“Can we be hopeful about our future?”
Imagine being 9 years old and asking, even just thinking, that question. As a father of an 18-month-old toddler, it shook me. I paused, feeling the full weight of what an honest response might require.
Am I hopeful? I think we have to be. Am I optimistic? It depends.
As I write this, my shirt is stuck to my skin and my hair is damp with sweat. Europe is enduring its second heat wave of the season. It’s June. Last month was the hottest May on record globally. Here in the Basque Country, a place not exactly known for scorching summers, we’re on red alert. While schools have already closed for the summer, daycares have partially closed as a result. Parents are improvising.
The North Atlantic is warm. Every local who pays attention to the sea — fishermen, surfers, divers — says the same thing: they’ve never known it like this, not in June. In my 7pm, post-work swims I’ve been using a bathing suit and find myself genuinely relieved when I drift into a patch of cooler water. This time last year I was surfing in a wetsuit.
The air is hot and dry. Our flowers and most of our vegetables have withered despite sitting under umbrellas and makeshift shade. The grass in the park next to us is going brown.
Across the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel, London is sweating through its own version of this. Public transport is disrupted and services are under strain. The bleak irony of London Climate Action Week unfolding in precisely this moment is not lost on anyone, but will the discomfort translate into decisiveness? Will the people with power look out their windows and finally feel the urgency the rest of us have been living with for years?
What frightens me most is the timing of all this, in June. We are only just beginning to feel the effects of what forecasters are predicting will be a significant El Niño cycle. The worst, in other words, may not have arrived yet.
And this unfolds against a backdrop of a global food system already under extraordinary stress. The consequences of the conflict involving the US and Israel with Iran and subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which a substantial share of the world’s fertilizer flows, are not abstract. They move through supply chains, into soil, and onto plates, ultimately deciding who can afford to eat and who can’t.
And yes, we’ve had heatwaves and El Niños before. I’ve heard that one plenty of times. It’s the comfort blanket of people who need this not to be as serious as it is.
The difference is that those heatwaves didn’t land on a planet already running a fever. Every natural weather event now plays out against a warmer, more volatile baseline — one we created, and one that doesn’t reset between cycles.
Another thing that gets to me is the unevenness of it all. We’ll be disappointed when our zucchini plant gives up. We’ll feel a small sadness at the vanishing promise of a home-grown harvest. And then we’ll walk to the fridge and pull out a supermarket one instead, and life will continue largely uninterrupted (for now, at least.)
Subsistence farmers across the global south are not afforded that luxury. For them, a failed crop is not a dinner-table anecdote. It’s a crisis. The people who have contributed least to warming a planet are absorbing the sharpest edges of what warming brings, and there is no moral universe in which that is acceptable.
We are already seeing the social fractures that scarcity produces. The recent xenophobic unrest in South Africa is partly a story about resources: about who has access and who doesn’t, about communities pushed to breaking point, about the oldest and ugliest of human impulses emerging when people feel that the margins are closing in. The same can be said for the rise in anti-immigration rhetoric in the US and Europe.
Are we ever going to stop putting billionaires on a pedestal — a pedestal that now, for the first time in human history, has a trillionaire standing on top of it? Will we ever look honestly at the flawed logic of infinite growth on a finite planet and admit that the math simply doesn’t work?
Will we ever actually get our arses into gear?
I know there are people who would answer no, who have decided that collapse is inevitable and are, in some cases, actively positioning to profit from it. Who have concluded that the house is already on fire and the only sensible move is to grab what you can.
But I also know that they are vastly outnumbered. The overwhelming majority of people on this planet want a liveable future. They want it for their children, for themselves, for strangers they will never meet. And there are brilliant, tireless, often underfunded people working on solutions that deserve far more attention than they receive. The innovators, the farmers, the activists, the scientists, the teachers. The quiet majority who are not betting on collapse but building against it.
So, am I optimistic? It depends on the day, the heat, the news.
Am I hopeful? I think we have to be, because the alternative — nihilism, paralysis, the seductive numbness of deciding nothing matters — serves no one. It certainly doesn’t serve that nine-year-old who asked me the question.
The Trumps of this world will keep doing what they do, sneering at what they’ve decided to call the “empathy trap”, as though caring about the future of human life on Earth is a weakness to be mocked.
But they are not the whole story. They are not even the majority of it. The rest of us, the overwhelming, uncelebrated, quietly-determined rest of us, must choose to do things differently, and we must demand that our governments do the same.
Having conversations about climate change, our habits, about the choices we make and the ones we avoid can be tough. We’re a stubborn, set-in-our way bunch. We like our routines, our traditions, our quiet permission to keep doing what we’ve always done.
But the world those habits were built for no longer exists. And pretending otherwise isn’t comfort, it’s a debt we’re running up in someone else’s name.
We owe our children honesty more than we owe them reassurance. We owe them a fair account of what’s happening, and the sight of us doing something about it. Not perfection, or certainty. Just the example of people who looked at a hard truth and didn’t look away.
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