Page | 2

​Opening remarks to ‘Inspiring Sustainability Transformations through Our Past’ Workshop

Good morning and welcome everyone… my name is John Barry and I’m both Irish and an environmental hypocrite (and a politician as well as an academic, but please don’t hold that against me) and I’d like to start my brief introductory remarks by reading you two short poems – one from William Butler Yeats, the other from Emily Dickinson, to orient myself to the task ahead over the next two days, and hopefully help you all as well to this same end.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping

slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket

sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

WB Yeats, 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'

“For peace comes dropping slowly”….does hope, radical hope also ‘come dropping slowly’…slow hope as Christof has suggested?

'Hope' is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers, Emily Dickinson

As not just a lapsed but completely collapsed Catholic – appropriate perhaps both in terms of the place we are today – Bavaria, perhaps the most catholic part of Germany, and also some of the origins of the conference in 2015 – the year of the publication of Pope Francis’s remarkable and remarkable hopeful and inspiring Encyclical Laudato ‘Si – on Care for our Common Home I will ask you for that most catholic of things, indulgences to permit to follow these poems with some quotes I would also like to use to situate myself and the workshop

‘Don’t read beauty magazines they will only make you feel ugly’

‘Don’t sit on the fence; you’ll only get splinters up your arse’

‘Exaggeration is when the truth loses it temper’

‘It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission’

‘Where there is no vision, there the people perish’

‘Experts should be on tap, not on top’

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.” Alice Walker

“It’s good to be cynical, if you know when to stop.” Aldous Huxley

The origins and inspiration behind this workshop go back to 2015 when I met Erika while both of us were fellows at the Rachel Carson Center. my own interest and work on 'radical hope' a concept I came across a decade ago when I first read Jonathan Lear's remarkable book, Radical Hope. I am a political theorist, a heterodox political economist who works on ‘post-growth’ economics as the only sustainable human economy in the times we live in, the 21st century, planetary boundaries, the Anthropocene, take your pick. I was attracted to Erika’s introduction of attention to history, to what might be learned from history for our current turbulent times and ‘sustainability transitions’. Being Irish of course means I don’t need to study history to know and talk about it, we Irish get our history doctorates in the maternity ward. Being Irish I know history is never over….So together Erika and I grafted/shifted together history and radical hope and pitched it to Christof in the Greek restaurant beside the Rachel Carson Center and where we’ll have our workshop dinner tomorrow night. And so from the chance meeting of an American environmental historian and an Irish dissident political economist, mediated by an intellectually promiscuous and risk taking German academic director we are all gathered here. So welcome….

In his book, Lear outlines a peculiar human vulnerability, one which all papers touch upon in different ways, even if they do not know it themselves. As Lear puts it

"We seem to acquire it [this vulnerability] as a result of the fact that we essentially inhabit a way of life. Humans are by nature cultural animals: we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life --whatever it is-- is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem" (6).

This leads him, and us, to a troubling existential blind spot within (most) human cultures, namely "the inability to conceive of its own destruction and possible extinction" (83). Meaning for example we do not typically prepare our younger generation to consider or to prepare for the possible eventuality of our way/s of life, the terms and practices we use to render such ways of life, of common goods etc. to be vulnerable so vulnerable they might, someday disappear completely. This ontological insecurity, to paraphrase Anthony Giddens, is not something we usually or usually willingly do, its speculative (hence it may not happen, so why worry about it?), its worrying and disturbing - hence thinking about possible futures might compromise one's enjoyment of the present), and even if there are troubling times ahead human ingenuity, improvisation and resilience coupled with technological innovation will 'take care of it'.

Radical hope as I view it, taking inspiration from Lear’s book (which we deliberatively did not ask people to read as Erika reminded me yesterday), is something on the other side of politics, or history, a courageous and imaginative leap of faith not that ‘everything will be alright’ (which is naive optimism) but that whatever happens will be different but meaningful and also in no small measure the result or input of human conscious effect, collective and individual.

At the time Erika and I were discussing the ideas for this workshop, which we then took to Christof, the world was a different place. In 2015, without being romantic or Panglossian the world seemed a more hopeful place…alongside the Pope’s wonderful ‘prose love poem to the planet’ as I termed his Encyclical Laudato ‘Si, we had the historic Paris Climate agreement signed in December 2015. Flawed though it was, it did represent progress, did represent grounds for hope. Now look around us, the Brexit vote in the UK to leave the European Union, the success of Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing and nativist, xenophobic populism on both sides of the Atlantic in France, Germany and the United States. Terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere, the rise and rise of the surveillance state, the refugee crisis in and on Europe’s borders as the single greatest humanitarian crisis since the second world war. And the list goes on….no wonder I am reminded of Elliott’s apposite and timely view in his poem Four Quartets, that “Humankind cannot bear too much reality”, for the world and the turbulent times we now live in are in Wordsworth’s words ‘too much with us’.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

But apart from these specific events, and there are surely more to come, it is the pervasive feeling of the world no longer making sense, things unravelling even as things stay together. Creative destruction now haunts the world, with changes and shifts happening that are as unprecedented as they were unanticipated. It’s a dizzying time to be alive, punch drunk on political movements, quakes and dramatic transitions, I certainly feel disorientated and traumatised to some extent.

Hence the importance of having hope, even a ‘will o the wisp’ hope as our guiding star as opposed to some end point. Hope out of necessity not choice as it were.

I’ll leave you as I started with two poems, the first from Seamus Heaney, an excerpt from his The Cure at Troy, the second from one of my intellectual and political heroes, Vaclav Havel and his poem Hope.

“Human beings suffer,

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols

Beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

Stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracle

And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter, self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.”

‘Hope’ by Vaclav Havel

“Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world

Either we have hope within us or we don’t.

Hope is not a prognostication—it’s an orientation of the spirit.

You can’t delegate that to anyone else.

Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy

when things are going well,

or the willingness to invest in enterprises

that are obviously headed for early success,

but rather an ability to work for something to succeed.

Hope is definitely NOT the same as optimism.

It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well,

but the certainty that something makes sense,

regardless of how it turns out.

It is hope, above all, that gives us strength to live

and to continually try new things,

even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing

to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily,

without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope”.