ReImagine Your World
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller
When I first started to engage in environmentalism as an undergrad in the late nineties, it sometimes felt like there were only two ways to try to make a difference. We could become a policy-level advocate, potentially able to address larger scales and scopes of influence, but working in an office somewhere, completely disconnected from the cycles and processes of the natural world. Or, we could go door-to-door or stand on street corners, collecting signatures on a petition for some watered-down lobbying action. Both of these approaches to advocacy were disembodied and disconnected from the physicality of ecosystems and ecological processes.
In those days, we were generally disconnected from the practice of tying our individual actions to climate outcomes especially in new and creative ways. In fact, individual conviction was often met with suspicion. I remember thinking that there must be something more - a way to take part in hands-on action in a way that would yield collective impact. And I didn’t want just advocacy against an unfeeling opposition. I was looking to build something tangible, to see the change in the physical world.
Fast forward to 2021, and all around us, individual environmental action has gone mainstream. There are so many more ways for people to get information and make conscious choices. But too often, like any good capitalists, we find our conscious choices expressed in the consumer products that we can buy and consume. There’s a good reason for that, of course. Products are things that we can make a choice about on the individual level. They give us an opportunity to be autonomous and definitive in our decision-making. And who doesn’t like choices?
But this individual, well-intentioned action can hit you over the head with irony: Think of reusable straws being used for throwaway cups; Meatless Mondays made up of vegetables sourced from other continents and likely full of pesticides and other chemicals; and consumer items we don’t need at all are made out of a sliver of a percentage of recycled content to make us feel a little better about our decision to consume yet another thing. We call this phenomenon “greenwashing” and there are abundant examples of companies selling products or “movements” like this, aimed at the well-intentioned American.
Despite the fact that the benefits of these actions are often marginal, they are not entirely meaningless choices. We might call them the “gateway drug” of eco-action. According to Steve Westlake, PhD Researcher in Environmental Leadership at Cardiff University, participating in individual choices like drinking from a reusable water bottle causes us to identify as people who care about the environment around us. These are first steps toward taking another individual action and another after that, and it can signal a willingness to change other behaviors in our lives. In other words, these small, individual actions give people an “on-ramp” to bigger and more meaningful change.
And yet, despite this rise in generalized awareness and the potential for bigger actions, why do our efforts still feel so disconnected? I wonder if buying “eco” products might add to our cynicism in some ways. Too often our culture’s current take on environmentalism is about buying a product we didn’t need as the systems we use on a daily basis - transportation, food consumption, energy - create substantial and irreversible impact. How would it feel different for our environmental choices to be related to the real work of living our lives? Each of us is looking for a way to feel like we matter, like we're making a difference. We want to feel more deeply connected to the meaning of life, to feel like we have a call to action.
Maybe you know that you have creative gifts to share with the world. Maybe you’d like to go on your own journey to deconstruct your own patterns of consumption or transform the way you live on your land. Or maybe you want to imagine and then advocate for bringing about nature-based change in your own neighborhood or wider community. The work of imagining and then transforming the land around us is intertwined with reaching your own potential for compassion, peace, and resiliency.
And if you’re wondering if your individual actions can bring about change on the scale we need to see in the world, research shows that the more we reduce our individual ecological footprints, the more effective advocates we become for changing policies and practices on a grander scale. There is a wider culture change that is required for governments and corporations to be compelled to change their toxic ways. That culture change comes from each creative and embodied action that we take.
Building a post-carbon, nature-oriented community means radically reimagining our world -- and also ourselves. Rather than framing the climate crisis as a catastrophe to be avoided, taking part in this reimagining can be an opportunity to shape the world we want to see, including within ourselves. But we need to hone our skills. We need to cultivate new habits of action and take part in the reshaping. We can do this through our own creative engagement with the problems and practices of imagining a new way for us to live and be in the world.