The point of trying

Meliorists know: the point is to try.

"…In the aftermath of an election that will return a climate denier to the White House and a climate-denying party to control of Congress, it sometimes seems impossible to keep going. Every effort feels Sisyphean. Any possible change for the better is about to be demolished by the outrageously unqualified industry toadies whom Donald Trump has named to run the agencies that protect our wilderness, our air, our water. Our future.

More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying?

Recently I read an old essay by the Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, who has been writing for more than six decades about the need to heal the separation between human beings and the natural world. In his essay "A Poem of Difficult Hope," which appears in his book "What Are People For," Mr. Berry argues that the success of any protest should not be measured by whether it changes the world in the way we hope it will.

'Much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come," he wrote in 1990. "If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.'

At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others.

Men in power did not wake up one morning and decide to give women the vote. White Southerners did not wake up one morning and decide to dismantle Jim Crow. Those things happened, if imperfectly and still incompletely, because hundreds of thousands of people worked together for years to make them happen.

But where preserving biodiversity is concerned, we don’t have years. Where stabilizing the climate is concerned, we don’t have years. Once a species becomes extinct, it remains extinct forever. Once the climate hits an irreversible tipping point, it will tip. In that context, the Republican takeover of Washington is a catastrophe that is hard to reconcile with a plan to plant more flowers and install more nest boxes.

So I am taking comfort from Wendell Berry, who has lived a life of ceaseless protest against the desecration of the earth and its creatures (most recently in an essay for The Christian Century called “Against Killing Children”). Even at 90, he is not asking himself what the point is...."

—Margaret Renkl, How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark