If you follow environmental issues, chances are you’ve come across the beautiful, inspiring Hopenhagen campaign. The purpose of the campaign is to draw attention to the upcoming United Nations climate change conference COP15, which you can read more about here. Many folks who care deeply about climate change are watching closely with their fingers crossed, hoping that strong commitments will come out of the conference.

For those of us on the ground who care about the outcome of the talks but aren’t involved in politics, there isn’t much to do but watch and worry. And that’s where Hopenhagen comes in. The brain-child of Ogilvy Earth, an international sustainability marketing company, Hopenhagen is the branding of a movement. The purpose of the campaign is to give activists something to do besides watch and worry: we can hope. The power of “hope,” as we learned with the viral “Yes We Can” video during the Obama campaign, is that hope has a way to inspire and motivate people to action in a way that fear never can.

Hopenhagen is not only a play on the city where the talks will take place, but a subtle jibe at the choices we have in the climate crisis. We can cope with climate change by changing our behavior, moving inland and finding alternate habitats for the polar bears, or we can hope that the crisis will move us toward a more sustainable way of living sustainably, with the resources we have available on this planet. There’s a lot of opportunity for innovation there.

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