(This is the second in a series of posts about topics that are off limits in the sustainability community.)

A decade or so ago, I attended a gathering of sustainability activists in Chicago. The writer Paul Hawken had just finished speaking and invited questions. "Ask the toughest ones you can," he urged.

Taking him at his word, I got bold and named the dread that lurks in the background at these gatherings: "We're careering toward the ecological abyss. Aren't we just kidding ourselves? How can we possibly hope to brake the train in time?"

Hawken nodded soberly. "Ah, yes," he said. "The despair question."

It's a simple, inescapable fact: the planet's environmental decline is very frightening, and the more we know about it, the scarier it gets. It seems that every time we turn around, the news about climate change gets worse. Time and again, scientific projections that were already frightening turn out to have underestimated the rate of decline. It's hard not to get depressed—clinically depressed—when contemplating what lies ahead, and the scope of the challenge we face.

Personally and as a community, we manage these emotions as best we can. In our private conversations and public presentations, we accentuate the positive. We focus on the progress we've made and what we will do to address climate change -- even if global warming will come anyway.

A delicate balance is required. On the one hand, we need to acknowledge that we're in danger. Otherwise there'd be no reason to take action. Yet we mustn't get too terrified, because that can paralyze. And so we take the very frightening reality and tilt it toward the less fearsome. With a little help from our thumb, we balance the scale so hope and fear are equal. Yes there is danger, and yes we can overcome.

The last week of the recent presidential campaign provided multiple examples of this, though not in the context of sustainability. The Obama camp went to great lengths to make sure their supporters didn't get over-confident. They pointed to tightening polls and stressed the need to "leave it all on the road." A quantum of fear was a good thing as far as they were concerned.

The McCain side had the opposite problem, and so they shifted the scale toward hope. "The Mac is back!" McCain proclaimed. "The polls are tightening! We're gonna win!" 

We might call this pattern "BS in service to success." Or, if this is too harsh for you, "re-calibration in service to success."

We sustainability activists do a lot of "re-calibrating in service to success." It may not be 100% honest emotionally, but never mind that: we need to to have hope. When you're in a war, the soldiers' morale means everything.

Al Gore's climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth provides a case in point. Here's a passage from the distributor's summary of the film: "With wit, smarts and hope [emphasis added], An Inconvenient Truth ultimately brings home Gore’s persuasive argument that we can no longer afford to view global warming as a political issue – rather, it is simply one of the biggest moral challenges facing every person in our times."

And indeed there are reasons for hope:
 

• Technological advances are making renewable energy an increasingly viable alternative to carbon-based fuels.
• It is becoming increasingly easy to wrap the politically charged issue of climate change in the non-partisan cloak of energy independence.
• In the United States, we also soon have an administration that isn't in denial about climate change.
• The current economic crisis may even turn out to be a plus in this regard, as it drives governments to be bold in their search for solutions (and slowdowns in production means an equivalent slowing in carbon emissions).

Could it be? Are we sailing into a perfect storm that's ... positive?

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But here I go, dancing the same old dance again, focusing on the positives, bringing this narrative to an upbeat close. It's a hard habit to break, and who would want to? We're in a war, a war for the future of the planet. We are the army at Helm's Deep and the Uruk-hai are amassed on the plain. We need to have hope. We need to have faith.

We need to steer clear of our despair.