Is It Over? A Direct Answer to Climate Despair

Is it already too late? If you follow the climate crisis closely, despair is a reasonable and rational response to what you're looking at.

This week, we’re being led by you. We gathered the messages you've been sending and let them set the agenda. They're heavy ones, and we wanted to stay with them rather than rush past. Is there still hope, or is it over? If this civilisation ends, won't nature simply restore itself without us? How do you keep going when the grief feels total?

None of them have easy answers, and we don't pretend otherwise. Along the way, one listener pushes back on the phrase "pre-traumatic stress" and offers a truer one: earth grief, the other side of the coin from love. Another thread reaches for deep time - William MacAskill's claim that we are barely 2% of the way into humanity's story. How does that perspective change what matters now?

So - what can we actually do? From the language we use, to how we give our time and resources, to the places where each of us touches power. Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson challenge each other and us to find actions that make our shared climate grief easier to carry.

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👀 Still looking for new terminology? Producer Ben suggests 'climate disruption', which captures the shift from the stable Holocene to a more uncertain world. 'Climate sabotage' can also be useful, if we want to shift focus to the perpetrators.

📘 Read What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill - the case for deep time and long-term thinking Tom draws on

📗 Revisit The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac - including the idea of the places where you "touch power"

🔗 Follow Stephanie Klotz on LinkedIn, whose letter reframed "pre-traumatic stress" as earth grief

🌊 Listen back to our AMOC episode

💷 Listen back to our philanthropy episode, the starting point for the question on giving small amounts

🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe (https://www.speakpipe.com/OutrageandOptimism)

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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

Edited by: Miles Martignoni

Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan

Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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