Weeding Out The Shoots of Despair
When you're questioning if your individual actions make any difference
Dear Human of Planet Earth,
How’s your week been going?
For me, climate despair came knocking. And I had to knock it back.
Climate despair came in the form of Peter Dynes’ tweet:
Climate change is beyond the point where individual agency will have any impact. You’re born into a system and zeitgeist with little control. Collective action on a scale never seen before is required.
Notice, Peter wasn’t despairing. But he was pointing out that what is necessary is also what isn’t happening.
Now meet Timo.
Timo argued back via tweet, that defeatism is a tool of the fossil fuel lobby.
If we believe radical change is impossible and our own efforts make no difference, we’ll shrug and hope gradual change and government policies will fix it, while we sit in the pot like frogs on the boil, desperately wanting to believe the warming water is just a sauna, and not a death sentence. Worse yet, defeatism could sink us in the quagmire of despair, climate grief and depression. You can see Timo’s response to Peter below.
Notice Peter refers to collective action. But every collective is made up of individuals.
I retweeted Peter’s position, adding my own thoughts:
In essence, I was saying that for there to be collective action, first there must be collective awareness.
Most people are willing to do something difficult if they really believe the difficult thing is necessary, urgent and makes a difference - and others around them are also doing the difficult thing.
When in January 2020, China put millions of its citizens under a Covid lockdown, the Western world gasped. We believed such things were possible in authoritarian China but not in Western democracies.
We were wrong.
A few months later we saw most people would willingly do something radical if they believed collectively that the radical thing was necessary, urgent and would make a difference.
What about the anti-maskers and anti-lockdown protestors? Well, they didn’t trust the messenger. They didn’t believe the message. They weren’t part of the collective awareness.
Let experts be experts, but there’s still a role for you and me
The difference between the Covid crisis and the climate crisis is like the difference between a broken arm with a conscious, cheerful human attached to it, and an unconscious body that’s been in a horrific car accident, sustaining multiple injuries.
With the critically injured, there’s so much more for experts - the paramedics, emergency staff and the hospital medical team, to understand and do.
But if you were a bystander who’d just witnessed the accident, you wouldn’t say, “Ah well, only an expert medically trained practitioner can make a difference. Too bad! The accident victim will have to wait for the ambulance, and I’ll just cross my fingers and hope for the best. If it was just a broken arm I’d help you make a sling and take you to the hospital in my car. But since you’re probably broken beyond repair, good luck fellow human being.'“
No way! You’d do what you could. You’d call an ambulance, you’d give first aid if you knew how. You’d use the awareness you had, to take the action you could. You’d activate the system that would give the victim a chance of survival.
Now Peter was saying we need to activate the system - collective action.
But I’m saying, without collective awareness, the system isn’t likely to be activated. There’s just too much inertia. It’s like a sleeping, bad-tempered giant that doesn’t want to be disturbed.
Remember the Lilliputians and Gulliver? They moved that giant but they were little and it took a lot of them and a lot of co-operation.
So what, you say? Am I not just agreeing with Peter, that individual action doesn’t make a difference?
Here’s my crucial disagreement with Peter: individual action makes a difference to the collective awareness we need for collective action.
Humans are social beings. We take our cues from each other.
In this article, environmental leadership researcher Steve Westlake talks about the impact of choosing to quit flying by plane on a person’s circle of influence.
…my research, first in my masters and now as part of my PhD, has found that doing something bold like giving up flying can have a wider knock-on effect by influencing others and shifting what’s viewed as “normal”.
In a survey I conducted, half of the respondents who knew someone who has given up flying because of climate change said they fly less because of this example. That alone seemed pretty impressive to me. Furthermore, around three quarters said it had changed their attitudes towards flying and climate change in some way. These effects were increased if a high-profile person had given up flying, such as an academic or someone in the public eye. In this case, around two-thirds said they fly less because of this person, and only 7% said it has not affected their attitudes.
I wondered if these impressionable people were already behaving like squeaky-clean environmentalists, but the figures suggested not. The survey respondents fly considerably more than average, meaning they have plenty of potential to fly less because of someone else’s example.
Remember those graphics during the Covid crisis of how exponential growth works? We saw how quickly two infections could become hundreds, then tens of thousands.
Social influence is slower but similar.
The nudge to do more of my errands on foot came from people in my social circle. My husband and son were walking the trips I was driving. My son seemed to think I was ridiculous to consider the walk long, or worry about being late.
Then I was driving up the hill one day and saw my neighbour who is probably over 80, walking down the hill with his wife! And yes, he has a car.
That did it. If he could do it, I could do it too. And even if I took the bus up the hill on the way back, there would be one less polluting car on the road.
And I’ve been seizing those errands as opportunities to walk rather than drive ever since.
Similarly, the conscientious commitment of vegans whose veganism is based on climate concerns, has pushed the carbon emissions of my diet deeper into my awareness.
The result? I’m a conscious flexitarian on a daily basis. I’ve cut my dairy consumption down in the last few years and reduced our family’s red meat consumption as well. I think about air miles when choosing fruit and veg and what to indulge in at the local café.
Individual action makes a difference to collective awareness. And collective awareness is essential for collective action.
So I’ve got some questions for you!
What changes have you made in your life, influenced by people in your social circle, or even in the public sphere?
Have you made changes that influenced others?
If you haven’t made climate-conscious changes yet, in what other areas of your life can you recognise the power of social influence?
Now that the climate crisis is an everyday talking point, are you comfortable talking about your everyday climate-conscious actions in your social circle?
For better or for worse, your social circle is your sphere of influence!
And thanks for reading! Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical has already had over 62 views and 3 shares! I’m very grateful! And I have so much more to share. Till next time,
With Love,
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical,
Writing from Croydon, London,
That patch of earth known as The United Kingdom,
Lat. +51.51, Long. -0.118