Is Hope Necessary? Thinking about Language, Justice, and Melting Glaciers in a Time of Fear and Foreboding - Paperback

by Osha Neumann (Author)

Is Hope Necessary? is an extended inquiry into the causes of our present discontents. It addresses a number of enormously difficult, possibly unanswerable questions:

• How did it come to this-that we seem bent on self-destruction and on taking the biological basis of life on the planet with us?
• How deep are the roots of our multiple crises? What is it about our species that gives us the capacity to be so destructive?
• What is the connection between the inhumanity we display to each other and the injury we inflict on the planet?

These questions are urgent because they bear on the most important question of all:

What is to be done-and the corollary-what is to be undone? How much needs to change in order to avoid catastrophe?

It is easy to despair and many do. Can we continue to struggle and resist even in the absence of hope. Is Hope Necessary? begins and ends with that question, Neumann believes we can and we must for only if we resist and continue to struggle do we have a chance of salvaging, for as long as possible, as much as we can, of all that is threatened and all that we cherish.