Why we should hold on to hope in these difficult times

Tomorrow is my daughter’s fourth birthday, and as I write this, the temperature is projected to be 107 degrees here in Portland, Oregon. Our kids wanted to cool off in the river, but the extreme heat has caused toxic algal blooms. The scale of our climate emergency often keeps me awake at 4:00 a.m., when I struggle to steer my imagination clear of powerful headwinds pushing it toward the worst-case scenarios. We have been living in emergency lighting for so long that I think even our inner eyes have adjusted, and it can seem “only reasonable” to expect (and accept) that the climate scientists’ most dire predictions will soon become fact. 

Perhaps you find yourself in a similar state, with an imagination that can produce a bumper crop of smouldering dystopias but that struggles to generate pictures of a healing world. It’s frighteningly easy to extrapolate from “business as usual” to cemetery skies and seas, societal and ecological collapse. Dystopias flood our screens and our bookshelves. (I have written some of them). “We need better realtors for the future,” I joked with my husband recently. “The one we want to live in.” 

On these hot nights, I think many of us have suffered a desertification of the imagination. Our minds mirror the heat flattened horizon, the eroded soils. People are thirsty for visions of alternative ways of feeding ourselves, transporting ourselves, living well together, caring for one another and our shared home. But who can imagine an unknown future alone? 

In April, I visited Mimi Casteel at Hope Well Vineyard in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Casteel is a forest biologist turned soil seer and winemaker, who teaches what’s possible with no till regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture has a millennial history on our continent: It was practiced with great success by Indigenous peoples long before the arrival of European colonisers, and continues to be today. Casteel stresses that ecological justice is inseparable from social justice. She wants agriculture to move away from colonial capitalist expansion—“occupying a spot, running it dry, moving on”. The answers to our urgent collective problems can be found in the deepest strata of the past.

First, we must understand this: Soil is alive. A single teaspoon contains more microorganisms than there are humans on earth. Scores of nematodes, yards of fungal filaments, one billion bacteria. A recent study found that soil is home to more than half of the earth’s biodiversity. 

It’s also finite. When we lose topsoil to erosion, we can’t get it back.

Food systems account for roughly a third of planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions, a 2021 report said, with much of that coming from industrial agriculture. Forty percent of the earth’s land is degraded; there are places in the U. S. corn belt where less than a centimetre of topsoil remains. But regenerative agriculture is one of the greatest tools we have in addressing our climate emergency. 

Casteel turned over a shovelful of rich, dark soil so that I could feel and smell its fertility. That earth perfume had a shocking depth: the opposite of tombstone, a pleasant hops-and-underarms reek, like a party at full crescendo. Casteel explained that I was smelling “life happening”. On the eleven acres that she and her colleagues steward, the temperature felt notably cooler than half a mile down the road. Casteel credits the healthy soil, which sequesters carbon from the atmosphere and holds gallons of water. Healing degraded soil is the work of generations, but these positive impacts can be felt within half a decade. 

Looking at stomata through Casteel’s pocket scope, we watched an earth worm breach the black soil and disappear. Nothing living would be here, I realised—not the worms, not the grapevines, certainly not us—were it not for the topsoil. 

Changing farming practices is not enough, Casteel tells me. We need to change the way we see the world and our place in it.

“Once you have felt what it means to see and create abundance,” Casteel says, “the scarcity mentality that drives so much of our society and economy right now has no purchase anymore.” 

Casteel’s work fills me with hope that healthy soil can create local cooling effects that bring the temperature down dramatically, remove carbon from the atmosphere, feed more people with nutrient-rich food grown on fewer acres—and give us an enriched base from which to imagine. 

The “desertification of the imagination,” like the degradation of our soils, is reversible. We can offer our kids different stories about what living is for—a vaster conception of “success” than what money can tally. There are better yardsticks: the health of our air and our water, the number of people in our communities who have housing, education, health care, spacious time with their loved ones. Organic matter in our soils and the ubiquity of birdsong. We can rebuild, along with the literal soils, the anchoring root systems that shelter value, helping each other to resist the powerful economic incentives for exploiting the natural world and its most vulnerable people. 

Memory feeds the imagination, and many of us are severely malnourished when it comes to personal experiences of reciprocity and community—ways of relating to nature that are not recreation or plunder. “We could dedicate ourselves to rebuilding the substrate that makes everything else possible,” says Casteel. “We could teach our children that photosynthesis is a sacred process that we need to support and protect.” 

These days, with effort, I’m trying to tune my imagination in a new direction, to envision how we might arrive at these best-case scenarios. I believe that artists and storytellers have an important role to play in this transformation. Rebuilding biodiverse soils is one of our greatest tools in addressing our climate crisis; so is inputting new life into our imaginations. We cannot succeed if we cannot imagine (and articulate) vivid alternatives to apocalypse. 

Warnings are crucial, but so are visions of what could happen if, as Casteel says, “we got it right, right now.” We could have tangible goals on a ten-year scale—“watersheds with 80 per cent food autonomy in the next decade, soils that have grown organic matter by 10 per cent.” 

Widening her lens, Casteel imagines communally held and farmed lands in the centers of cities, quality jobs for ecohydrologists rebuilding watersheds. We get to the dystopias when we extrapolate from the ways we live today, but as Casteel tells me, “A model is only as good as the values you give it and the assumptions it’s built on.” What if we were to imagine from a different foundation? 

“We can manifest huge amounts of energy to make change,” Casteel says. “The only true limitation to a future of beauty and permanence is our own imagination and the courage to act.”

Karen Russell is a Pulitzer finalist as well as a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of five books of fiction, most recently Orange World and Other Stories and Sleep Donation. Her new novel, The Antidote, is forthcoming from Knopf.

This story was first published in the October-November 2023 issue of Esquire, USA.