It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the climate emergency, so I’ve started this blog to lift my spirits and share ways people are taking action and making change happen.
Sometimes I find myself thinking about all the things I’m personally failing at. Like the amount of items that somehow, unconsciously find their way into my home covered in single use plastic.
Now, I’m an Australian-British person living a modestly eco life just outside London, but when I total up my average emissions each month, I’m definitely living on ~1.5 planets.
Last year I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts, How to Save a Planet and their episode ‘Is your Carbon Footprint BS’. They quoted a stat that reframed the issue for me: an average American’s carbon footprint is 15 tons, and overall the global carbon emissions is 50 billion tons. This means the average American’s contribution to the total global problem is 0.0000000003.
Even if you are the perfect, zero-waste, low-carbon footprint human being, that doesn’t change the world unless you do something bigger than yourself. Because if you disappear tomorrow, we would still be facing exactly the same magnitude of climate crisis because you’re just a rounding error to global carbon emissions.
Dr Ayana Elizabeth Taylor – How to Save a Planet: Is your Carbon Footprint BS?
Given my new understanding of my own minuscule impact, I more often find myself despairing at all the work our society needs to do urgently to address global heating.
Like shifting to renewable, clean energy sources to power our homes and transportation. Like drastically reducing industry’s reliance on fossil fuels. Like governments outright banning single use plastic. Like transforming agriculture and improving soil health. Like setting more ambitious targets for a carbon zero future…
The list feels endless. The politics are often nasty and complicated. The subject is divisive. My thoughts can wander down that rabbit hole and suddenly the problem feels huge and hard. It’s a bit of a downer.
But then I try to remind myself there are tonnes of inspirational ways people are already making change happen. From little things, big things grow. There are easy, small, impactful things I can do now that can (maybe, possibly) turn into bigger, impactful things later. We’ve got to start somewhere.
There are amazing people around the world who are transforming their homes, communities, cities and countries. These initiatives can start as very small changes – maybe just in one’s own backyard or community group – then have great ripples of influence. If enough of us make a change and take action, the effect is felt in the offices of policy makers and in the strategy rooms of big fossil fuel consumer companies. Systems are changing, one ripple at a time.
To avoid that feeling of climate emergency despair, I want and need to feel like I’m working on making a difference every single day.
So I’m setting myself a mission in 2022 to find inspirational people who are making change happen and share their stories. I want to learn how I can transform my own world and share that journey, but most importantly I want to learn how I can make changes that ripple out and have an impact greater than just myself.
I want to share these stories with anyone else who’d find it helpful to follow along too. So here we go…
Featured photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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