Antinuclear

What climate activists have failed to do, she says is to capture people’s imaginations with a vision of what a new world could be like: “What I think we have been lacking is to be able to paint the picture to really build out in people’s imagination what is an economy like Australia going to be like 10, 15 years from now when it has moved over to renewables? What does it mean for the quality of cities? What does it mean for the quality of agriculture? What does it mean for the Great Barrier Reef? What does it mean for camping in the bush safely without having to worry about … fires? It is a much, much healthier, longer term, stable economy that we can definitely build, and must be built. But we haven’t painted that picture very well. Hence, if you do not have a visual destination of the positive world that you want to construct, it’s very difficult for people to gravitate there.”

So we must dream.

“Obviously, the doom and gloom makes us concerned, helpless, hopeless, despair, grief, all that family of sentiments that are important because we have to understand what is out there,” she said. “But we have not been able to point to the fact that actually now in this decade we are in the most consequential decade of the history of humankinds. Because over the next 10 years we will decide whether we are at one half the global emissions in order to be able to move on to much, much better healthier, safer more stable world. That is going to be determined over the next 10 years. And Australia has to be part of that transformation.”

Figueres was troubled, though, that when she met Greta Thunberg she understandably struggled to infuse her with optimism. To those Australians who share Thunberg’s despair, she said that she too shares the pain and anguish of those troubled about the earth, particularly the hellish, devouring bushfires, but argued that we need to use that emotion as a fuel for determination and resolve: “I believe very firmly,” she said, “that we cannot stay in the pain and the grief and the despair as our ultimate destination of the journey. We have to be able to face that reality without denying it, whatsoever, understand it, and in a martial arts way turn the energy that comes out of that pain and that grief into a firm commitment, a resolute, gritty determination, to actually do what it takes to protect nature and to protect human life, because if we do not approach this with a firm resolve, we will lose it.

“So, for me, optimism is not simply the result of having attained something. It is rather a strategy, the input, the approach with which we must face climate change because it is the only way to enhance the probability of success.”

It’s an arresting thought – the only way to succeed, or merely survive, is to hope. Not a passive hope, but a hungry and angry hope, one that will force us to act. We can’t afford to sink into despair. We can afford, in the way of the martial arts, to wrestle our anxiety into force and strength. In sickness and in health. “It is what we do now,” says Figueres, “that counts.”