Stubborn optimism
Dear friends:
One story I love to tell is the ‘Brave Little Parrot’. The story originates from the Jataka Tales, an ancient Pali collection of some 547 stories about the former lives of the Buddha before, as legend goes, he reached enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi tree. The tale that I tell is adapted from this beautiful version written by Rafe Martin.
It may sound similar to Wangari Maathai’s ‘I Will Be the Hummingbird’, which I mentioned previously. In ‘The Brave Little Parrot’, a grey parrot lives in a verdant and abundant forest, which is suddenly engulfed in flames as a powerful storm passes over the forest canopy. The parrot is a humble bird, but she loves her forest home and cannot stand by as it burns. Other larger and stronger animals are too scared to act, but the Brave Little Parrot does not hesitate to fly through the smoke to the river to gather water in her beak and feathers and try and extinguish the flames. Despite her tiny size and the monumental odds against her, she will not give up. Exhausted, her feathers singed, she flies back and forth between the river and the conflagration, over and over again, shaking droplets of water over the flames. Ultimately (spoiler alert!), her courageous actions bring about a surprising intervention through which the forest is restored and her own burned feathers grow back in glorious colours.
Working with this story, I think of climate change, the destruction of the natural environment, and the perilous future we all face. I think of all the animals and living species annihilated in catastrophic wildfires sweeping with growing regularity across large parts of the planet - the Amazon, Australia, California and the western United States, Canada, Indonesia, the Mediterranean and Siberia. We have already crossed four of the nine scientifically measurable planetary boundaries that maintain a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity on Earth. With each passing day, the human suffering from this planetary crisis mounts. As we lose more of our planet’s precious biodiversity and life support systems, it becomes more critical to preserve and restore what remains, while regenerating for the future.
The Brave Little Parrot story struck a chord for me again recently, as I listened to a talk by the Costa Rican climate leader Christiana Figueres. She champions a mindset of ‘Stubborn Optimism’ to confront our stark planetary situation and finally cut greenhouse gas emissions in half within the next decade.
Figueres is known for leading the global negotiations to bring about the United Nations’ historic Paris Agreement on climate change in December 2015, under which 196 countries agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in order to maximise the chances of avoiding catastrophic levels of global warming. Through her two TED talks and her book The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (with Tom Rivett-Carnac), she tells the story of how a global climate change treaty was reached against all odds, and explains how a ‘stubborn optimist’ mindset can help us all to summon the courage and will to take the necessary actions in this ‘decisive decade in the history of humankind’.
Figueres describes stubborn optimism as ‘the mindset that is necessary to transform the reality we are given into the reality we want.’
She learnt about stubborn optimism from her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, a land owner and politician who led an uprising in 1948, after the Costa Rican government refused to accept the results of a democratic election and called in the military. A civil war followed and against the odds, the government forces were defeated. Costa Ricans then disbanded their army and directed their resources toward health, education and social justice, with Figueres Ferrer becoming president of the small country known to this day for its commitments to peace, wellbeing for its citizens and protection of the natural environment.
Many years later, when Figueres was tasked with heading up the ongoing negotiations for a global treaty on climate change, there was every reason to be pessimistic. The process had derailed in Copenhagen in 2009, as the rift between the global south (contributing least to climate change yet bearing the brunt of its impacts) and global north (responsible for most of the emissions) became intractable, with governments on all sides firmly entrenched and unyielding in their positions.
As Figueres recalls, she herself did not believe an agreement was possible at the time. But when she actually heard herself saying those words at a press conference, she realised that her mindset needed to shift.
As Figueres makes clear, stubborn optimism is not about naively assuming that everything is going to work out fine. Rather, it is having ‘a fierce conviction that no matter how difficult, we must and we can rise to the challenge.’
Optimism is the ‘necessary input’: the positive mindset that moves you from ‘despair to determination’, Figueres says. ‘Optimism means envisioning our desired future and actively pulling it closer. Optimism opens the field of possibility. It drives your desire to contribute. It makes you actively jump out of bed in the morning, because you feel challenged and hopeful at the same time’.
Stubbornness is the mental toughness to just keep going and push through no matter how difficult it gets, like the Brave Little Parrot. It is the ‘gritty, determined, relentless’ part of staying on a committed path.
Earlier this year I heard Figueres speak at a virtual conference of the Mind and Life Institute, and was fascinated to learn that her climate leadership was also deeply influenced and inspired by the teachings of Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who in 1967 had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for his activism to end the Vietnam War.
Another stubborn optimist, one could say.
Figueres spoke about how Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on impermanence and compassion had helped her to cultivate an attitude of openhearted curiosity in her engagements with governments, corporate executives, activists and others often holding radically opposing viewpoints.
She told Tricycle Magazine in an interview: ‘Early on in our path toward the Paris Agreement, we understood that our work to bring all countries to common ground was best served by suspending judgment and devoting ourselves to listening deeply to every participant to understand their respective needs and wants. It was through that deep listening that we were able to let collective solutions emerge at the right time and recognise the seeds that needed to be watered in order to blossom into fruition. Finally, we were blessed to know that, ultimately, we are all interconnected with one another and with all living beings, and it is this interconnection that guides our path forward.’
This is also the teaching of the Brave Little Parrot. She cannot know whether her efforts to save her beloved forest will succeed. But she recognises the need for action, and will not give up until she has done everything she can.
None of us can possibly know what will unfold in our collective human story in the coming years and decades. Once again, global leaders have gathered at COP this week. As the world burns, many countries are reneging on their climate commitments. We may feel outrage, grief, frustration and fear about this. But the Brave Little Parrot reminds us that whatever we do, we must not give up.
Just as we are all interconnected, we all have agency and the possibility of making a difference. Each of us carries our own unique potential to contribute towards the beauty, joy, thriving and healing of the world. No matter how small and insignificant our lives may seem, there is something we can do.
This week I am holding the question that Figueres poses to us all: ‘What is the future you want, and what are you doing to make that future a reality?’
With love,
Megan