Global Wandering

The environmentalist Derrick Jenson wrote an essay in the May/June 2006 issue of Orion magazine entitled Beyond Hope.

He described hope as “a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency….it means you are essentially powerless.”

“When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We do whatever it takes. When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free–truly free–to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say when hope dies, action begins.”

His definition implies hope is just a longing and not a particularly useful quality.

Contrast this negative view of hope with a more positive definition put forth by Harry Hutson and Barbara Perry in their book Putting Hope to Work. They state, “Hope is an orientation to a positive future that engages our heads, hearts and hands.” In the February 2007 Harvard Business Review, they describe five elements that must be present for hope to exist:

1. Possibility
2. Agency
3. Worth
4. Openness
5. Connection

Jenson believes hope is bereft of agency while Hutson and Perry believe hope cannot exist without agency.

I favor the latter definition. True hopelessness is not having choices.