Hope Lights the Match — What's the Strategy?

Why the Future We Want Will Require More Than Good Intentions

A blunt challenge has been circulating across climate and ocean advocacy spaces. Marine biologist and strategist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson posed it without softening the edges: “Fuck hope. What’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?”

The point was not to reject hope as an emotion or a motivator. It was to reject hope-as-a-stand-in for action—the kind of passive optimism that allows people to feel aligned with the right outcomes without confronting the harder question of how those outcomes will actually be achieved. That question—what’s the strategy—is the pressure point this moment demands.

Hope has carried movements a long way. It sustains people through dark years, keeps them engaged when outcomes are uncertain, and reminds them that the future is not yet written. Hope matters. It is often what brings people into this work in the first place.

But hope, by itself, will not get us where we need to go. When hope is treated as an endpoint rather than a starting point, it develops a dangerous failure mode. It becomes a waiting room. A substitute for leverage.

The consequences of that confusion are already visible. For decades, advocates—environmental and otherwise—have been told, often by well-meaning allies, that optimism is the antidote to burnout, that civility is the currency of influence, that if the data are presented clearly enough and the tone stays measured, change will follow. “When they go low, we go high.” The problem is not that this ethic is wrong. It’s that it is incomplete—and in some moments, actively disarming.

The planet is not being degraded because hope was absent. It is being degraded because power has been willing to act ruthlessly, while responses have too often been cautious.

There is a difference between being hopeful and being prepared to fight. Fighting does not mean abandoning science, ethics, or care. It does not mean mirroring cruelty for cruelty’s sake. It means recognizing that this is contested terrain, not a seminar room. It means understanding that systems change not only through persuasion, but through pressure—social, legal, economic, and cultural.

History is unambiguous on this point. Protections that endure were not granted out of enlightenment. They were wrestled into existence by people willing to be inconvenient, relentless, and, at times, confrontational. Courts were used. Boycotts were organized. Public accountability was enforced. Regulatory choke points were targeted. Coalitions were built that could absorb disagreement without collapsing. Costs were imposed on bad actors. The stakes of inaction were raised.

Hope was not abandoned—but it was never allowed to be the stopping point. Somewhere along the way, hope softened into branding. It became a tone preference. It was offered as a moral alternative to anger, rather than as fuel for disciplined resistance.

But anger, properly directed, is not the enemy of hope. It is often what converts hope into motion.

What this moment requires is not endless positivity. It requires effectiveness. That begins with honesty about the terrain. Entrenched industries. Regulatory capture. Short political time horizons. Extractive systems that profit from delay and externalize harm. These forces are not confused. They are strategic. They know exactly what they are doing, and they are very good at it.

Responding with aspirations alone will not stop them. Matching seriousness with seriousness does not require abandoning values. It requires acting like the stakes are real. It means designing efforts that assume opposition, not consensus. It means defending expertise aggressively, protecting institutions loudly, and refusing to let disinformation slide in the name of civility.

It also requires recalibrating expectations. This is not a story with a clean arc or a quick resolution. Fighting for a livable future is long work. It involves losses. It involves tradeoffs. It involves choosing where to apply pressure and where to build quietly. Hope still belongs here—but as fuel, not as a finish line.

Moving beyond “just hope” looks like choosing leverage over symbolism: supporting campaigns with legal teeth, regulatory consequences, or economic pressure, not just awareness. It looks like showing up to the boring meetings where decisions are actually made—and staying long enough to matter.

It looks like defending expertise when it is attacked, citing it, elevating it, and refusing to treat knowledge as elitism. It looks like naming bad actors when necessary, rather than hiding behind vague concern.

It looks like building coalitions that can endure disagreement instead of chasing perfect alignment. It looks like donating, organizing, voting, litigating, boycotting, and applying public pressure strategically—not performatively.

Most of all, it looks like accepting discomfort as part of the work. Progress that threatens entrenched interests will never feel polite. If it does, it probably isn’t working.

This is not a call for constant outrage or performative militancy. It is a call for clarity. Hope can open the door. Resolve, strategy, and sustained pressure are what carry movements through it. If a future worth inheriting is the goal, then it must be fought for—not someday, not abstractly, not politely, but now, with intention and with others.

Hope lights the match. What happens next determines whether anything changes.