Active Hope—Joanna Macy

Keynote presentation. 'Active Hope," is the title of a new book by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. In it, they eschew feel good denial, cynical disengagement and baseless optimism. In this talk, Macy summarized their message. As Macy and Johnstone wisely acknowledge, there are no comforting certainties involved in opting to work for change with ‘active hope:’ “there are no guarantees that we’ll be able to turn things far or fast enough to safeguard our civilization, or indeed, to ensure the continued existence of conscious life on Earth. We will probably not know in our lifetimes whether we are serving as deathbed attendants to a dying world or as midwives to the next stage of human evolution.” But, act we must on the issues we care about. Taking their lead from Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone's new book Active Hope, Cynthia Papermaster and Harvey Wasserman organized this evening of multi-issue presentations, Januare 10, 2016 at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists.