Change/Climate Action/Guilt/Helplessness

“What can I do?”

“What’s the point of policy changes if people don’t get it?”

“It’s big biz that needs to make the big changes.”

“Business needs to survive, we can’t change everything unless there’s support/demand.”

“You can’t put at the individual’s doorstep when huge systems work the opposite way and cause massive damage.”

You hear all of that, and more when discussing the ecological problem. All true. There are no straightforward answers, but here are a few thoughts :

- It IS complex, and comprises many things, many people, many efforts, many ideas, motivations, structures — at every level. We got here through millions of edits in small ways over centuries, and we need millions to fix it and account for the accumulated blind spots from all of those edits.

- We need to do it as part of our daily life, our jobs, in our spheres of influence, however large/small they are. If enough do it at whatever level, that network of our actions, orgs, motivations, materials, outcomes will start to look very different. It looked very different even 300 years ago, and can look different, however impossible it might seem.

- Kuldeep Dantewadia of Reap Benefit recently explained their way of looking at change succinctly, and it stuck with me. To paraphrase — moving from unconscious wrong to being consciously wrong is a pre-step before being consciously right, where a couple of nodes and an edge of that complex network start changing. A large population being consciously wrong is also ready for legislative/other changes to nudge behaviour that is difficult to change itself because inertia. So what we often call “hypocrisy”, rather than be a cause for frustration and guilt, may be our biggest pathway to change, as long as we acknowledge it for that stage of change and use it as a positive move forward.

Here’s hoping/wishing for rapid, massive changes at every scale this #WorldEnvironmentDay — since we have perhaps 6–8 years to turn this ship around.