The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(62)

The components of the hope cycle originate with Charles Snyder who identified them in his book, Psychology of Hope (Simon & Schuster, 2010), as goals, willpower (often called agency or confidence), and waypower (often called pathways or realistic ways to realize one’s goals). Other researchers, including Kaye Herth, who developed the Herth Hope Index, have included social support as one of the building blocks of hope (“Abbreviated Instrument to Measure Hope: Development and Psychometric Evaluation,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 17, no. 10 [October 1992: 1251–59, doi: 10.1111/j.1365–2648.1992.tb01843.x).

For more about Edith Eger, see her books The Choice: Embrace the Possible (Scribner, 2017) and The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life (Scribner, 2020).

Reason 1: The Amazing Human Intellect

For an explanation of the neuroscience of hope and optimism, see Tali Sharot’s The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain (Pantheon, 2011). As Sharot points out, the frontal cortex, which is larger in humans than in other primates and likely the neural basis for the human intellect that Jane references, is essential for language and goal setting, and likely also for hope and optimism. Sharot identified a specific part of the frontal cortex, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), that influences emotion and motivation and may contribute to hope. In her research, the more optimistic a person was, the more likely they were to imagine positive future events with great vividness and detail. As subjects thought of positive events, this part of the brain was activated more and seemed to be connecting and modulating the amygdala, an ancient structure in the brain associated with emotion, especially fear and excitement. The rACC in optimistic people seems to calm the fear that is aroused when they imagine negative events and gets them more excited when they think of positive events. This may be the neural basis for Lopez’s felicitous phrase that humans are hope-fear hybrids (Lopez, p. 112).

For more on the intelligence and communication of trees, see Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021) and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Greystone Books, 2016).

Reason 2: The Resilience of Nature

For more stories about the resilience of nature and more detail on some of the stories Jane told me, see Jane’s books Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink (Grand Central Publishing, 2009) and Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants (Grand Central Publishing, 2014).

For more information on the dramatic loss of biodiversity and rapid extinction, see the May 2019 UN report, “Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating,’” Sustainable Development Goals, www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/.

For the APA report on the effects of climate change on mental health, see Susan Clayton Whitmore-Williams, Christie Manning, Kirra Krygsman, et al., “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance,” March 2017, www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf.

For more on the ability of ecosystems to recover, see the study “Rapid Recovery of Damaged Ecosystems” by Holly P. Jones and Oswald J. Schmitz of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences (PLOS ONE, May 27, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0005653). After reviewing 240 independent studies spanning a hundred years, they found that ecosystems could recover when the source of the pollution and destruction is stopped. The ecosystems they studied recovered within a decade to a half century, with forests recovering on average in forty-two years and ocean floors recovering on average in ten years. Environments with multiple sources of destruction took an average of fifty-six years to recover, but some ecosystems were pushed beyond the point of return and never recovered, although even these might recover in much larger time scales that may not be relevant to human civilization. The researchers qualified their findings by saying that even these heavily damaged ecosystems can recover “given human will.”

For more on our need for nature and the deep influence that nature has on human health and well-being, see Caoimhe Twohig-Bennett and Andy Jones’s “The Health Benefits of the Great Outdoors: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Greenspace Exposure and Health Outcomes,” in which researchers analyzed over 140 studies involving more than 290 million people in twenty countries and found that spending time in nature or living close to nature resulted in diverse and significant benefits including a reduction in type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, premature death, and preterm birth (Environmental Research 166 [October 2018]: 628–37, doi: 10.106/j .envres.2018.06.030). While the reason nature has such a profound impact is not clear, one theory is that nature seems to reduce participants’ stress as measured by their salivary cortisol level.

Environmental neuroscientist Marc Berman at the University of Chicago and his colleagues have found that having more trees on a street is related to the improved health of its residents (Omid Kardan, Peter Gozdyra, Bratislav Misic, et al., “Neighborhood Greenspace and Health in a Large Urban Center, Scientific Reports 5, 11610 [July 9, 2015], https://doi.org/10.1038/srep11610). People who lived on a street with ten more trees had health improvements that were related to being seven years younger than those who lived on streets with less tree cover, even when controlling for other confounding factors such as income and education. Berman doesn’t yet know why this is, but he suspects it might have to do with air quality, and also with the soothing aesthetic that nature provides. In another study, he found that a simple walk in nature leads to 20 percent increases in working memory and attention and that people can also experience cognitive benefits from images, sounds, and videos of nature. (Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan, “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature, Psychological Science 19, no. 12 [December 2008]: 1207–12, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467–9280.2008.02225.x; Marc G. Berman, Ethan Kross, Katherine M. Krpan, et al., “Interacting with Nature Improves Cognition and Affect for Individuals with Depression,” Journal of Affective Disorders 140, no. 3 [November 2012]: 300–305, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2012.03.012.