Make room for optimism

I’ve been thinking a lot about good news lately: what good news means in a time of scarcity and how important it is for humans to have some of it. But also whether good news can be trusted and when the obsession with finding some reason—any reason—for optimism becomes delusion.

Good news on any topic is so hard to find these days, it seems there’s almost an instinctive mistrust of it in some circles—a defensive assumption that optimistic tidings are either fabricated outright or, if factually accurate, offered as a way of distracting people from their righteous anger at the broader picture.

Remarkably, though, this week opened with good news for some of the groups most used to disappointment. Sunday evening, the energy companies backing the controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline announced they were canceling the project entirely. Monday morning, that news was followed by a court order for the even more infamous Dakota Access Pipeline to be shut down immediately, pending further environmental review. Both pipelines have been vociferously opposed by Indigenous and other minority groups in their paths, in addition to climate campaigners appalled at the prospect of locking in decades of further fossil fuel use.

Back in October, The New Republic’s Nick Martin declared, “The Next Standing Rock Is Everywhere”:
As the world’s carbon emissions approach the no-return threshold, as more black and Indigenous and poor communities are pushed into environmental catastrophe, that web is still expanding. There won’t be just one battle in which marginalized communities attempt to defend themselves against capitalists extracting the last bit of value from the fossil fuel economy. There will be many. And they’ve already started.

The ACP, like many pipelines, promised communities in its path much-needed jobs. As Nick explained, these projected job numbers usually only apply to the construction phase and fall drastically once the project is completed. They hardly make up for the constant spill risks and other environmental justice issues raised by pipelines, which are disproportionately threaded through land occupied by marginalized communities. The ACP also rushed through a required stage of tribal consultation.

Over the past year, TNR has repeatedly covered the particular insanity of the ACP, which was being constructed to carry natural gas, despite the poor health of the natural gas market at this point. So we published not one but two pieces on its cancellation Monday: one from Nick, looking at the importance of local activism, and one from Kate Aronoff, looking at the way protest movements can intersect with or even serve as market signals. With good news so hard to come by, you could do worse than to read both.

It’s worth considering this good news in the context of the continuing barrage of bad: Neither the ACP cancellation nor the (for now, temporary) DAPL shutdown is going to halt climate change. (The latest sign of the apocalypse: pink Alpine snow.) But as climate essayists have started to note in the past few years, defeatism in the face of global warming can be as bad as denialism. And this week’s good news, as both Kate and Nick argue, carries a particular message: Activism works. “For keeping fossil fuels in the ground and preventing new infrastructure,” Kate writes, “the simpler solution may just be to give ’em hell.”

Don’t be deluded by good news. Use it.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor