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8 Meaningful Things You Can Start Doing for the Climate… Today
Here’s how to go on a climate diet
Should we do nothing or should we do something?
There’s a lot we can ask ourselves about climate change, but in the end, this is the question that really matters in the immediate experience of living our lives. Should we put our very own shoulders to the wheel before us, grinding out, through our own efforts, a transformation of our culture, our economy and, really, life as we know it, or should we lie down before this rising sea of troubles, accept the futility of opposing them, and hope that we somehow survive in what is rapidly becoming a less and less livable world?
I started asking this question because I had become fixated on an essential disconnect that keeps many of us on the sidelines of climate action. On the one hand, awareness of the problem has risen markedly in the last few years and many more Americans want to do something to fix it. On the other hand, most scientists and policy makers have correctly identified the crisis as far bigger than the scope of what one person can do. Both perspectives are valid. But when they collide, the psychological effect on the average citizen is paralysis. “Where is my place in all this?” a person confronted with this dilemma wonders. “What can I possibly do that is meaningful?”
