A Climate Scientist’s Case for Optimism

For the start of 2025, I want to reflect a little on what optimism means in the context of climate adaptation and resilience.

The tension between fear and hope in a shifting climate runs deep in many of us as professionals as well as mere humans. I first encountered the question in practical terms in Delhi for a communications campaign about how to prepare the communities near the Ganga (Ganges River) for climate shocks — should we frighten them or give them something to aim for in terms of what the future could look like? I wasn’t a local, just an advisor for the team. The consensus was that fear, couched in dramatic language, was the better motivator for reaching consensus and positive action.

More recently, I listened to a journalist reflecting on a single community in the US and how they have reframed the issue of optimism and adaptation and resilience away from fear and hope. He was thinking about New Orleans. He reminded me of my most recent visit.

I was invited to participate in an adaptation workshop there a few years ago, a city as much as a part of the larger Caribbean by language, culture, and history as of the rest of the US. New Orleans is a city with a deep sense of memory and intense self-awareness of a past that included wonders and horrors, even within this century. New Orleans is a city that knows itself, a city connected at least indirectly to my family for at least two centuries, and one where I am always happy to visit and reconnect. 

New Orleans is an old port and harbor town, connecting the mouth of North America’s great river — the Mississippi — to the Atlantic Ocean. She sits back of the Gulf of Mexico, behind some 150 kilometers of salt marshes in a great grassy estuary.

The city has always been exposed to riparian and inland flooding and is ringed like a medieval fortress by dykes, armed with pumps and diversions. The land for centuries has been subsiding as the sediments of its extinct wetlands compress over time. And threats from the sea are nothing new either. Hurricanes are part of the lore and danger of the city. An episodic environmental violence amplifying the everyday violence of its streets.

A 2005 storm called Hurricane Katrina whose aftermath I saw that year in person broke the city, at least for a few weeks. Infrastructure failed in ways that left about 1400 people dead, even as social systems also began to fail in the city’s isolation from outside help — in neighborhoods, in churches, in police stations, in hospitals. Katrina is still spoken of like a person, a spirit of death who visited that autumn. The stories of Katrina remind me of accounts of the Black Death of the 14th century and the sudden collapse of communities in violence, horror, disorder, and grief. This is not the city that is advertised to tourists, but this is the city that New Orleans knows of herself. Climate adaptation here is a fight against time — or perhaps a fight for time. 

The night before the workshop, I had dinner with a colleague I hadn’t seen in years. She had relocated to NoLa (as the city is often known to its intimates) from Canada to join the faculty of a university — a move much farther than the three thousand kilometers of distance might suggest. 

She was living in a local style of house in a classic neighborhood. She seemed happy and productive, and her family had prospered. She and the local culture had embraced each other. 

Late in the evening, I asked what seemed like the essential question: we’re here behind 7 meter high dykes and levees, in a city where death has recently walked the streets. Death will come again, perhaps with more vengeance. How do you know when to leave? Do you talk about leaving with your neighbors and friends? Are you afraid?

Her response was wise and irreconcilable with the language of “fighting” climate change: We know the city will end, but we embrace its life today too. I don’t know when we — my family, my university, my neighbors — will leave or if we will be forced to. New Orleans has a lifetime. We think of it often. We speak of her death little. We get ready as best we can.

A journalist too has captured this sense of urban mortality. I encourage you to listen to his interview; I was struck by how different New Orleans is from the rest of the US in its self-awareness that this is a city that will die, expire, and end. And probably within our lifetime. This awareness has not lead to despair in its residents, and their awareness is not grounded in fear. But “hope” is not the right word here for contrast with despair. I think the right contrast is wisdom versus fear.

A better phrase — captured here from ancient Rome, but based on a sentiment much older — is simply “Memento mori”: Remember, you must die. This is the phrase that New Orleans has learned to comfort herself. And with these words, the music sounds sweeter, the food tastes more intensely, the laughter feels more merry because she knows her time is limited.

We ourselves have our own mortalities, and we must choose how to spend our precious time. Memento mori does not express giving up or a collapse. To me, memento mori means that our work is to alleviate suffering, to help those to come after us to prepare, and to find joy in the present as we work for a better but ultimately quite different future. Memento mori makes the search for climate justice sweeter, the assisted evolution of communities and ecosystems more precious, and the work more urgent.

Do good work this year, my colleagues.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA