How YOU can save the planet! In 500 words, or less…

ok, here goes...

Actually.

Sorry.

It’s impossible.

The enormity and complexity of the issues we face today cannot be simplified so readily. Which means most of us - caught in the headlights of personal and collective overwhelm - make no changes at all.

Perhaps we even secretly believe we can comfortably carry on without having to make changes.

Truth is that carrying on as we do is not sustainable, in the very essence of this overused word. How we are today will not sustain us, or the billions more humans yet to come. Much less the other sentient beings who share our world that we’re rapidly killing off with our unsustainable ways.

copyright World Wildlife Fund

So, we cannot escape this difficult situation without changing.

BUT, we’re ready for it!

Afterall, most films, stories, and videogames have been preparing us for decades.

We have the tools. Now’s the time to use them.

The hero/ine’s journey isn’t about the one who stays home eating palm-oil products and watching Netflix. The hero/ine’s journey celebrates the one who ventures out and is changed by what s/he meets on the plastic-strewn path.

Folks talk about Climate Change as though it requires belief. It exists and it’s happening - whether you believe in it or not.

Remember Peter Pan? Remember how every time someone said they didn’t believe in fairies, another one died? What if every time you said, “I don’t believe in Climate Change,” another species died?

That’s pretty much what’s happening.

Our reluctance to engage, or believe, is perpetuating destruction.

The overwhelm is totally warranted. How can any one of us make any difference?

How do we know our actions will have any measurable impact?

But maybe a better question is:

 “How can I live in right relationship with the world around me?”

If you’re still reading, kudos to you! You’re clearly already on the hero/ine’s journey by questioning what-is. You’ve stepped out of your comfort zone.

Let’s say you’re concerned about deforestation because you know the irrevocable biodiversity loss that comes from cutting down 10 million hectares of mature ecosystem each year, all for the sake of beef, feedstock for beef, and wood products like paper.

But what can be done?

Here are 3 things you can do immediately that require minimal change to your first-rate life:

·      Switch internet browser from Google to Ecosia. 100% of their profits go to planting trees in the places that need them.

·      Refuse to buy any products that use palm oil. Check the ingredients lists. Exercise your enormous consumer power!

·      Minimize or eliminate your beef consumption. This film, with Kate Winslet’s sexy narration, tells the story of how.

One last tip, for bigger-picture contemplation:  

Ask yourself what you love.

Trace that back to its roots, or into the future, and notice how everything is linked. There’s no escaping this particular “wicked problem”.

The sooner we all chip in, the sooner we preserve what we love.

This post comes courtesy of my final assignment for Climate Change & Environmental Management (which, by my reckoning, is really more about human management) with Conservation/Biodiversity Professor Richard Fuller and Oceanography Associate Professor Helen Bostock, both of whom, by the end of a term with 300 students in this one class alone, had nearly lost their voices. How to get folks to hear is the challenge they’ve spent decades facing into. Consolidating into something digestible and actionable is a skill for sure. After the last shared assignment of 4,000 words, it was a relief, but also quite a task, to say anything meaningful with only 500 words. As Mark Twain said:

Last few days of term—one more assignment and one exam to go and then on to writing and rehearsing for my solo show in the Anywhere Festival, Heaven On Earth, over the break. Next term I’m excited to be enrolled in Environmental Philosophy, Science Engagement in the Community, Sustainable Business Practice and the beginning of my own special-interest research! Stay tuned, be well, and thanks so much for reading…