In the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.
For as long as humans have faced sudden environmental upheaval — from the ice of the Younger Dryas to today's wildfires and floods — survival has depended less on predicting the future than on adapting to it. Climate scientists and geographers now argue that our deep hunger for certainty, while understandable, may itself be a vulnerability: over-reliance on predictive models can misdirect infrastructure planning, while the anticipation of loss fuels a growing mental health crisis. The emerging counsel, drawn from both ancient human resilience and contemporary research, is to embrace uncertainty not as defeat, but as the very ground from which adaptive action and genuine hope can grow.
- Wildfires, floods, and ecological shifts are accelerating faster than communities can establish a 'new normal,' leaving people cycling through shock, adaptation, and loss in an exhausting loop.
- A mounting mental health crisis — marked by climate anxiety, grief, PTSD, and depression — is compounding the physical toll, as people mourn landscapes and futures they can no longer count on.
- Climate physicist David Stainforth warns that over-dependence on predictive models creates a false sense of security, potentially directing flood defenses and infrastructure toward futures that may never arrive.
- Geographer Michele Koppes argues that releasing the illusion of control is not surrender but liberation — a reframing that helped her, and the communities she studies, move through grief toward action.
- Younger generations are already modeling a quieter form of resilience: finding joy in what exists now, holding places lightly, and building lives that do not depend on the world staying still.
Thirteen thousand years ago, the Younger Dryas plunged the northern hemisphere into ice within decades. Our ancestors did not stop the cold — they found refugia, small sheltered places where life could persist, and they endured. That ancient instinct for adaptive survival, scientists now argue, may be exactly what the present moment demands.
In a small northern British Columbia town last fall, a lifelong mountain guide watched wildfire smoke turn September strange. The same smoke blanketed Vancouver, briefly giving it the worst air quality on earth. The surprise people felt, even as they chided themselves for feeling it, captures something essential: humans crave pattern and predictability, yet the world is delivering neither.
This hunger for certainty carries a cost. Physicians have linked climate impacts — and the dread of impacts yet to come — to rising rates of anxiety, depression, grief, and PTSD. Communities peer into the future through predictive models and build infrastructure accordingly. But Oxford physicist David Stainforth cautions that leaning too heavily on any single model is its own kind of risk. Climate systems are so deeply interconnected — Arctic sea ice influencing the Indian monsoon, North Atlantic rainfall reshaping African temperatures — that cascading effects quickly outrun our projections. 'The future in reality could be very, very different,' he warns. His prescription is not to abandon modeling, but to build refugia flexible enough to absorb surprises we haven't yet imagined.
UBC geographer Michele Koppes arrived at a similar place through different terrain. Studying glaciers and the communities living beside them, she found that accepting uncertainty — rather than fighting it — offered a genuine path through climate grief. 'The notion of control is a fallacy,' she said. Complex systems, by their nature, produce emergent outcomes no model fully anticipates.
What both researchers share is a conviction that grounding climate action in what people actually love and value — their cultures, landscapes, and ways of life — is more generative than chasing certainty. Rebecca Solnit captured the logic precisely: hope lives in the spaciousness of not-knowing, because that space is where action remains possible.
Younger generations seem to have grasped this intuitively. They hold their attachment to place more lightly, finding joy in what exists now without demanding it last forever. In doing so, they are not abandoning hope — they are practicing the oldest human survival strategy there is: adapting, enduring, and leaving room for a future that might yet be beautiful.
Thirteen thousand years ago, the northern hemisphere turned white almost overnight. Temperatures plummeted in what geologists measure as mere decades, and ice sheets descended from the mountains, erasing the warm world that humans and countless other species had inhabited for ten thousand years. The period that followed—the Younger Dryas, named for a small Arctic flower—lasted a thousand years and arrived with the speed of a hummingbird's heartbeat. Our ancestors didn't perish. They found refugia, small pockets of landscape where life could still take hold, and they endured. When the ice retreated as suddenly as it had come, the Holocene began.
We are living through our own moment of dramatic environmental upheaval, though ours is written in fire rather than ice. Last fall, in a small town in northern British Columbia, a conversation between neighbors turned to the unseasonable heat and the wildfires that had erupted even as the season seemed to be ending. The man speaking had grown up there, spent his life in the mountains as a guide and outdoors enthusiast. "I have never seen a September like this," he said, his voice carrying the weight of someone watching the familiar become strange. Those same fires that filled his mountain town with smoke blanketed Vancouver for days, making its air quality the worst on the planet. We were surprised, even as we scolded ourselves for being surprised.
Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures, but we are also creatures who crave certainty. We build our lives around patterns—the rhythms of seasons, the predictability of weather, the assumption that next year will resemble this year. We plan picnics and road trips, soccer games and barbeques, anchoring ourselves to these expectations. As the world shifts beneath us, we shift with it, though painfully and in fits. We now plan for wildfire season, something unthinkable in childhood. We pack inhalers and sunscreen. We abandon campfires during summer months because of fire bans that stretch for months. Each time, we establish a new normal and cling to it, only to watch it dissolve again.
This hunger for certainty exacts a cost. A growing body of research suggests that climate impacts—and the anticipation of impacts yet to come—are fueling a mental health crisis. Physicians have documented associations between climate change and post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, grief, and suicidal ideation. We peer into possible futures using predictive climate models, designing infrastructure we hope will shield our communities from fires and floods. But the world changes as fast as that hummingbird heartbeat, and we act as though each pulse will last forever. There is only so far we can see.
David Stainforth, a physicist and climate scientist at Oxford, argues that our reliance on predictive models, however sophisticated, can trap us. Climate models play an important role in adaptation, but leaning too heavily on any single set of predictions can satisfy our hunger for certainty in dangerous ways. "You're building the flood defences to protect yourself against the future in the model," he explained. "And the future in reality could be very, very different from that." In his 2023 book, Predicting Our Climate Future, Stainforth makes the case that uncertainties in climate systems compound over decades until almost everything can influence almost everything else—changes in Arctic sea ice rippling into the Indian summer monsoon, shifts in North Atlantic rainfall reshaping temperatures across central Africa. By embracing uncertainty rather than fighting it, he argues, we can build refugia capable of withstanding impacts we haven't yet imagined.
Michele Koppes, a geographer at the University of British Columbia who studies climate impacts on mountains and glaciers, has found that accepting uncertainty offers a path through climate-related grief and anxiety. Her work began with the physical landscape but shifted toward the human dimension—the stories of people living closest to these changes, their perceptions, their needs for resilience. That reframing helped her process her own sense of loss as she watched places she loved melt away. "The notion of control is a fallacy," she said. "The more I spend time on this earth, the more I recognize how we are just one small part of a complex system. And complex systems are the process of emergent phenomena—you never quite know where it's going to go."
Our ancestors facing the Younger Dryas probably didn't debate how to stop the ice. They took stock of their surroundings and acted quickly to protect what mattered most. Stainforth emphasizes that grounding conversations about climate change in what we actually care about—our societies, our cultures, the world we've grown up in—is essential to spurring action and hope. Infrastructure will need rebuilding more and more frequently because of landslides, flooding, drought, and ecological shifts. These repairs will drain government resources, leaving less for culture, transport, health, education. "It's a threat to everything," Stainforth said. "It's about building a future that we want."
Rebecca Solnit, writing about hope, emphasized the value of uncertainty itself. "Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act," she wrote. If we believe too firmly in a predictable future, we risk apathy, grief, and paralysis. But if we accept uncertainty as fundamental, we can act. Koppes sees this embodied in younger generations, who have loosened their grip on certainty without falling into despair. They no longer expect to preserve a snapshot of place or time. Instead, they grasp at the components of their environments still bringing them joy, knowing those things might not last their lifetime. They are accepting an existential truth: everything is always changing. And while we cannot be certain about the risks ahead, we also cannot predict how beautiful or resilient the world we co-create might become.
Citas Notables
You're building the flood defences to protect yourself against the future in the model. And the future in reality could be very, very different from that.— David Stainforth, climate scientist, Oxford
The more I spend time on this earth, the more I recognize how we are just one small part of a complex system. And complex systems are the process of emergent phenomena—you never quite know where it's going to go.— Michele Koppes, geographer, University of British Columbia
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does accepting uncertainty feel so different from just being pessimistic about the future?
Because uncertainty cuts both ways. Pessimism says the future is fixed and bad. Uncertainty says the future is genuinely open—which means your actions matter. You're not resigned; you're activated.
But doesn't that make planning harder? If we can't predict what's coming, how do we build anything?
You build for resilience instead of precision. You don't build a flood wall to stop exactly the 100-year flood. You build systems that can bend and adapt to whatever comes, because the whatever is genuinely unknown.
The article mentions mental health crises tied to climate anxiety. Does accepting uncertainty actually help people feel better?
Yes, but not in the way you'd expect. It's not comforting. It's liberating. When you stop fighting the fact that you can't control everything, you can focus on what you actually can influence—your community, your values, what you protect.
Your students seem to have figured this out already. What's different about how they think?
They grew up in a world that was already changing. They never had the luxury of assuming stasis. So they're not grieving a lost certainty—they're learning to find meaning in what's still here, knowing it might not be forever.
That sounds like it could go either way—toward apathy or toward fierce protection.
Exactly. The difference is whether you believe your actions matter. If you accept uncertainty and also accept that you can influence outcomes, you protect fiercely. If you accept uncertainty and give up on influence, you get apathy. One is grief; the other is hope.