Anna-Zoë Herr, PhD Candidate at the University of Heidelberg, joined us to talk about "Finding Hope and Wonder in a Burning World" — how the way we talk about climate change can quietly drain hope, and what research into survival, awe and wonder can teach us about finding it again.

Anna-Zoë Herr: I just feel so honoured that I can be part of your meeting today, and that you can see the inside scoop of the activists meeting online in Tasmania — right before I'm leaving Tasmania, so I feel really grateful this is one of the last things happening here. The title for today is "Finding Hope and Wonder in a Burning World."

I'm a PhD researcher and I have researched hope and communication around climate change since 2015. I have previously also worked in public engagement and science communication at the Natural History Museum and the NGO Talking Hope, in Berlin. I'm also a freelance artist, and I love to bake and to run. I've been on a long journey trying to figure out a balance between research and art, which I used to think of as a curse, and I'm slowly realising just how much they can give to each other.

Just before I dive in — I'm not able to see you or the chat, so if someone has a question or wants to chime in, unmute yourself or just speak into the room. This isn't super interactive, so it's basically just me going at it — if that's okay.

All right, let's get started. I often collect poetry that connects to the theme of hope, and I thought I'd kick us off with one of my favourites, which I've shortened a little. It's called "A Brief for the Defense," by Jack Gilbert:

I know there are some religious words in there, but what I'd love for you to take away is a rebellious sense of hope: we have this stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. And it is a ruthless furnace. I've been following COP30, as I'm sure most of you have, and it isn't a hopeful picture as the politics unfold. Thinking about this ruthless furnace we're in, it's absolutely clear we will lose how the world is today — species, landmass, flora and fauna, homes, people, languages will shift dramatically, and there will be chaos. Even if CO2 emissions stopped completely today, we'd still see a ripple effect on how dramatic those changes are, depending on many interlaced factors.

So I want to start by saying that even though I'm a hope researcher, that doesn't detract from having wide, open eyes to the facts of reality. But even in the ruthless furnace of the world — what does it mean to have a stubborn gladness?

Ecological hope

I want to introduce a concept that came out of my master's thesis a few years ago, which I call ecological hope. I gathered it from a number of different writers. It basically says that hope emerges out of crisis — that when there's a crisis, there's a pivot, a potential turning point, and the hope comes from really facing that specific crisis and jumping into something new.

One thread is that hope springs forth after illusion dies, through rupture — the illusion that capitalism works, or the illusion of how we've been running the world — and that hope is what springs forth within a new vision. What fits this nicely is looking at the original meanings of words like "apocalypse," which we understand today as cataclysm or destruction, but which originally also meant revelation and new knowledge. The same is true of "crisis," which we associate only with intense difficulty and upheaval, but which in the original Greek also meant judgment, decision and turning point. That really aligns with how ecological hope has emerged from my research.

How I became interested in hope

It started with an introductory sustainability class I took in college — one of the best classes I ever took. Our teacher introduced us to what climate change was about, and in almost the last class we learned about people making a difference in the world: building our own yards, going dumpster diving together, meeting people who'd rolled their own solar panels, people working in architecture, people certified in food security in different places. It was an incredible class — it taught me that sustainability is an alternative vision for the future of what could be. I got so excited that I did a road trip through the US visiting different projects, and started as a climate activist in my local chapter.

That's where things went a little downhill for me, because I found that in the climate movement, at least where I was, there wasn't really a vision for the future so much as a fear of the present and how things were going. I started to lose my own sense of hope. I realised that the climate movement, as opposed to the sustainability movement, holds more fear of the future and less of an alternative vision to hold onto — and I found a lot of hopelessness in that. So I got interested in what made those two movements different, and why there's this polarisation between fear and hope in how we communicate about climate change.

Three rhetorics that maintain hopelessness

I'd like to ask you to follow me into the narrative jungle of climate change communication (I made that image with AI, for what it's worth). From my master's research, looking at climate change literature, I found three rhetorics that keep us in a place of hopelessness rather than a hopeful vision of the future.

Reductionism. There's a "war and urgency" rhetoric — Charles Eisenstein writes about invoking an existential crisis, following the rhetorical template of war, with an us-versus-them template: well-adapted communities versus climate refugees, environmentalists versus the establishment, non-humans versus humans, present communities versus the future. There's also the idea that no effort is worthy unless it reduces CO2 — which has fed into funding decisions for ecological projects — and this is a recipe to decrease hope, because it implies that unless climate change is halted, nothing else matters. But not everyone can relate to CO2 specifically; we need all kinds of effort. There's also the unimaginable power of numbers we can't personally experience — we can't physically understand what 1.5 degrees of warming means, so we rely on outside institutions to tell us, and we're given a cutoff point after which hope is treated as worthless.

The "we" rhetoric — "we need to wake up, we need to change, we need to start acting" — is so widespread we forget how much despair it can seed, because the premise is misleading. It assumes the public is asleep rather than constrained, when actually the majority of people know about climate change and want to do something — there's a concept called "cultural creatives," of over 50 million people trying to live ethical, good lives aligned with a better future. The "we" rhetoric also hides that information and pathways to solutions aren't accessible to everyone, and it hides inequality in decision-making and power — pretending we all have equal power, when it's actually much easier to join a movement already moving in the right direction than to feel like the sole leader who has to wake everyone else up. It's a rhetoric that quietly maintains the status quo.

The "wake up" rhetoric works in three steps. First, shock and fear — hammering down the effects. We measure the moral worth of an act by its future consequence (think of someone saying "why would I bother recycling, what's it going to do anyway?"), as if the worth of recycling depends on its future impact rather than just being the right way to do things. This consequentialism works while people still feel they can make a change, but as soon as they feel too paralysed by fear, it loses its power — because then we stop doing the things that are the right things to do. Second is displacement of the catastrophic experience into the future: "X will happen unless we act now" — the most common effective juxtaposition, where an inevitable catastrophe is followed by a final strike of optimistic promise ("the future is alterable"), which keeps a sense of hopelessness and complexity going.

Hopelessness

The traditional design behind climate rhetoric was: if people feel hopeless enough, they'll wake up and rise and transform things. But hopelessness actually entrenches the status quo and powerlessness. Carol Farran, a leading hope researcher in clinical studies, defines hopelessness as a feeling of discouragement, despair, a de-energising — hopeless people feel entrapped by their situation, their soul withers, their thinking is impaired, they have difficulty making concrete plans or finding alternative solutions, and they don't expect anyone, including themselves, to find a way through. In a way, hopelessness is a convenient feeling for the public to have, if the goal is for them not to rise up. This aligns with a study on powerlessness showing that the more powerless people feel, the more likely they are to vote for parties that maintain the very status quo in which they feel powerless — "the powerless serve as an accomplice after the fact in their own subjugation." So it's a lot to ask people to simply switch into hope.

The real question for me became: how do we find the power of hope without asking for hope in a hopeless world? It's not a solution to ask people who already feel pushed into a corner to just become hopeful warriors. So I looked at the most extreme cases of powerlessness for guidance — survival. Lawrence Gonzalez, a survivability author, found that awe and humility are alternative responses to powerlessness, and that they show up again and again in people who survive shipwrecks, plane crashes and other catastrophes.

My PhD research

My PhD is on ecological hope as a concept — specifically, what role hope plays in the practice of scientific research on socio-ecological crisis, situated in the anthropology of science and environmental humanities. Here in Hobart I've been speaking with polar researchers about how they navigate, sideline, use and find hope in their research and communication, and from that I've been extrapolating a new hope framework.

The basis of this comes from two researchers: Ernst Bloch, a German philosopher, and Hirokazu Miyazaki, a Japanese anthropologist — both seminal hope researchers. Bloch speaks of hope as work and effort: "the work of this emotion, hope, requires people to throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong," and "danger and faith are the truth of hope, in such a way that both are to have their day." Two things stand out to me: hope is effort — it's struggle, it's handling insecurity and even hopelessness, because hopelessness doesn't require much of us (it always has an answer for everything), while hope requires work because there's uncertainty to face. And hope has and belongs to a vision — it takes imagination and the capacity to face reality in order to build a vision from there. And hope's times are the best times for hope: there's the greatest capacity for hope to unfold exactly in the moments we feel we need it most. Miyazaki, meanwhile, speaks of hope as a method — an operative in all knowledge formation, not just scientific knowledge, but in all the ways we create new knowledge in our lives.

Going back to survival: does hope matter at all, and if it matters there, does it matter to us on a larger scale? There's a famous — and, fair warning, a little gruesome — experiment by Curt Richter in the 1950s: he put rats in a bucket of water and timed how long it took them to drown (about six or seven minutes), then repeated it but fished the rats out right before they drowned, let them recover, and put them back in — after which the rats swam for up to seven days. Richter's conclusion was that after the elimination of hopelessness, the rats didn't die — as if hope releases an almost infinite supply of energy.

On the human side, Carol Farran and colleagues worked over a long period with terminally ill patients, looking at the effects of hope and hopelessness. She writes that when people who are ill or injured feel hope, their recovery proceeds more smoothly — hope "reconstitutes the will to struggle and survive." So hope seems to matter — and there are real, researched distinctions between wishing, optimism and hope, which is a topic in itself.

I looked at individual survival case studies with the help of Gonzalez's work: Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, stuck in the ice; Yossi Ghinsberg, lost alone in the jungle for twelve days; Debra Kidwell (shipwreck survivor); Joe Simpson, who survived a climbing accident; Lauren Elder, who survived a plane crash in the Andes; Steven Callahan, who survived a shipwreck after a whale hit his boat, as did the Robertson family; the Ernest Shackleton and Apsley Cherry-Garrard Antarctic expeditions, which many of you will know since we're in Tasmania; and Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz and wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" about that experience. Drawing on Gonzalez's survivor characteristics — openness, gratitude, humility, wonder, courage — alongside my own case studies, I developed an ecological hope framework, drawn as a flower, with hope at the centre and bidirectional markers around it: effort, meaning, awe and wonder and beauty, engagement with goals and imagination, a sense of the future, and the ability to perform hope in daily life. You can reach hope through any of these petals, from the outside in or the inside out. This is my PhD hypothesis — take it or leave it — but so far it aligns with what I'm finding. One thing I'll add: about 90% of the people I've interviewed for this research found a renewed sense of hope and meaning in their work simply by talking to me about it. There's something in survival, and in meaning, that's renewed simply by talking to each other about it. I know we're running a little over time, and I have one more section to go.

Sharee: How long is the other section? Because this is fantastic.

Anna-Zoë Herr: Okay, my last section is on awe, wonder and beauty — let me just give you a definition and then jump to the takeaways at the end.

Awe, wonder and beauty

Dacher Keltner, the best-known awe researcher, defines awe as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world, and says it leads to wonder — a mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity and embracing mystery. Wonder is what drives us to create new solutions, and it arises out of awe. Keltner's research identifies eight everyday "wonders of life" where we can find awe — it's something we can find in everyday life, and heighten in how we communicate, producing wonder in ourselves and the people around us, which leads to greater creativity and a greater capacity to deal with difficulty.

Key takeaways

1. Hopelessness is not the best option — hope does mean effort, but effort implies power, which is the main thing we need.

2. Our view of, and response to, climate change is shaped by rhetoric that over-emphasises powerlessness — by design, not because it has to be that way.

3. Awe, wonder, humility and hope are alternative responses to powerlessness, essential to survival, and something we can cultivate in our own lives and communication.

4. Speaking about ways to maintain hope, finding meaning, and sharing beauty with each other has been shown to be effective.

5. Survival without hope is not possible.

6. If you cannot find hope, seek meaning first — that seems to be the easiest doorway into finding a renewed sense of hope.