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Writer's pictureJeh Bruce

A Time of Hope...and Despair

Updated: Jul 29, 2021


George Fredrick Watts, "Hope", 1886


To me, this painting, by the symbolist British painter, George Fredrick Watts (1817-1904), perfectly sums up the world right now. The nonstop tsunami of news about massive wildfires, floods and droughts of epic proportions, civil unrest everywhere one looks, and a rapidly spreading variant of Covid with its associated "epidemic of the unvaccinated" have collectively laid siege to all we hold dear. Like many, I fear social norms most of us believed were universal and immutable are now in hyper-flux, and if that weren't enough, the growing realization that we are no longer approaching the tipping point of climate change, but are in fact beyond it and now on the downward slide into what generations of human avarice has wrought, taking the rest of the planet and its hapless inhabitants with us.


In most allegorical paintings of Watts' time, Hope is identified by an anchor, but Watts took a different approach. He painted a blind Hope seated on a globe, one leg hooked around the other, playing a lyre which all but one of its strings is broken and above her right shoulder, a faint star shines (you have to squint to see it). She leans close, listening as her fingers pluck the remaining string, her expression one of a deep and abiding sadness. The overall impression is of desolation, of melancholy, rather than hope. The perfect allegory for our time as well, with a world swaddled in toxic air and all of us hanging by a string.

The northern California "Dixie" fire, July, 2021 (photo uncredited except by Cal Fire)


One of my novels, Borrowing Trouble, set a few decades in the future, has, as its backdrop, a world where climate change is no longer an abstract climate change deniers can, well, deny. Major low-lying cities have been flooded and abandoned, and climate refuges are no longer someone else's problem. Humanity has managed to colonize Mars as well as some of the rocky moons of our solar system, along with constructing massive orbital habitats, but we've also brought with us all of our societal plagues, as one would expect from a species, who, like some rebellious adolescent told to clean up his room, always finds a way to shirk his responsibilities, just as we, as a species, have been able to shirk our responsibilities for the damage we've caused by moving elsewhere. Having run out of places to despoil on Earth, and rather than learn from our mistakes so we don't repeat them while making some effort at restitution, we've turned our avarice outwards and with the same sadly expected results.


I readily admit, it can be overwhelming, easy to give up, to see no hope. But small actions can bring change. What's that old saying, "Many hands make light work"? There will always be the utterly selfish, and those among us so fearful of change they'd rather destroy what they claim they love above all else, just so they might deny it to those they consider "the other". There will always be those who think their rights, their needs come ahead of the orangutan or the cheetah or the polar bear, that their deity gave them this planet and they can do whatever they wish with it, but to me there does seem to be a perceptible, or, more honestly, an imperceptible tilt towards a more inclusive, less self-centered attitude. It's tiny, barely a speck, like Watts' star in the above painting, but it's there. We can all do our part; we must do our part, from driving less, to turning off outdoor lights at night to give the nocturnal world its due and give the Milky Way a chance to shine again in our city skies, to picking up trash on a local beach or along a path through a local park, to making whatever outdoor space you have, be it a large allotment or a tiny balcony, a haven for wildlife...to wearing masks (just make sure you cut the ear loops before properly disposing of your masks--otherwise they can entangle wildlife).


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