Agonistic hopes in 'New Tasmania’: the utility and liability of ecological hope in solutions journalism

With emerging solutions and constructive journalism practices, news outlets increasingly centralise hopeful news in their reporting of the environment. Implicit in their normative justifications is the idea of hope as a public and democratic good and, in particular, hope as a means of opening up public discourse about the environment, freeing it from paralysing anxiety and fear. While a journalistic innovation, this idea about hope is now pervasive in documentary films, political pronouncements, corporate public relations and activist communications alike. Without losing hope, this paper scrutinises the implicit assumptions underlying claims about the efficacy of ecological hope. Based on analysis of Australian future-focused articles, I argue that solution-focused stories are often a means of enclosing, safeguarding and privatising imagined ecological futures. Without considering who gives and is given hope and who is excluded, ecological hope risks creating communities of exclusion and a discursive vacuum for spurious and insurgent hopes.