Paper short abstract:

Can hopelessness lead to political action? This paper analyzes how urban gardening in Sweden lends people a preparedness practice that both provides a profound experience of nature and teaches self-sufficiency skills. Both are needed for the deep moral commitment that leads to action.

Paper long abstract:

Anxiety over our inability to stop an imminent environmental apocalypse has led to forms of individualized and often consumer politics that help people cope with their own sense of powerlessness. However, social movement scholars drawing on the sociology of emotions have recently started to point out that, contrary to expectations, hopelessness may lead to mobilization. In this article, I analyze the intersection of hope and environmental anxiety drawing on three years of ethnographic research of urban gardening activism in Sweden. I show that many gardeners have a bleak view of our capacity to avert environmental catastrophe: in one way or another, they say, this way of living will come to an end. Gardening practice allows individuals to develop trust in nature’s capacity to renew and provide an abundance of produce, a process reinforced in communal gardens by others. Urban gardening activism with its focus on localized changes may not have the power to prevent environmental catastrophe, but it does provide a silver-lining: preparedness and post-apocalyptic renewal. Initially this work may at times bring relief to environmental anxieties. In the case of committed urban gardeners this is a much more profound experience. Hopelessness in the face of certain crises does not diminish but enhance gardening’s importance. More than simply providing a tool for coping with anxiety, it provides a tool that redefines individual powerlessness.