Laura Dawn: Hi, Chris. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me on Dear Humanity podcast. It’s good to see you.

Chris Johnstone: Thank you, Laura. I’m delighted to be here.

Laura Dawn: You co authored a book alongside Joanna Macy titled Active Hope, How to Face the Mess We’re In with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power. And in the book you write, Active hope is not the same as feeling hopeful.

And so I want to lead into this question. Why do we need a new way of thinking about hope and how do you define active hope? And I think to get there, it might be helpful to lay the foundation of the conversation by sharing these three stories that you share in your book, Active Hope, to help just prepare everyone for.

What act of hope really is

Chris Johnstone: sure. So, uh, you can look at what’s going on in the world. Through different lenses in different ways, and one way of looking at what’s going on in the world is that things just carry on the same old way. Nothing really much changes. We have our way, we usually do business, and the story of business as usual is really just that, that we can carry on doing our business the way we usually do, but.

Link to the way the dominant ways of living in industrialized countries. We are in a state of overshoot. We’re pushing the planet further than it can sustain. And in all kinds of ways, we’re already seeing evidence of collapse, whether it’s collapse of our weather systems, collapse of ecosystems, collapse of trust politically.

There’s all kinds of ways that there’s a falling apart happening in a way that A lot of people, there was a big research study of young people, over 10, 000 young people were asked whether they how they felt about the future. Very high levels of fear about the future. And more than half agreed with the statement, humanity is doomed.

And that sense that our world is falling apart around us is so widespread. And that’s another story. It’s a story we can call the great unravelling, the great Great unraveling. It’s not just one little bit falling apart here or there, but there’s a larger pattern of different systems in states of collapse or approaching collapse in a way that are having rebound impacts on, on each other.

And a lot of people, they look at the future and just have this massive heart sink and just a sense of like, where are we going? And a third story, a way of looking at reality, I guess, is, is the. The idea of we are living at a time of massive and inspiring turning point. And just as in an adventure story, you can have a very gloomy beginning, but turning points happen throughout the story.

We could be living in one of those times now. And,  , we think of that as the great turning, and it’s not just A change in our approach to transport or approach to education or healthcare, that there’s a larger pattern of transformation in all these areas that follow the same kind of direction, which is really about how we live in a way that supports the flourishing of life, the flourishing of life in ourselves, in each other and in our world.

And we think of that as the great turning. And I think of it as an amazing, inspiring story. But when I talk to people about this idea of the Great Turning, a common response I get is, well, that’s a lovely story, but I can’t see it happening. And this is where we need active hope, because what I often reply with is the question, well, do you hope it will?

Do you hope that we could have this kind of massive turning and transformation? And if the answer is yes, then how can you be active in making that more likely? How can you play a role in this larger story? And Joanna Macy and I, when we first wrote Active Hope, it came out in 2012. And when it came out then, we had more of a sense of, , optimistic possibility, that the sense of approaching collapse, that if we acted in time, we could really prevent some of the worst things happening.

And just what’s happened in the last 10 years is, is really, gone further in more disturbing ways than we really could have expected. This sense of every year becoming warmer, records being broken, but also the impact of that in terms of wildfires and droughts and crop failures and the impact that that’s having on displacing people leading to a mass migration process, the tensions that that can lead to, the increased threats of war.

So this idea of the great turning. Some people think, well that’s just not going to happen. Active hope is saying, well, starting where we are, asking the question, what do you hope will happen? And then how can you be active in making that more likely? That’s what we mean by active hope. It’s different from, are you hopeful?

Are you hopeful is do you think that the things you hope for will happen? That sense of positive expectancy, but If you don’t have that, if you don’t have a sense of hopefulness, it can become a real blocker to action unless you find another approach. And this is what we mean by active hope and the story of the great turning.

The central part is turning up, turning up with an intention to play our part. And in that turning up, there’ll be things we turn away from and things we turn towards.

Laura Dawn: It sounds to me like there’s also a strong role of imagination in this process because we have to wake up an inner vision. You talk about that within a larger frame of how we take steps towards engaging in active hope.

Chris Johnstone: Well, what you’re pointing to is so helpful, Laura, because often people want to be fact based. Fact based, reality based. But the thing is, if you’re only fact based, you’re looking at things that have already happened. And there’s a lot of interest in history, and there’s so much we can learn from history.

But if you look at the amount of attention that’s given to looking backwards in time, as opposed to looking forwards in time, there’s a massive imbalance. Just think of what we teach children in schools. There’s a lot about teaching about history, but very little of future studies. How do we teach people to look forward in time?

And the thing is, when you look forward in time, you don’t know what’s going to happen. And so you have to rely on, well, several things. One is Information about already established trends. What’s reasonably foreseeable based on what we know right now. But also, because there’s so much uncertainty, you need imagination.

You need imagination to ask the question, what’s the best that can happen here? And that’s A lot of my work is around teaching resilience and I’m very influenced by a resilience training program developed at the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn Resilience Program, and they have this three question reality check or perspective check where they say, what’s the best that can happen?

What’s the worst that can happen? What’s most likely to happen? Wherever you are, whatever you face, and when I teach resilience, we do it with a hand gesture, like just like this hold out your hand and each digit represents different ways things can go. The palm is like us here now, there’s better ways it can go, worse ways it can go, and what’s most likely.

But also to know that this is something we can influence. That we cast votes of influence that can steer our lives and the larger systems that we’re part of, in particular directions. And if we don’t look where we’re going in time, then we end up where we’re headed, which is over the edge of a cliff. And so we need to look ahead in time at what’s reasonably foreseeable based on current well established trends.

And it’s very disturbing. And so we need to have a sense of imagination of, well, first of all, what’s the best that can happen here? What do we deeply hope for? But then also how can we come in behind that? How can we really give our support to our hopes? And there’s imagination, not just in what we’d like to happen, but also what are the pathways that help us get there?

Laura Dawn: I love how this whole conversation is really framed within the work that reconnects and viewing that work as so foundational because I think as you both talk about in the book, there’s such a knee jerk reaction to turn away from pain and you’re mentioning resilience. in As well, and I feel like and and this is part of the work that reconnects is how do we open towards the reality that we’re facing?

To me, that also speaks to a level of emotional mastery that we weren’t taught in school and emotional resilience. How do we sit in the middle of discomfort in the face of so many crises and catastrophes and increasing stress? climate change \ So I’m curious if you can speak to that as maybe the starting point here of how do we cultivate emotional?

resiliency to be able to face face the pain of what’s happening without shutting down, numbing out, turning away from, but really holding our center, staying open and curious to what’s happening. And I’m curious what you’ve learned through the years of supporting so many people in this journey in terms of how that faci