The Radical Hope Syllabus

The Radical Hope Syllabus is the product of a two-day conference held in Germany in July 2017 by the Rachel Carson Center and the University of Texas. The conference brought scholars from around the world to exchange ideas about the role of hope as a new solution to addressing environmental crises. The idea comes from the title of a book written by Jonathan Lear from the University of Chicago, who defines ‘Radical Hope’ in a very specific way — how do you maintain hope in the face of extreme desperation, which is essential for human survival? The conference took the core idea as it applies to environmental issues and used it as an expansive term within which people could define hope in their own ways.

The question for the Green Forum today is, What if we are the people we are waiting for? We have all the technology, policies, and resources we need to create a more hopeful, sustainable future. Our history shows us to be a resilient, innovative species—capable of great harm, certainly, but also with the capacity for great and positive evolution and achievements. A crucial question for us all is, Can we educate for hope?

In this context, members of the Green Forum are invited to make a collection of online thoughts, ideas and achievements to assemble a zero waste curriculum to promote the educational theme ‘Learning Circularity With SIDS’. This will be a resource for people who want to make a conscious effort to be informed about, and help with, community-led conservation management in small island states, where their survival involves abandoning a culture of linearity for one of circularity

This process is driven by Radical hope—a radiant vision of new possibilities in the face of personal or collective devastation— that is the catalytic ingredient at the heart of all personal transformations and successful social movements for cultural change.