The condition of realism, as I stated it in the Introduction, was that hope must address itself to a real chance of the hoped-for event's coming to pass. But what counts as a real chance? Here, already, we need to embark on some conceptual clarification.

The odds are apparently about a million to one, for instance, against your being struck by lightning in any given year. Is there, nevertheless, a real chance that this will happen to you? There is a sense in which that assertion of the odds itself constitutes an affirmative answer: yes, indeed, there really is such a chance, although it is a very, very slim one because misfortunes of this nature occur extremely rarely – only about one time in a million when you are out and about, to be more precise. But then, in that sense, the condition of realism would be met by any case where what one was hoping for wasn't something literally impossible, such as travelling back in time, however overwhelming one judged the odds against its happening to be – and that is plainly not what we intend when we recognize that hope has to be realistic to do its proper work.

Instead, we mean ‘realistic’ here in the sense in which it would be unrealistic to frame one's New Year resolutions, holiday arrangements and so forth on the basis that one might on any day in the coming twelve months be taken out by lightning – just as it would be still less realistic to erect such life-plans on the firm assumption that one will this year win millions on the Lottery. The chances are such in either case that it would be wildly impractical to spend any time worrying about or joyously anticipating the events in question, or even (except perhaps idly and momentarily) contemplating them at all. The condition of realism in relation to both our fears and our hopes, that is, carries an essential reference to the common-sense distinction between attention to the way the world objectively is, and fearful or wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking, which this opposition distinguishes specifically from hope, we could define for the moment as the process of letting one's desires play a larger role in generating one's expectations about what will happen than the facts relevant to what is likely to happen actually warrant.

So the realism of transformation is ambitious. If hope informed by it can envisage a rapid and dramatic shift in the perception by individuals of their agency and motivations, in relation to their whole Earth-systemic context, that shift could also by extension transform the pressures shaping action by groups and collectives all the way up to the nation state and the international order. This means we are to hope for nothing less than a new kind of movement for change, establishing itself with astonishing speed through all the new forms of connectivity now available – a movement of deliberate and emphatic individual acceptance of responsibility for the wider biospheric life which is now threatened. How such a movement might be brought sufficiently swiftly into being, through what activities of consciousness-raising and mobilization coupled with the impacts of which unignorably climate-driven disasters, is an open-ended matter. So are the expressive forms which it might take, and the drastic political changes which it will demand. Empirically, none of that is remotely credible. Practically, we have no option left but to hope against hope that it could yet happen. That means believing what the previous chapters have tried to set out the warrant for believing: that the hope which we must invest counter-empirically in bringing transformation about can genuinely create the possibility of our becoming the life-responsible agents of its happening.

Counter-empirical hope, however, remains hope: desire for a valued outcome under the sign of contingency. As such – the point from which our whole enquiry into its implications started – it must be directed at something which, while uncertain of achievement, is nevertheless in principle achievable, which means, something really (at some level) in prospect. That is, it must still, for all the life-depth of its impulsion, meet the condition of realism by pointing to real possibilities. But now, if we have recognized the power of human action spurred by hope to create possibility, what kind of requirement could that be? Haven't we presented ourselves with an allpurpose superpower to do anything whatsoever? The suspicion that we might be trying to do just that lurks, naturally enough, not far beneath our ongoing cultural reluctance to acknowledge what I have been calling the creativity of human action.

For all that I have been saying in Chapter 7, XR is evidently the nearest thing to a climate-driven revolution yet to have emerged in the advanced West, where the emergency must be decisively confronted if there is to be any future for humanity. It draws, as we have seen, on genuine energies of recoil, rejection and revolt. The importance of those energies cannot be overemphasized, but nor must their nature and dynamic be misconstrued.

We can bring out what is at stake here by reflecting on a characterization of Rebellion which might strike one, prima facie, as peculiarly insightful:

This emphasis on the ‘metabolic’ combination of ‘political, instinctual and moral’ motivational elements – the gut and the conscience working together – tells us something very important about XR's genesis. But the conjunction becomes still more revealing when we register that we have here not, in fact, a description of the current situation at all, but part of the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse's enthusiastic welcome for the student movement of the later 1960s. That is, or should be, uncomfortable as well as revealing, because we know what happened that time around. Those student protests, described unsympathetically but not unfairly by Alasdair MacIntyre as ‘more like a new version of the children's crusade than a revolutionary movement’, were an expression of typical adolescent discontent which happened to coincide with widening access to the protected space of tertiary education, increasing availability of contraception, the beginnings of the televised ‘media cycle’ and an easy target for moral outrage in the Vietnam War.

We ended the previous chapter by concluding that the difference which no one is too small to make must be a matter of helping to dislodge the assumption of self-interested action which underpins the collective-action dilemma. Unfortunately, appealing from self-interest to moral responsibility fails to escape the essence of this dilemma. The trouble is that the disparity between action and climate effect remains in force to prevent morality from getting any real grip here.

At first blush that seems counter-intuitive – surely the moral issues in this area are starkly clear? Whatever sense it makes in general to attach moral predicates to a collective entity (unsurprisingly, a contested point in social philosophy), it must be taken for the purposes of this book as perfectly intelligible to say that Western-style civilization, in persisting with its high-carbon ways of living while knowing what it ought by now to know about their consequences for climate and biosphere, is acting with gross irresponsibility. Indeed, attributions of climate irresponsibility to anything other than a large enough collective entity would be unintelligible, since only of such a collective does the claim that its actions are jeopardizing the climate even make sense. Again, however contested might be the issue of irresponsibility towards what – the question of whether an extensionist environmental ethics which talks about duties to threatened species or to the biosphere itself makes sense – it surely cannot be denied that future people, at least, are being thereby treated irresponsibly, nor moreover (as emphasized in the Introduction) that some of those who will suffer serious future adversity from such dealings are already alive. And the failure of those in prominent positions, most glaringly the world's so-called political ‘leaders’, to have led their various constituencies towards accepting the need for change has been a form of dereliction of duty beside which ineptitudes like blundering into war or Brexit pale in comparison.