Resurgence & Ecologist magazine Issue 355 • March/April 2026

Hope as a radical act

When the first issue of Resurgence appeared in 1966, the world was changing fast, both materially and psychologically. Modernity had reached its full expression, and people were asking questions.

Resurgence emerged as a challenge to modernity, calling for peace, spirituality and ecological awareness. Sixty years on, we find ourselves at a moment when powerful interests are seeking to return us to those heady days of the 1960s. To project forward, we first have to look clearly at the now: a time of ecological collapse; war and genocide; technologies dependent on relentless extraction; and massive inequality. If we wish to save what is still beautiful in this world, we must not lose hope. But where can we look for hope today, and how radical an act is hope itself? The themed section of this issue offers four responses to those questions.

Rebecca Solnit grounds hope historically and politically, reframing it as agency, continuity and incremental change, alongside a refusal to surrender. While governments and policy fail us, The Land Gardeners return hope to the soil, focusing on the local and practical actions of farmers and growers who are building their own regenerative solutions. Giuliana Furci finds hope in the fungal world, explaining how a fungal lens reveals interdependence, cooperation and forms of intelligence that challenge human exceptionalism. And Sonji Shah questions and troubles hope itself, shifting it away from certainty towards relationship, responsibility and the not-yet-known. As we rehearse for the future, hope emerges as collective, grounded and deeply relational. It becomes a radical act, unshackled from optimism and outcomes, yet committed to participation, care and the unfinished work of imagining the otherwise.

Elsewhere in the magazine, Katie Hodgetts suggests that inner development must accompany our calls for justice, while Rachel Fleming invites us to recover more subtle ways of listening and relating to land. Amy Warren explores the idea of the evolved nest as a more nurturing relationship with our own human ecology, while Satish Kumar reflects on poetry and love as daily practices that soften the ego and widen our capacity for care. Of course there is more, much more. Let us hope we haven’t run out of time – chronos, and also kairos.

Free to read

• The radical hope of soil: Bridget Elworthy and Henrietta Courtauld
• Agreements that bind us: Brendan Montague
• From bleak streets to greener streets: Andrea Perry
• The sounds of the deep below: Rowena Wilson
• Threads of life: Chiharu Shiota
• Idealised dream or powerful tool?: India Bourke