What Can I Do About Climate Change?

This is the twelfth and final article in a series about the Earth-system – how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it. Read the series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11

In this series of articles, I aimed to provide some context around our environmental predicament, including climate change. I discussed its multilayered complexities, how we got here, and where hope for the future of humankind may be found. In this final article, I’ll consider the next hardest question I’m frequently asked: What can I do about climate change?

It’s a pressing question. The role of the individual within larger systemic changes is difficult to map, but clearly most vital. For though we are in so many ways enmeshed and often powerless, still the totality of our enmeshed, individual actions is what makes our world. Nor can our answers today, arrived at within our current social and material frameworks, be complete; they can only be steps, taking us into a future of inevitable discontinuities: unexpected, abrupt, and snowballing social and material changes stretching through our lifetimes and for generations beyond. We already live in a climatically different world than the one that shaped human evolution and all of human history—the world to which we are best adapted—and more extreme changes are inevitable. For both the Earth-system and its subordinate human system have a momentum that carries us along and is difficult to turn.

So rather than imagine that any individual can do something to slow down climate change and other ecocide, it seems most useful to first orient ourselves toward a broadly conceived vision of a more equitable and less consumerist world. We might then try to align our actions with helping to create that world in place of this one, piece by piece, even as conditions change significantly along the way—new problems, new possibilities opening before us, new conflicts and catastrophes, new understandings that change our older ones.

The one lesson I feel sure about is that any helpful response cannot entail promoting the further expansion of the human enterprise. It will not be found in the direction of using more energy and creating additional layers of technological or social complexity devised to maintain the course of our present civilisation. Rather we must look toward disentangling ourselves from them, thread by thread. Any genuinely hopeful response can only be found in embracing greater simplification. In our civilisation. In our lifestyles. It must lead toward a reduction of the overall human ecological footprint in the most equitable manner. And the most effective and equitable long-term responses will ultimately be the highly localized ones: locally conceived and built to answer local needs and issues, endeavours that deliver both their benefits and attendant costs to the same community.

This is difficult to do within the constructs of today. And I won’t pretend I know just how to accomplish this, starting from where we are now.

What I can say is that it will require nothing less than a fundamental paradigm change for what we call modern civilisation, a wholesale refiguring of both its economy and our social values. And what that calls for in individuals is to change ourselves while supporting others in our communities to do the same. In changing ourselves, we might each play a part in creating new stories about what we owe to each other and to the non-human world. We might help shift the dominant political conversations, normalise lifestyle changes, mitigate discrepancies that allow overconsumption by some when others don’t have enough. In light of that—and with the understanding that no one can do everything but everyone can do something—it’s possible to frame perhaps a salutary direction that responses to our predicament might turn, tailoring individual actions for different inclinations, abilities, geographical and social locations.

Change your mind

We won’t find the best, holistic responses to issues that arise if we don’t understand what causes the suite of problems we face and how they are interrelated. Right now, to a greater or lesser degree, every one of us lives in a state of denial about the actual, biophysical state of our world. This enables us to go on embracing value systems that continually worsen outcomes for people and other living beings. Despite our good intentions, denial and shallow understanding block us from collectively bringing about necessary systemic changes.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Learn what you can about ecological issues and climate change. Go at whatever pace feels right, so as not to overwhelm yourself. If you’re able, get your environmental news directly from scientific papers or reliable, independent sources of science reporting, like this one—not from corporate media houses, who have an interest in perpetuating the dominant economic narratives. Practice looking at what’s real and wondering what’s possible—yes, it might take practice. Learn the facts underneath the prevailing myths—taking into account the holistic picture, not merely the financial accounting—and form your own conclusions.

Think and talk about ecological overshoot and climate change regularly, so it becomes an aspect of everyday awareness and reality for yourself, your family and friends. Question biases and presumptions about human supremacy and entitlements to enslave or annihilate other beings. Living in the daily awareness of ecological destruction and climate change can help us see and understand the world differently, breaking through the blinders of the everyday notions that normalise and worsen them. Let this new awareness sensibly guide your decisions about your future.

Prepare yourself emotionally for challenging years ahead. Remember that maintaining your social relationships and taking care of yourself are paramount; you can’t help anyone else or yourself, if you’re not okay.

Do not get lost in despair. Practice staring into the unknown and steadying yourself. Practice asking the hard question, and then the next question, pushing through the fear of doom, fighting off the impulse for denial. Feel the grief, but know there is a place beyond it, on the other side of fear and doom. That place is grounded in compassion. Let that be your guiding light.

Change your values

If we want to live in a world of care, we must build it. Values that valorise the hoarding of wealth and rationalise socioeconomic class or caste systems, patriarchy, sectarian nationalisms, or other drivers of exclusion, divisiveness, and exploitation play a deep role in driving and perpetuating our systems of overconsumption. Recognising our common humanity and plight, instead, turns us toward nurturing greater community and equality among citizens and helping each other to develop our strengths, rippling into wider pro-social changes. Those who are embedded in communities of mutual aid and meaning will also be better equipped, socially, psychologically, and materially to weather the crises to come.

Prioritise the education and empowerment of your daughters as much as your sons. It often falls most heavily upon girls and women to teach and protect the children, pull people together, work for their family’s survival. And yet girls and women still suffer disproportionately when times get violent. Support them in whatever ways they need to develop their own independent strengths. Accept their decisions about when and whether to have children, based on their own priorities and knowledge and abilities. Do not handicap them in their ability to build their future and protect themselves and those they love.

If you’re someone who lives with excess, practice accepting enoughness. Think about all the products you use—food, cosmetics, clothes, gadgets—and consider what goes into making each item: the energy, materials, labour. Being mindful of these things can help us reevaluate what truly has value in our lives, how much value and what kind of values those things actually represent. And that can help us adjust our choices.

Oppose priorities that further disenfranchise marginal communities or force them to lose their already low ecological footprints in order to fortify the consumption of others. Resist narrowly framed, half-baked, techno-optimist solutions in which broadly sharing the benefits among those who pay its costs or some preparation for limited-energy lifestyles isn’t part of the goal. Champion proposals that recognise environmental limits and prioritise equity, instead. Support Adivasi and Indigenous groups fighting to protect their ancestral lands from corporate exploitation.

When refugees arrive, don’t turn them away. Remember that you or someone you love may be the next refugee, ravaged by climate and ecological disasters or their resulting political upheavals. It’s not a circumstance anyone ever plans for or chooses. As the world inevitably changes around us, we must do what we can to cushion the fall of others, and thereby also ourselves.

Change your habits

As heterodox economist Kate Raworth puts it, we must increase public luxury while maintaining private sufficiency, which means creating better public spaces and services that benefit everyone, so everyone has enough. It also means those with more than they need should get used to having less kept exclusively to themselves, but rather learn to embrace a spirit of resource sharing. Being aware of how we use resources can change us. For example, reusing R/O wastewater for watering or washing, or recycling it back through our water storage systems can wake us up both to our profligacy and its pricelessness.

Be mindful of your consumption habits versus your requirements—energy, water, gadgets, etc. We may laugh at people for avoiding plastic straws or bags, because it’s true that one’s individual actions won’t make a dent in the plastic mountain. But their animating spirit can shift behavioural norms and snowball into larger social movements and political demands. Sometimes collective action can move mountains. Millions of individuals limiting use of simple things like plastic straws or bags, wherever possible, can add up to tons of less plastic killing turtles and seabirds or torturing the guts of urban cows, and that’s not nothing. Keep the idea of ecological limits in mind and draw your own lines for your own behaviour, based on what makes sense to you. If nothing else, it’s good practice.

If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with a metro or other good public transit system, use it whenever you’re able. Limiting use of private vehicles reduces your carbon emissions and your contribution to air and soil pollution. By co-opting public spaces for the privileged use of the wealthy, private vehicles represent the opposite of public luxury and private sufficiency. The less we use them, the better it is for everyone.

Change your options

It is, of course, difficult even to begin to make choices leading to public luxury and private sufficiency, when we’re entangled within a system that pulls us relentlessly in the opposite direction, in part through the values it perpetuates and incentives it promotes. Our economy and social structures offer few reasonable options for many among us to reduce our excess consumption or environmental pollution in everyday life. So for most things, our options really need to change ahead of our choices. Perhaps public pressure can help to bring this about in a relatively managed way.

If you’re an activist or organiser, initiate or support legal and social mechanisms to shorten fulltime workweeks for all workers to 30 hours or less. Shortened workweeks will not only help slow the gears of global destruction by curtailing economic ‘productivity,’ they can change our entire experience of life as workers. Working fewer hours will open up personal time for family, health, creativity, learning, gardening, community, and political engagement. Plus naps! Shortening the workweek could be a first counter-turn of the screw that really begins to loosen and change everything.

Pressurise governments and corporations to offer transportation alternatives and city planning that prioritises multiple forms of public transit, walking, and cycling over making space for private vehicles. City governments could limit lanes for private cars and curtail private parking on public streets. Enforcement of paid street parking, tollways, and pollution taxes is a way to help private motor vehicle owners shoulder their claims to public space (including the atmosphere) for private use. Public transit systems should serve people of all abilities too, so options for mobility are planned around needs rather than wealth status. Many cities around the world already follow similar policies.

Lobby the government to not incentivize more plastic-making factories across India, which will flood the market with more plastics. Lobby corporations to find alternatives to single-use plastics in packaging and food service. Rather than expecting consumers to forego plastics, when plastic is the only thing available, expect suppliers to provide other options if they wish to sell their goods. Think how Frito Lay, for example, sells mass quantities of chips in cheap, single-use packaging—and then lets public systems absorb the costs of clearing up the plastic waste they profited from. Instead, consumers should expect Frito Lay to solve their own plastic pollution problem, even if it means it costs more to supply their chips in packaging that doesn’t ruin the environment and raise the city’s costs of waste management. For the consumer, eating fewer packaged chips because they’re more expensive to buy is not harmful. For society and the biosphere, less plastic waste is beneficial beyond price.

Push for water harvesting in your community—on a smaller scale, collect your A/C condensate water to use for washing. Compost your biodegradable waste. Grow some vegetables. Learn a trade. Especially if you’re young, hands-on skills may help build a life, prepare you for a more conservationist lifestyle, and build or strengthen your local communities for mutual aid and resiliency. Plenty of books and YouTube videos discuss techniques for water harvesting, regenerative farming, and other adaptive responses to build resiliency in your town or community. If you’re a tinkerer or doer, check them out or find one of the permaculture or associated projects going on across India.

Install household or community solar panels, if you have rooftop space and resources to do so. In many cases, small-scale, local installations of solar panels can meet essential needs for a simple lifestyle, and without causing the same mass displacement of marginalized peoples or the ecosystem destructions created by huge solar farm installations. Alternatively, help work on mitigating the harms of unavoidable megaprojects. In the decades to come, those who are less dependent on high energy and consumption lifestyles will also be better placed to deal with unpredictabilities in supply.

Volunteer with environmental groups and communities, activists and providers of aid, strategists and workers. Multiple responses are required, which include working both within and outside the system.

Don’t blame yourself or others

Reducing our complex global crisis, born of very deep cultural roots, to finger-pointing based on facile reasonings will not begin to help anyone. Least of all, yourself. While we can hold people accountable for their decisions, it also helps to bear in mind that our global predicament is not created by any one generation, ethnicity, nation, family, or person. Every one of us sits atop multilayered histories that inform our perceptions of the world and define our options within it. No one has the sole power to fix the past or the present. Everything is more complicated than that.

Don’t expect ‘purity’ of thought or action from yourself or anyone else who cares about the environment. Every one of us abounds in contradictions. None of us has perfect will or judgment or knowledge or even freedom of action in every sphere of our lives. We all do things that someone else will judge as hypocritical. Remember that we’re all fighting different battles too. Don’t shame others for not doing exactly as you’re able to do.

Accept that nothing you do will be enough. You alone cannot stop global warming or save the world. Nor is the goal to prove yourself an individual environmental hero. The goal is to participate in local and global changes collectively driving a paradigm shift toward a more equitable and sustainable human enterprise. Like everyone else, you can only do your best; some days and some choices will be much harder than others. Don’t let others shame you into doing less or more than you’re able to do.

Don’t dream of utopias. Human beings aren’t capable of creating utopias. Such fantasies are anti-human and have often proven dangerous to attempt. But as individuals, as societies, as a species, we can certainly acknowledge that there have been times and places when we’ve lived more harmoniously and carefully. There are also times when we annihilate other people or species thoughtlessly or even fanatically. All these capacities are within us. Yet we can play our part in moving society toward its better self.

Each of us will at best be part of a changing tide, in our own way, for massive changes that will take years or generations to become fully established—if we’re lucky. And if we’re successful, we’ll find our way toward envisioning alternative futures, rediscovering how to build communities of cooperation and mutual aid, and facing the challenges with openness and good humour. It begins and ends with understanding what’s real and practicing compassion with others and ourselves.

Usha Alexander trained in science and anthropology. After working for years in Silicon Valley, she now lives in Gurugram. She’s written two novels: The Legend of Virinara and Only the Eyes Are Mine.