Tip 7: One person can do a lot

Tip 7 Act individually, but go further to act collectively

We live in a very difficult time of distortion and denial. It penetrates across the globe, from cities to countries, into the minds of millions. Climate change is dismissed. Science and repeated warnings are passed over. Calls for war and the stock market are in the forefront while there is a black-out on reporting of the climate emergency. Yet, unprecedented, once-in-a-hundred-year events occur weekly or monthly. Record floods, heat, drought, forest fires, rainfall, and hurricanes rattle our communities. That is why Greta Thunberg, at 15, responded with bravery, with defiance, and with heroism. And she did so as a single individual. It was about standing up by sitting down, alone.

Greta Thunberg's first famous climate strike in Stockholm.

Let's be frank, going out on our own remains a necessary and heroic first step to protect future life. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry and its sycophant allies want us to worry about anything but coal, oil and gas, and their brutal, death-causing emissions. War, immigration, poverty, and sickness crowd out attention on dirty energy and its impacts including environmental damage and human suffering. Diversion and distraction, or getting off the issue, is one way they win the argument. Here are tips to deal with this.

Do not fall for becoming a marshmallow when called a hypocrite or nerd. Act individually, even if you drive a car, fly, eat meat, do not recycle, do not eat soya, do not repair your bicycle. Act individually, like 15 year old Greta did for the planet, for the future generations and even present generations. We are now in a state of mind that makes it hard to act individually. If we all acted individually, we could rip off the chains of coal, gas, and oil–and we would be doing so collectively!

Start the individual effort. Do not abandon it because you do not see millions protesting, voting, shouting or doing something about the climate. In fact, this is what the media, the oil gas and coal companies, and obliging leaders want you to do, to show no courage to take them on, but to be meek little puppies. They want you to pay attention to anything but fossil use and emissions because, in doing so, they will get richer without paying for the expanding globe of damage and loss that present and future generations will have to cover. They are freeloaders, enriching themselves off you. Start individually, knowing full well and inevitably in 2 or 50 years, that people will have no choice but to stop this wanton, evil death march driven by fossil fuels. Ordinary people, in coming together, have the power to fix climate change. While individual, small actions may not halt emissions, many people together, in organized, large numbers, have the capacity to bring about great change. They start to understand where climate change is going, who the victims are, and who the evil winners are. Numbers, great numbers, count, especially for a rapid, just transition out of fossil fuels.

Act to bring together a few others while being the lone wolf. Some might be silent, some might smirk, when alone, you knock on a door or stand in front of a library to say, ”hi, want to sign my petition to declare a climate emergency?” Sooner or later, you will be two or five people. It is inevitable because the vast majority are not dumb, but are bound to wake up when they see that we are being crushed by wanton fossil fuel greed.

Persist in your individual efforts, even if it appears foolish. Think of environmental justice leader Cecilia at 88, Melina at 15 (mentioned in Tip 6), or Greta Thunberg at 15. The frail and thin Cecilia might now look foolish, but in one hundred years, historians will praise her as an icon that deserves flowers and blessings. Greta, in her persistence, is a young hero of our time, and Melina will follow. Recognize that, even if on your own, you stick to following the climate science, spread your understanding, and lead by example, your cause and effort is more noble and correct than that of thousands of others mocking you or laughing at the climate change that washes away their homes, their crops, their savings, their kin, or their own lives.

Win over the hearts, minds, and hands of like-minded ones, starting from scratch. Sociologist Margaret Mead has been famously quoted, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has". Two things are vital. One is assumed but imperative–break out of that individual isolation, such as in the story of the mighty hummingbird who did the best it could against the raging forest fire as others initially just looked on. Then welcome the handful of committed and thoughtful ones, but also the undecided or questioning onlookers, often driven by anxiety over climate change and its impacts. In this process, turn individual effort into actions that are increasingly collective.

Seek to win over the hearts, minds, and hands of still more people. Consider ordinary folk, not only those who are recycling, repairing, restoring, and putting solar panels on their roofs. Meat eaters, people who fly, car drivers, and people who don’t know any better can be our allies and friends and become bona fide leaders. Regular people should not be punished by being blocked on the tarmac or highway or be provoked to frown at climate activists or climate issues. Above all, do not stand out as an extremist or a misanthrope or know-it-all, but be one of the ordinary people. The ones who are pretending to be not innocent are the ones who are harming us, our health, our future, our pocketbooks, the ones who know with a smirk that they poison the world as they get rich. They are the major stockholders or corporate elite of Exxon, BP, Shell, and their political allies. These are the ones who swear up and down in ideological blindness at climate activists.

Do not let yourself be distracted. When the focus turns to carbon storage, to seeding the skies to magical technology, fossil fuel interests are diverting your attention from their carbon pollution. Such techniques, embellished by a sort of science, are used to deflect blame, deflate the magnitude of the crisis, misrepresent the issues, subvert the science, and raise doubt that we face a global climate emergency, an existential threat that requires urgent action.

Do not discount that the small steps can lead to big strides to fix the climate. Those very small steps, eating tofu, bicycling, going vegan, and planting trees, or fighting to eliminate oil subsidies, are for many the starting point to a grander commitment. What they show is the capacity to make a new system which is better for all. Bicycling in a city is not a bandaid reform of the past, but a step to the future. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step– or pedal.

Grasp the theory of change. We will forever ask what brings about great changes, such as reversing climate change, the end of slavery, the industrial revolution, the liberation of Africa or Latin America, the civil rights movement, or the toppling of corrupt governments. If your answer is Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Emmeline Pankhurst, Abraham Lincoln, Bill McKibben, or you on your own, you omit the indispensable role of millions of men, women, and children, or ordinary people coming together to do extraordinary things, as Barack Obama once said. To succeed, masses will need and demand a screaming unity of “change now”. If the masses of people do not get behind those little steps or a grander commitment to stop climate change and transition to renewables, many will find it hard to see how the parts can fall together. Success lies not in a simple step or policy or program, but in deep systemic change away from fossil fuels. Nowadays, the common vision still is that if we talk to politicians there will be change. This ultimately fails because it lacks the sustained pressure of the masses to force the politicos to dump fossil fuels altogether. Pope Leo XIV recently shared the essential theory of successful change: “There is indeed an action hero with us — it is all of you, who are working together to make a difference.”