Hazardous Hope
Hazardous hope is not wasted hope. What does that mean, hazardous hope, you might wonder. And does it even make sense? We do wonder the same, seriously. In our daily research and fieldwork, we are confronted with social and environmental contexts that are heavily burdened with hazardous waste. The not very surprising results are stories of decline and destruction. As a scholar in the Environmental Humanities, it is hard to not fall in the trap of declensionism, so we started to follow others that are searching for glimpses of light on the horizon, instead of narratives of doom. And we found that even in the most toxic surroundings, there is hope. Sometimes it is slow and fragile, but essential nevertheless.
The five blog posts in "Trash Talks: Hazardous Hopes" comprise the second instalment in an ongoing series from the research group "Hazardous Travels: Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy". This blog series was first published on Seeing the Woods, a blog by the Rachel Carson Center. In our blog posts, we explore a few of the many ways that hope can enter into our stories about hazardous realities. Considering hopeful aspects in our narratives renders them more complex and might stimulate more action. So keep on reading if you want to know why hazardous hope helps us to keep our sanity!
