Faithfulness to the life within us insists on our going on hoping. And responsible hope, conscious of anything much more than the immediate daily horizon of getting by, must now reach out towards the transformative changes in economy, society, politics and life-arrangements generally, which might even yet retrieve some kind of habitable world from the unprecedented perils now confronting humanity. But the burden of this book so far has been to argue that, just because the perils are so utterly unprecedented, transformative hope has to arise from depths of counter-empirical resolve at which it comes conceptually bound up with a tragic view of life as the condition of its necessary realism. I will not defend this claim any further, but will take it as having been made sufficiently compelling for the purposes of argument – although of course, what we think about the implications of accepting it will itself feed back into final assessment of the case as a whole.

We must now consider what those implications actually are, for the clamorous practicalities which beset us on every side. What can we take forward, into political and social action over the next two make-or-break decades, from the vital connections which I have been seeking to establish between hope, realism and tragedy? What difference would framing lifehope explicitly within a tragic vision make to our understanding of how we must grapple with our dangerous prospects, and seize upon our remaining opportunities? How would being properly realistic about the climate emergency feel, and where might it take us?

Here is the place to emphasize again a point made in the Introduction, that the answers to these questions and the consequent practical recourses which I suggest in the remaining chapters are all intended to be provisional and heuristic. The argument thus far, from lost empirical hope to life-hope informed by a tragic vision, is I think watertight – or at any rate, it is one which I myself find wholly convincing. By comparison, what follows explores forward, open-endedly, along lines which the conclusion of that argument seems to me to indicate. The proposals turned up by that exploration will, I am sure, be found starkly controversial by many.