Photo by Lexey Swall for The New York Times
by Eva Laporte
Finding Hope in the Web of Things: Climate, Conversation, and Courage
In Swing State, the natural world is not just a backdrop – it’s a living system that reflects the fragile state of our human relationships. Set against the ecological richness and uncertainty of rural Wisconsin, the play asks a quiet but urgent question: What do we owe each other – and the world we inhabit – when everything feels like it’s unraveling?
It’s a question that resonates far beyond the stage.
I recently came across climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe when searching the New York Public Library archives for material. You can view the interview “Climate Change: The Case for Hope and Healing with Katharine Hayhoe and Tia Nelson,” presented as part of The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures.
Katharine Hayhoe has spent much of her career translating the science of climate change into human terms. A Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University and Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, Hayhoe has contributed to multiple U.S. National Climate Assessments and authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications. Yet the message she returns to again and again is surprisingly simple: the most powerful climate action begins with conversation.
“Climate change is here and now, and not in some distant time or place,” Hayhoe has said. “The choices we’re making today will have a significant impact on our future.”
Her book Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World argues that the path forward is not only technological or political – it’s relational. Real change happens when people talk across differences, building trust strong enough to face difficult truths together.
That idea feels strikingly theatrical.
The characters in Swing State are all standing at a kind of crossroads – personal, political, ecological. Each is wrestling with grief, isolation, or the uneasy sense that systems they once relied on are breaking down. But ultimately, what shifts two characters’ trajectories is not a policy proposal or a scientific breakthrough. It’s the courageous act of showing up for one another.
At Surround Project, we often talk about theatre as an ecosystem of its own. A play only exists through the delicate interplay of writers, artists, audiences, and the shared space between them. Every performance is a temporary community built on listening to the story together.
Hayhoe’s work suggests that this kind of listening may also be one of our most important climate tools.
One of the most compelling aspects of her story is that she often speaks about climate science in places where the conversation can feel especially fraught. As an evangelical Christian who grew up in a missionary family, Hayhoe has described reconciling her scientific work and her faith as “like coming out of the closet.” Rather than retreating from communities where skepticism exists, she leans into dialogue – grounding conversations about climate in shared values like care for creation, responsibility for future generations, and love of place.
It’s a reminder that resilience is rarely solitary.
Ecosystems survive through interconnection: forests through networks of roots and fungi (which is like pure magic 🍄), watersheds through the delicate balance of countless organisms. Human communities are not so different. Our ability to face climate change – or any large collective challenge – depends on whether we can maintain those relational networks even when disagreement threatens to fracture them.
In that sense, hope may not be a feeling so much as a practice.
Hope looks like asking a difficult question instead of shutting down a conversation. It looks like staying at the table with someone whose worldview challenges our own. It looks like choosing curiosity over certainty, relationship over retreat.
Both Swing State and Hayhoe’s work remind us that the future will not be shaped by individuals acting alone. It will be shaped by people willing to take risks on one another.
In a divided world facing an ecological crossroads, that kind of courage might be the most important form of climate action we have.