change makers

We were told that this was our final chance to band together to cap carbon emissions and lead the world away from the brink of disaster. And it seems the world could now all be on the same page. Scientists and institutions have convinced us that global warming is real and we need to move quickly to save life as we know it. Governments have all taken up the challenge to reduce carbon emissions and limit global warming. But who will make the changes?

 

We who have enough are overwhelmed by commentary on fuel prices and taxes, extreme weather and environmental, air and water pollution, traffic congestion and suburban sprawl, food and resource scarcity, economic downturns and fractured societies. These topics are difficult - difficult to discuss, difficult to access and difficult to find consensus on. They are tied intimately to our lifestyle, or at least to the postindustrial consumer culture most of us have grown up in. We are vaguely certain that our governments and global organizations must have it all under control, but our society continues to revel in excess while our energy continues to rises and natural resources dwindle. We sense that there are changes we can make, and we are right. Global warming is a global problem that can only be solved by all of us.

 

questions that foster change

Something fundamental does needs to change, but it is daunting to sift through overlapping, complex and contradictory information from scientists, activists, policy makers and politicians, not to mention colleagues and neighbors.

 

Who knows best? Will doing something make a difference? How do we start? Who goes first? These are questions I have been asking myself. We have spent decades being ecological and mindful of nature. More recently we have thought globally and efficiently, and we have tried to attain environmental sustainability by thinking holistically. But now it seems they have done little to solve the real problems we face.

 

Change can be scary, especially in context of the goals we need to attain in order to stop global warming. But as I started to better understand my own role in the quest to stop global warming, I found that the process of making lifestyle changes in the right direction is actually pretty interesting, even exciting. Many people have been slowly and (often too) quietly doing the groundwork for us. They have been thinking about what needs to be done to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and they have been thinking about changes we need to make - to our lifestyles, to our economies, to our own thinking - to get there.

 

Most of us know quite a few of these change makers, their lives are in fact little different from our own. What I found they all have in common is a respect for the longer cycle of everything our society does. We can all be change makers as well, once we start to look at the larger impact of our own lives. Asking questions is the way to start, finding answers is what keeps the process going. The answers can be surprisingly close at hand, in our own behavior, in our interaction with those close to us and with those farther afield.

 

on the way to transition

Rob Hoskins, a British environmentalist and teacher, in The Transition Handbook, published in 2008, notes that people he spoke to about the challenges of transitioning from a fossil fuel-based economy felt powerless to change the status quo and they felt frightened by the consequences of not being able to do so. But he found that as people began to understand why they should and how they could reduce their energy use, they not only became empowered to reduce their energy use, but they also strengthen the ability of their communities to be self-sufficient, or “resilient”. The key lay in changing fear into motivation for reaching a common goal.

 

My own transition has been slow but principled. As my children got older, I started reading on global poverty and fair-trade. As I committed more time to my profession, I started to better understand the role the built environment plays both in shaping global problems and in solving them. But I felt that whatever lifestyle decisions I embraced meant very little in the larger scheme of things. It seemed that only a few people I encountered, even a few years ago, were willing to spend time addressing the issues. I was especially aware of the attitude differences between those I spoke to in the US and those I spoke to in Switzerland. I wondered how to coax friends and family to look outside their very busy boxes.

 

When I started looking, I found that there are a plenty of people in the US working to change the way Americans think and use fossil fuels and other resources. Their efforts have been diverse and not always appreciated by mainstream culture. More recently however, their knocking away at efforts to avert global warming and general excess has made a rather large collective impact. The production of solar and wind energy has been rising, as the use of coal and other fossil fuels has been declining. Local industry and grassroots revitalization has been making a comeback.

 

 When we comprehend why we must reduce our energy use, we can transform our fear about losing what we have into motivation to reach the goals that the UN Paris conference has set, not just for governments, but in fact for each of us. We can gain an understanding of what is being done and of how it all fits together with what still needs to be done. The question we really should ask is, how can I fulfill my own needs, our needs, without jeopardizing the needs of future generations?

 

We are on the path towards reducing our energy and resource use, but it’s not happening fast enough. If we pool our knowledge, we become a community, a community that embraces the challenges of changing our world together. We have to live our lives through this anyway, so we might as well find ways to enjoy the journey towards our goals. We can embrace sufficience. We will be happier and more resilient.