Radical Hope #3 Standing at the Edge of Hope
Standing at the Edge of Hope
Last week we explored why our solutions keep failing — how four centuries of left-hemisphere thinking have left us brilliant at analysis and blind to how we are the living world, and have never been separate from it, even for an instant.
I ended with a question that I suspect many of you have been sitting with: if it might already be too late, what's the point?
This newsletter is my attempt at an honest answer.
Why Things May Appear Hopeless
In the two weeks since Newsletter 1, dozens of species will have gone extinct, global military spending will have increased by another $50 billion, and atmospheric CO₂ will have risen another fraction of a part per million it will never recover.¹˒²˒³
Democracy will have continued its ninth consecutive year of decline — with more people now living under autocracy than at any point since the 1980s.⁴ Corruption will have worsened across another swathe of countries, including established democracies we once trusted.⁵ The volume of disinformation — government-sponsored, AI-generated, and algorithmically amplified — will have grown.⁶
Press freedom has suffered its most far-reaching fall in fifty years, with more than half the world's population now living in countries where independent journalism is in a 'very serious’ situation.⁷
Hopelessness, False Hope, and Radical Hope
The Climate Psychology Alliance has argued that both hopelessness and false hope are paths to failure: hopelessness tipping into paralysis and withdrawal, false hope into the comfortable belief that technology, or the right election result, or someone else entirely, will sort it out.8 Both are forms of avoidance. Both let us off the hook.
The Climate Psychology Alliance is right. But the answer to hopelessness is not to avoid it.
As psychotherapist and long-time Chair of Climate Psychology Alliance, Chris Robertson says:
“Having absorbed and felt the depth of the hopelessness, something else is born through that, out of the ashes. And that’s radical hope… in the darkness, little sparks start to emerge.”9
A Story of Radical Hope
The story that has helped me most comes from the nineteenth century — from the Apsáalooke, the Native American Crow Nation of the northern Great Plains.
They faced the complete collapse of everything that had made life meaningful, and found, in the ruins, what we are calling radical hope.
The Apsáalooke inhabited a world of extraordinary coherence: their identity, their spirituality, their whole understanding of what made life worth living was woven through with the buffalo. Thirty million buffalo migrated across the Plains in vast herds.
Then the US Army made a calculated decision. Exterminate the buffalo, and you destroy the Plains tribes without firing a shot.
They succeeded. Within a generation, the herds were gone. Starvation followed. And with them, everything the Apsáalooke understood as meaningful action — the hunts, the ceremonies, the warrior culture, the seasonal migrations, the entire framework through which a good life was lived and recognised.
Their last great chief, Alaxchíia Ahú — known as Plenty Coups — later said that after that, “nothing happened.”
He didn’t mean nothing occurred.
He meant that the very concepts through which his people understood meaningful action had collapsed. The future wasn’t just uncertain. It was unimaginable.
Intelligence Without Aggression
As a young man, years before the collapse, Plenty Coups undertook a vision quest.
He saw the buffalo disappearing, cattle arriving — and only one creature surviving: the chickadee, the smallest, least imposing bird on the Plains.
The elders interpreted the vision: the world of the Plains tribes would end. Only those who listened, learned, and adapted would endure. The chickadee was not a warrior. It was intelligence without aggression, attention without rigidity. The kind of attention Newsletter 2 described: present to the living world rather than the map of it.
In winter, mixed flocks form around the chickadee — nuthatches, warblers, woodpeckers — because it reads the world with a precision other birds have learned to trust more than their own senses. It becomes, quietly, the nervous system of the whole. Not the strongest creature in the flock. The most attentive.
Plenty Coups spent the rest of his life becoming the chickadee.
Actions Without Optimism
He could not imagine what a good future looked like. It wasn't a failure of imagination. The concepts through which "a good future" had meaning — the buffalo, the hunts, the ceremonies, the warrior's life — were gone. There was no vocabulary left in which to picture it.
But he acted anyway, with extraordinary clarity.
He travelled to Washington ten times to defend Apsáalooke land rights, refusing to allow the reservation to be carved up. He forged a strategic alliance with the US Army — not out of loyalty, but out of a sober reading of what survival required. He lobbied relentlessly for education, insisting that Crow children learn the skills of the new world without losing their identity. When a government school was built on the reservation, he insisted that children begin each day with a traditional gratitude prayer, facing the rising sun.
These were not acts of optimism. He had no vision of triumph, no confidence in the outcome.
They were acts of commitment undertaken in the ruins of a world, without being able to picture what might be built from them.
By contrast, Sitting Bull — the great Lakota leader — chose armed resistance on the old terms. His path was noble, coherent, and ultimately catastrophic: massacred at Wounded Knee, their lands broken up and sold, their children taken to assimilation schools, their ceremonies banned.
Plenty Coups chose something harder to name: not surrender, not resistance, but a third thing.
Radical Hope
Joanna Macy, whose Work that Reconnects has sustained people for decades, describes Active Hope as something you do rather than feel — the movement through gratitude, grief, and anger into engaged action. It asks: given this situation, what do I want to bring about, and what steps can I take now?10
That is essential. But it isn't quite what Plenty Coups was doing.
Philosopher Jonathan Lear, who studied Plenty Coups' life closely, calls what he was doing radical hope.11 Hope that persists even when we cannot envision what a good outcome looks like. Even when the concepts we use to understand what's good may themselves be in question. Hope without guarantees, without clear vision, perhaps even without optimism — yet remaining a fierce commitment to care, to create, and to engage with the world exactly as it is.
Radical hope doesn't deny despair. It moves through it. It begins with clear-eyed recognition that something precious has ended, that the world we knew is no longer available to us. Rather than pretending otherwise, it asks us to stay present in the ruins long enough for new forms of meaning to emerge.
This kind of hope is not a feeling. It is a discipline — a way of acting when the imagination fails, when the old stories no longer guide us, and when the future cannot yet be pictured.
I know this territory from the inside. I began psychotherapy at twenty-five, working with emotional wounding that happened in the first year of my life. All these years later, I am still working with the somatic parts of myself that hold that early experience. I hold them with love, patience, compassion — without any expectation of healing. And yet holding them in this way is itself healing. Not the healing I expected. Not the healing I once wanted. Something quieter, yet present — available to me in this very moment.
This is what radical hope feels like from the inside. Not the confident expectation of resolution. The willingness to stay present with what is unresolved, and to keep tending it anyway.
Where We Stand in the World Today
Our world is not ending in the same way as the Apsáalooke's. But something is ending.
The story of endless growth, of human mastery over nature, of separation as safety — that story is collapsing around us, and we feel it.
Blog 1 named the polycrisis. Blog 2 showed why the consciousness that created it cannot solve it, and that a new paradigm, systems consciousness, is needed.
This week I want to suggest that standing at the edge of that hopelessness — not retreating from it, not rushing past it — may be exactly where we need to be.
Not because hopelessness is the destination, but because it is the obstacle.
As Gilligan and Dilts remind us, trying to bypass the somatic contraction only intensifies it. Held generatively in the body and field mind, the obstacle becomes information rather than enemy.12
The chickadee showed us what this looks like.
This is a different kind of leadership. Not the warrior's certainty, but the listening that holds a community together when the old certainties are gone.
Over the coming weeks, we'll explore how we develop that capacity ourselves: embodied, grounded, and awake to what is actually here.
But first, next week: why is this deep inner work not self-indulgent whilst Kyiv and Gaza burn? Why is it, in fact, the most urgent thing we can do?
A Practice
Find a few quiet minutes this week. Sit with these questions, not to answer them, but to notice what arises:
1. Where in your life do you feel that the old story is no longer working — personally, politically, or both? Not as an abstract idea, but as something you can actually feel?
2. What would it mean to stay present in that feeling, rather than rushing past it into either despair or forced optimism?
3. And alongside the hopelessness — is there anything that still feels alive, or beautiful, or worth tending? Not instead of the grief, but within it?
There are no right answers. The practice is simply honest noticing. Plenty Coups didn’t begin with a plan. He began with a willingness to see clearly what was actually happening.
That willingness is itself a form of radical hope.
What's the one thing from this blog that's staying with you?
These ideas are alive for me, and I'm always interested in where they land for others. If something has resonated — or troubled you — do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also, write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.
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Julian Russellis a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry. He is a co-founder of the Generative Citizen community — a gathering of people who understand that how we are matters as much as what we do. His forthcoming book, Standing at the Edge of Hope, explores why personal and spiritual development is not a retreat from the world’s crises, but the very ground from which transformative engagement becomes possible.
Notes
1 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, Global Biodiversity Outlook (Montreal: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020). Estimates of current extinction rates vary considerably depending on methodology; the Convention cites “up to 150 species lost per day,” while other authoritative estimates range from 24 to 82 species per day. All estimates agree that current rates are between 100 and 1,000 times higher than pre-human background rates.
2 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2024 (Stockholm: SIPRI, April 2025). Global military expenditure reached $2.7 trillion in 2024, an increase of $233 billion (9.4%) on the previous year — the steepest annual rise since the Cold War. At this rate, global spending increases by approximately $4.5 billion per day.
3 NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” NOAA Climate.gov, updated 2025. Atmospheric CO₂ reached a record annual mean of 422.8 ppm in 2024, an increase of 3.75 ppm over 2023 — the largest single-year rise ever recorded. Once added to the atmosphere, CO₂ persists for centuries to millennia; on any human timescale, the increase is irreversible.
4 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, Democracy Report 2025 (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 2025); International IDEA, The Global State of Democracy 2025: Democracy on the Move (Stockholm: International IDEA, 2025). Both reports confirm 2024 as the ninth consecutive year of net democratic decline — the longest such run since records began in 1975. V-Dem finds that for the first time in more than twenty years, the world has more autocracies than democracies, with approximately 72% of the global population now living under autocratic governance.
5 Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2025 (Berlin: Transparency International, February 2026). The global average CPI score fell to a new low of 42 in 2025. The number of countries scoring above 80 has declined from twelve a decade ago to just five. Established democracies including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and France all recorded declining scores.
6 World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report 2024 (Geneva: WEF, 2024), which ranked mis- and disinformation as the world’s top short-term global risk, rated by over 1,100 experts from 136 countries. V-Dem, Democracy Report 2025, finds that half of all autocratising countries are now actively deploying government disinformation as a political tool. Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2025, documents the fifteenth consecutive year of decline in global internet freedom.
7 Reporters Without Borders (RSF), World Press Freedom Index 2025 (Paris: RSF, 2025). For the first time in the index’s history, global press freedom is classified as “difficult” — the second-lowest category. More than half the world’s population now lives in countries where the situation is rated “very serious.” International IDEA, The Global State of Democracy 2025, confirms press freedom suffered its most far-reaching fall in fifty years in 2024.
8 Climate Psychology Alliance, newsletter, March 2015, climatepsychologyalliance.org. The CPA was co-founded in 2012 by Paul Hoggett and Adrian Tait. Chris Robertson, psychotherapist and co-founder of Re-Vision, served as chair for many years and was a central figure in developing the Alliance’s thinking on radical hope. He co-organised the “Radical Hope and Cultural Tragedy” conference, Bristol, 18 April 2015, and co-edited “Climate Change, Despair and Radical Hope.” The Psychotherapist 63 (2016). His personal website is at culture-crisis.net.
9 Chris Robertson, in conversation with the author, September 2025.
10 Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In without Going Crazy (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012).
11 Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
12 Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan, Generative Coaching, Volume 1: The Journey of Creative and Sustainable Change (Santa Cruz, CA: International Association for Generative Change, 2021).
