Struggling with the Questions, Looking for Answers
Back when I was in my crisis stage I was stuck asking myself what I could do. What could I do?
Nothing I could think of seemed remotely sufficient.
Go knock on people’s doors??? What would I be asking people to do?
I could join Al Gore’s army. But Al Gore didn’t have an army. And what would an army to fight Climate Change do anyway? Build bridges? Would they be literal or figurative bridges? Do we need bridges?
Maybe I could re-create my evolutionary biologist/curator career into…???
I’d give my left leg if it would make a difference, but it wouldn’t.
At that point I was still driving my sky blue 2006 Prius. I hung my laundry up to dry, even in the winter. I rinsed and re-used my zip-lock bags. I’d changed out all the lightbulbs in the house. Twice. I was trying to get solar-sourced electric. I voted for the political party that acknowledged that Climate Change was real.
All my actions as a consumer and as a voter were in line with my concerns about Climate Change, but it all just seemed so…minor. So small. So ineffective. It seemed that to otherwise participate in “normal life” at all was to be complicit in the demise of the world. Maybe I could abandon my “normal” life, go live like a hermit in the Rockies? But then wouldn’t I be, by definition, not normal, or “abnormal?” Or worse, crazy? I didn’t want that either. It was hard to see how that would help any more than being complicit.
What could I do?
Letting Go of Finding “The” Answer
I don’t know when I gave up on having to be able to see exactly how my actions would actually save the world and just became content knowing that all I could do was the best I could do. I think at some point I just realized that was all I had. I didn’t want to set myself up for a shameful day of reckoning with my children. A day where they struggled to understand how I could know, and yet not do everything I could to stop or slow or minimize what was coming. Someday, a whole world of humanity was going to have to try to reconcile how any human being from our time—that’s you and me—could have known what was coming and not flown into extreme action. Extreme action won’t sound irrational or extreme in the future. Minimally, it will sound smart and sensible. Likely, it will sound heroic. If I was going to have to answer to my kids someday, or to my future self, I just wanted to be able to hold my head high and be able say “I wrestled with the important questions and made my choices.” Or “I did every thing I could think to do at the time.” Or “I tried to do the best I could imagine doing given who and where I was at the time.”
And once I allowed for that to be the target—the best that I could do—I got a whole lot freer about the whole thing. There’s a lot of room to move in “the best you can do.” I knew my answers wouldn’t look like everyone else’s answer, or be “the” right answer, but just my best answer. It was okay to be personal that way.
The core idea is this: none of us has as much money as we can imagine having. None of us has as much influence as we can imagine having. None of us has as much time as we can imagine having, none of us has as much knowledge, or as many skills or abilities or talents as we can imagine having, so it is logical to see ourselves as inherently limited. 1
This is one possible perspective. A “cup is half empty” perspective. Relatively speaking, you can always imagine being less limited than you are by having some resource(s) you don’t currently have. You see less limited people around you all the time, right?
But how about going the other way? Can you imagine being more limited? Having more constraints imposed on you? If you look, you can also see more limited people around you. People with less money, less opportunity, even less time because they have to work two jobs to make ends meet. People with less functionality in their lives. Imagine taking away your freedoms and you will start to see how free you are. Draw a lottery card to exchange places with a similarly average person in China, India, or African, and you will find yourself significantly more limited. The potential leverage of the average American is something we don’t even recognize. Consequently, we don’t wield the power we do have very well.
We have to own up to the power we do have.
Finding Your Place of Power
When you take the pressure off of yourself to have the answer, or to solve or fix the problem, and instead challenge yourself to contribute the most you can toward a solution, you should find yourself in a significantly more powerful place.
You are back in the position of control. Your cup is half full. What do you have in your cup anyway? You can manifest the best you have to give. You can be creative. You can ask yourself who you are, what you are good at, what is important to you, what you enjoy, and most specifically what you have to offer.
That last bit—what you have to offer—is the essential piece of one’s Place of Power that connects us back to doing something meaningful to address the Climate Change crisis.
My choices inside my personal life—like what I buy and don’t buy, how my family uses energy, what our personal carbon-, plastic-, chemical-, landuse- footprints are—are incredibly important. Managing these things is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient. What the world critically lacks and needs is clarity about what is going on in terms of our systems and their consequences for our health and the environment and Climate Change. People also need help with coping and even embracing that reality so that they can be transitioned into people working to make the changes we need. In addition to our carbon footprints, we all have a social footprint. A ripple of influence that extends out from us into other people. It has to be people, together, who fix this problem. That means finding your Place of Power includes going out into the world and trying to influence people. To help them be more effective versions of themselves.
For me, I’ve decided I want to offer people the same thing I discovered I needed: a framework for hope, and a map showing pathways and a thousand destinations where my behaviors matter. I like thinking deeply about things, and I like writing, and public speaking. I like science and teaching science to non-scientists. These things suggested some paths over others for me. But what if you hate public speaking? What if you are not a scientist? What if you feel like you’ve never been able to explain Climate Change to anyone, and couldn’t defend anything from a denier? That’s okay. That’s where you are, and I guarantee there are other people in similar places. If you are climbing a mountain, the people one step above you can help you up, and you can help the people one step below you.
No matter who you are, you still have a role to play.
Grassroots are made from the tangled fibers of many individual plants. Whose fibers are in your immediate vicinity? Start by reaching out to those nearest you. Who do you talk to? What communities are you in? Who are your peeps? What do they know and understand about these issues? Do they know Climate Change is real? That the science is clear about that? Do they know how small the true “denier” community actually is? Do they know the consequences of Climate Change are dire? Do they know how dire? Do they need a friend to talk about this with? Do they want to find their own way to becoming the more engaged?
Our responses can run the gamut. From hand-holding a friend or loved-one through organizing a march or running for a public office. Moving people up the continuum of the Six Americas is work that will be done by people and ideas. You can focus on whoever you relate to. You can work at whatever scale you think you have best access to, or where you feel like you might have the greatest affect. You can use whatever skills you’ve got for that task. Talk to people one-on-one. Identify someone who is already trying to create something and help with whatever they need help with. Organize, lead, contribute, follow. Talk about it. Paint, draw, or computer-graphic about it.
When you apply heat to a pot of water, the heat energy spreads from one heated molecule to the next until the whole pot of water is hot. Become activated and activate the people around around you. Feel the heat run through you and pass it on to others.
Let me close this post with one last thought. Being a single person of finite power in an era with an impending crisis of planetary scale is an inherently challenging reality. However it is not the only reality, or even the most important reality. It is also true that it is not the circumstances we find ourselves in that define or even limit us, but rather who we chose to be in those circumstances that determines our happiness and success.
Let’s work from our places of power, not our limitations.
Footnote: There is a must-see, unbelievable, unscripted moment inside this otherwise very inspiring TED talk (just start at the beginning and let it unfold for maximum effect). In a powerfully real exchange with audience member Al Gore, speaker Tony Robbins brings home the idea of how much we all limit ourselves by giving over to feeling limited by our external circumstances, . ↩︎
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