The Geography of Hope

Quite a lot happened in two and a half short days at Ankelohe. It rained a lot and the food was uniformly excellent. There was a haunting documentary about the end of oil in the same vein as The Corporation, and there was a sort of preacherly revival delivered by Jeremy "The Hydrogen Economy" Rifkin. Some participants recited troubling figures (oil in dwindling barrels per day, CO2 in fast-escalating parts per million), others spoke of a sort of quasi-religious conversion to an indisputably urgent cause (the body of knowledge on climate change compelling wholesale commitment to slowing its growth, the implications of the phrase "moral equivalent of war"). There was a spirited debate about whether or not The Economist should have bylines.

The specifics of any/all of this stuff, though, doesn't sum the thing up for me. It was, to be sure, an invaluable learning experience, filling in pretty much every gap I'd arrived with in my knowledge of the emerging science of climate change and the hard data on the global oil industry. What was most surprising, though - and ultimately most rewarding - was the electric intensity of the weekend, the almost-gleeful, terrified-excited, vertigo-like thrill of simply being there, at the frontlines of what seemed by the end of the weekend more than ever like the fight of my lifetime (all of our lifetimes).

Maybe this is best explained in a single scene. Saturday night, a good while after Rifkin's evangelical speech on the potential embedded in the disruptive technologies of renewable energy and just after the bacchanalian post-keynote barbecue, I fished a Beck's out of the fridge in the dining room and headed for the clearing in the woods out back for the nightly barbecue. We'd been at this for two days and two nights, we AnkCon attendees, presenting and arguing and commenting and interrogating on the issue at hand. Some of us (e.g. yours truly) hadn't slept much, what with the boozy bonfires stretching well past midnight and the first morning sessions starting promptly at 09:00. I wondered if there'd be much spark left in the bonfire scene; followed the path into the woods thinking I might even hit the hay before midnight.

Left to right: At least three fevered conversations about peak oil and climate change. (Not pictured: the two guys just a bit further to the right arguing about bylines in The Economist. Which was pretty fevered in its own right.)

Instead, I found spread out around the bonfire a broad tableau, more or less the same as it'd been around the conference table and dining tables and in the makeshift "cybercafe" in the manor house's enclosed porch all weekend: a half-dozen rollicking conversations about how we'd come to this point and what was to be done. Information (and, yes, a healthy dose of gossip) being briskly traded, theories expanded upon, details clarified, conclusions questioned. I've never been a part of a professional event so vigourous, enthusiastic, feverishly intelligent. It struck me, arriving at the bonfire, that I'd been running into this same tireless energy in bits and pieces throughout my research to date - in the huts of Karen Thai villages after the day's work was done, in the courtyards of South Indian utopian communities, in the R&D departments of multinational carpet conglomerates.

Some of us at Ankelohe talked cautiously about it, this momentum, not wanting to jinx it by staring at it too long. Talked about how there was a kind of alchemy that came from understanding the undeniable fact and vast scope of the problem, and working on the solution, and finding others - more and more each day - tuned into the same information and turned onto exploring the possibility of putting it into sustainable practice.

I left Ankelohe more hopeful than I'd felt in months. Maybe years. The task may be huge and the time may be short, but the climate change problem is attracting the best people - the scientists unafraid to embrace the full implications of their research, the visionaries unafraid to dream of a radically restructured world, the ones, plus a healthy dose of the writer/artist/activist/idealist crowd Jack Kerouac had in mind when he talked about how the only ones for him were "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved." They're sizing it up, embracing it, making it the core of their life's work. The enthusiastic momentum is all on their side.

We might just be able to fix this thing.