What is this?
I’m writing this a couple of days after the end of Earth’s warmest year ever recorded (so far). Yeehaw!!!!! Now what?
I read a lot on climate and the natural world, mostly focusing on solutions and ways I can contribute, because there are only so many Tums a human being should eat. Something I noticed last year after reading Nature’s Best Hope and Rebugging the Planet was that there were huge gaps in these books and others like them. These are just examples, so to give a reductive summary of both: Rebugging the Planet can be boiled down to “tear it all down and establish a new non-extractive system”. Nature’s Best Hope can be summarized as “get all the property owners in the USA to remove their lawns and replace them with native plants”. Cool, yes, great, but how? Specifically? What about people who don’t have a lawn to replace or money to do that? If people live in a neighborhood with an HOA, how do they go about changing the rules? How specifically can we replace our current model of society with something better? It’s very “draw the rest of the owl”.
Nature’s Best Hope gave an anecdotal story about a daughter getting her skeptical dad to replace his lawn. It talked briefly about the conversations they had that didn’t go anywhere, then suddenly he was into monarchs and planting milkweed for them. Great! But what changed? How exactly did she approach this to see a different result? Why was the last conversation successful when the others weren’t? This is just one woman and her dad, and people are talking about this all over the world. What worked for other families, and what didn’t?
If we’re going to actually accomplish anything, we need to break things down into smaller steps and honestly analyze what we’ve done. We need templates for successful and unsuccessful efforts, small-scale and large, so we can adapt them to our own lives and communities.
I started collecting resources and writing stuff down for myself. This is an effort to find this ideal resource for myself because I would LOVE to be told the best way to get rid of all this climate anxiety. If I find it, I’ll happily share it and get back to petting my dog. Until then, I’ll keep collecting and writing things down. The ideal outcome is to find or create a resource that:
increases visibility of successful local climate action
provides actionable templates established by activists and everyday people
gives examples for people to adapt to their current needs, location, interests, and circumstances
details successes and failures that people can learn from
focuses primarily on successful efforts to prevent burnout, but includes some unsuccessful efforts so we can examine what could have been done differently
shares other resources and adds to them as needed
This isn’t a complete list, of course. The ethos of this resource would be:
All you have to do is anything. Here’s how.
Who is this for?
This is a resource intended for people who are freaked out about climate change but feel overwhelmed, lost, or confused about what to do now (hello, I am this person). I’m not looking to belabor the problem or rehash the (exhaustively, extensively) established science. I likely won’t engage with climate deniers here—that’s best done offline. This resource is for you if you need somewhere to put the overwhelm, are interested in taking tangible climate action, and would appreciate being given a road map. If you feel like nothing you do matters and that corporations and billionaires and militaries are the real enemy, I’m going to yes-and that sentiment and say this is for both of us.
Who’s behind this?
I’m a person with a lot of existential dread 👍🏻 Some things I’ve done that are relevant to this resource: worked in biological research, published science writing in a few places, helped establish a climate department in Denver, and worked at a couple of climate startups as an engineer. I’m not an expert. If that’s what you’re looking for, you may enjoy We Can Fix It, All We Can Save, How to Save a Planet (RIP 🫡), Grist, and others.