The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

And from Pirke Avot:

"You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." 

It's the same message from Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gospels and the Stoics and Epicureans and Plato: Act rightly today without clinging to the fruits of your labour. I think we need to hear it over and over again because it's so hard to learn!