Like Wildfire

Hello palace dwellers. Welcome to another chapter from the forthcoming book pulling together the big questions and conclusions from the first 100 or so issues of this email newsletter. This one is about a tough topic, which is what in the fuck are you an individual walking around in the world supposed to do about climate change. More specifically, how are you meant to understand your role in a global catastrophe that we are all undeniably a part of, but should not be resting on any of our shoulders?

I think this is a hard one because we've all been manipulated and controlled by horrible governments and companies, and none of us really have the personal capacity or responsibility to solve a problem that is deliberately perpetuated by a powerful minority that couldn't really give a shit about whether most of us die as a result. And yet! We are not powerless. Nor are we without responsibility.

You can read the whole thing and I hope you will, but spoiler, I argue that we have to reconcile this by changing the way we think about individual action, beyond consumer choices and into the realm of a person as part of the collective, driving decentralized solutions that eventually change the whole stupid world. There's a little Marxism, a little sociology, and some savage dunks including on Al Gore and Melissa Etheridge. Here:

Like Wildfire

In search of the individual's role in the creation and resolution of a global catastrophe.

By Tate Williams

As the credits rolled on the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, audiences in theaters were instructed to take a series of actions that appeared one by one on screen, set to the soulful adult contemporary sounds of Melissa Etheridge, singing the movie’s theme song, “I Need to Wake Up.” The first messages read:

Are you ready to change the way you live?

The climate crisis can be solved.

You can reduce your carbon emissions to zero.

Buy energy efficient appliances and lightbulbs.

Change your thermostat.Weatherize your house.

After a sizable list of lifestyle changes requested of us, the documentary eventually makes its way up the food chain to recommend actions like voting and writing to Congress. Eventually one of the tips says to pray, which honestly, if you truly think you have god’s ear on this one, I’d skip ahead to that one. 

I must not have stayed long enough to read those later suggestions at the time because, although the movie was impactful in its own way, I remember being so irritated that the grand finale was to ask us to change our lightbulbs. This thing was a huge hit, after all, drawing standing ovations all over the country. Melissa Etheridge even won an Academy Award! Around that time, I believe I would have been working on my second climate change-related campaign pushing for a renewable energy standard in Oregon, so I probably would have been pretty annoyed at the emphasis on lifestyle changes. 

Individual action—along with a certain deluded tone of optimism—dominated the climate conversation for many years, and it left a huge blind spot for the culpability of industry and politicians, not to mention the sheer weight of societal transformation the crisis demands. “Everyone do your part” messaging of that era also lacked an environmental justice analysis that different communities contribute to and suffer from this problem at vastly different levels. If everyone really did their part to solve climate change, the majority of humans on the planet wouldn’t need to do anything at all, because they didn’t do much to cause it. 

But then the pendulum kind of swung on the lifestyle narrative. More and more, you started to hear the refrain that climate change was a systemic problem that couldn’t be solved by individual action. I think these days people are much more likely to lay blame at the feet of the Trunks or Exxons of the world than on themselves for keeping the thermostat too high. One of the most-repeated factoids people use when making this case comes from a 2017 report that found just 100 companies were responsible for 71% of global emissions, which is meant to emphasize that industry, not individuals, bear the burden of climate change.

Another more radical slogan used by people revolting against lifestyle environmentalism is “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” which is meant to counter calls for responsible spending habits. The argument goes that any capitalist system requires such profound exploitation, regardless of whatever tweaks on the margins companies might offer, that your consumer choices don’t really matter all that much. We should neither be appeased by our own responsible consumer actions, nor should we shame others for buying the wrong paper towels. That’s an industry scam. 

This shift toward this latter analysis is, broadly speaking, a really good development in our collective understanding of climate change. We came around to the idea that there are powerful people and companies, created and protected by a system designed for profit and economic growth, and they are vastly more to blame for climate change than the rest of us who are just out here doing our best. In short, we’re moving away from feeling guilty about using the wrong lightbulbs and moving toward wanting the heads of the motherfuckers who are making this happen. And that’s progress. 

But there’s still something unsatisfying about the anti-individualist arguments and the attitude they communicate. For one, while the 100 companies fact is often conjured to put a target on the backs of the powerful perpetrators of global emissions, it actually came from a nonprofit that pushes for voluntary corporate citizenship, as opposed to any form of damages, government oversight, or redistribution of wealth and power. In casting them as the main actors in creating climate change, the campaign also casts them as the actors who need to step up to the plate and take care of this problem, which we should then applaud, presumably.

The implication is that some corporate actors are doing bad things and others are doing good things, and we gotta get the bad corporations to behave. So it’s actually just a bigger version of the lifestyle change strategy, but one that individuals don’t even really need to be a part of. Corporate lifestyle change. The idea is that if we raise awareness of climate science among the corporate community, they’ll voluntarily adjust their actions or buy some carbon credits or whatever, and we can all go about our business. 

While “no ethical consumption” is at its core an anti-capitalist slogan, it also sends a weirdly similar message, which is that our actions are irrelevant, pending the establishment of a post-capitalist economy. That’s not really the case, though, because even assuming that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, we have to admit that some forms of consumption are definitely less ethical than others. While it’s true that this is a systemic problem, the system has created such inequality that certain individuals’ consumption can create exponentially more emissions than the consumption of others. And, you know what, that shit matters. You can’t fly 20 times a year and live in a mansion and then tap the sign on the bus that says “no ethical consumption under capitalism.”  

What I find troubling about both of these arguments is the implication is that our actions don’t matter, which is an overcorrection to the implication that it is each individual’s job to solve a global crisis. Particularly for those of us living in industrialized nations, this feels like an absolution from our connection to climate change and the changes we all have to make in order to curb its impacts.

The environmental nonprofit world offers its own solution to this disconnect with a workaround that empowers individuals, but only to the extent that they donate money for grown up stuff like getting Democrats elected or advocating for climate policy. This is the membership-based advocacy approach, in which grassroots organizing supports elite-generated solutions, and it’s been the dominant model at these NGOs for decades. 

However, this morphing of personal responsibility into government lobbying still dodges the question of how individual action fits into systemic change. For one, promoting smart policy crafted by elites and fueled by donations from white, middle-class donors simply has not worked, and it often leads to exploitation of communities of color in the name of environmental protection. Membership-based advocacy also drives a wedge between people and elite decision-makers, divorcing the outside game from the inside game. Those same middle-class donors are then allowed to absolve themselves from their own bad behaviors, which sometimes actually do matter. 

So what we’re left with, as is the case with so much climate discourse, is a stubborn and unhelpful binary—between individual and systemic change. The first makes us feel meaningless, the second hopeless. We need to bridge the divide between the two.  

Not Everything Is About You

To do so, we first must get to the heart of what is actually wrong with most individual action narratives. I think much of this comes down to the fact that neoliberalism has trained us to believe that the one and only role we have to play within the collective is economic consumption. And that role, by design, holds very little power.

I’m going to lean heavily in this section on a book by Matthew Huber, called Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, which offers, among other things, a refreshing explanation of the failures of the environmental movement—namely its reliance on elite professionals and market-based solutions. Applying some good-old-fashioned Marxist theory to climate change, Huber calls out what is rarely vocalized—that this crisis is caused by a relatively tiny, powerful minority who are controlling the means of production—how we extract resources and generate energy—and the solution is to organize the working class majority against them. Huber critiques the historic overrepresentation of the professional managerial class in the climate movement, which has led to a fixation on “believing science” and “smart policy” as the key to transitioning to a post-fossil fuel economy, absent any class or power analysis.

Another consequence of this imbalance is a fixation on consumption habits, driven by a combination of “carbon guilt” over environmentalists’ own relative comfort and a total lack of access to production of resources, where power truly sits. "Carbon guilt confuses material privilege—a level of comfort and security—with the power to control the material organization of energy production," Huber writes. Profiteers intentionally lock out workers—including the cozy knowledge workers who run environmental nonprofits—from the means of production, so we're left to flex and flail around in the only pitiful realm we are allowed—the market. Even elite policy fixes often focus on market schemes and consumer behavior, while rampant fossil fuel production churns away in the background, carried out by a handful of nations and corporations. 

Unfortunately, the portions of the economy we are not permitted access to, the very top that holds decision-making power over how we use resources, has a much larger impact on global emissions than the suburban comforts of the consumer. It’s not that individual actions are irrelevant; Project Drawdown once estimated that between 25% to 30% of emissions reductions needed to avoid the worst climate impacts could happen at the individual or household level. But if you flip that statistic around, some three-quarters of the necessary emissions reductions are out of our hands as individuals, and that’s by design.

It’s also by design that we all sit around obsessing over the 25%, instead of the fact that the system has locked us all out of the big decisions around how we generate energy. We all know the term “carbon footprint” by now, and that is entirely because the fossil fuel industry made sure of it. The specific phrase was the creation of an advertising firm hired by BP—and you know all about those shitheads—to convince the public that climate change was the fault of consumers instead of oil giants. Even the “carbon calculator” that allows you to feel precisely as guilty as you need to, was created by the firm Ogilvy & Mather, which was the inspiration for the ad agency in Mad Men if you’re wondering if they are good dudes or not. So yeah, if you’ve ever worried about your personal carbon footprint you can thank oil and gas propaganda for making you feel like shit. 

You might currently be thinking that, well, every little bit counts and I can do my part. Or that if we all express our wishes via purchasing power, industry will have to respond. And it's true that there is a place for the boycott, for example, in working class organizing. But boycotts work only to the extent that mass strategic withdrawal is sustainable and widespread enough that it can force those in power to give in to a specific demand. But let's be honest, some sliver of financially stable consumers who decide to stop shopping at Walmart or Amazon has a negligible impact on these companies with such a vast share of the market. And if the hope is to make them go away and die, rather than some targeted concession, forget about it. This kind of diffuse simulation of a boycott, born mostly of powerless frustration, may make the middle class feel better about not patronizing a shitty company, and sure there is maybe some value in that, but it cannot transform an economy.

The reason is that is that the vast majority of individuals are unable to make the kinds of consumer decisions that could meaningfully reduce emissions or have much of an impact on the broader economy, and that too is by design, Huber points out. That's because the very same people who control the means of production have commodified and cheapened basic goods so that workers can live on less and be paid less, and employers can extract more profit. The cheapening of those commodities is achieved by pushing negative externalities into the natural world, which the public then has to absorb in the form of bad things like climate change.

In other words, companies pay their employees shitty wages and offer shitty products that are shitty for the environment and cheap because it doesn’t cost the company anything to be shitty for the environment. Imagine an employee who works at Walmart and has no access to public transit and can't afford a stupid Tesla, so they drive an old gas burning car to work every day. They eat a cheap burger for lunch made at a factory farm that churns out carbon. They can only afford to shop at Walmart, so they take home products packaged in convenient single-use plastic containers made dirt cheap by the overproduction of petroleum, and take it all home in single-use plastic bags because at that point, who really gives a shit. And every one of these decisions is completely rational for the employee, who is just trying to not starve to death, after all. 

To put it even more simply: under capitalism, there is no environmentally friendly version of being poor. If you’re in the middle class or upper-middle class, you may be able to stop buying bottled water, stop buying fast food burgers, stop driving to work, start driving an electric car, install solar panels on your home, shop at the food co-op or farmers market, and tell yourself that you’re part of the solution. But poor people will never be able to make the decisions that you are able to make because of low wages and cheap goods made possible by negative externalities. And, I regret to inform you, poor people means almost all of the people in the world. 

Huber also notes that, aside from the fact that focusing on your role as a consumer averts attention from industry accountability, it’s also a complete loser as a movement strategy. For the same reasons that the working class has limited options as consumers, they also will understandably not be keen on campaigns or policies that restrict their own consumption. For Huber, when climate policy is fixated on consumer habits, the endgame is austerity policy. This is a problem with a lot of formulations of a carbon tax, most viscerally demonstrated with the yellow vest protests starting in France in 2018. Protestors revolted over a gas tax increase, not because they love climate change, but because the tax would have made the working class suffer. When it’s applied to buying habits instead of production, climate policy becomes anti-worker policy. Keep trying that and people will never get on board. 

Behavioral Contagion

If the idea of our consumer behavior as a climate solution is so fraught, how else should we be thinking of our own actions, without entirely throwing our hands up in the air and concluding that our behavior doesn’t matter? Part of the problem here is when the only societal role we are allowed is as a self-interested market actor, there’s not much regard for action that is not some form of individual consumption. The goal then, is to relearn the idea that we are inherently social creatures, and therefore, our individual actions contribute to the collective far beyond purchasing power in a market economy. I would like to explore this idea in a way that might seem kind of weird, which is through the work of an economist. 

This guy Robert Frank is kind of a weird economist, though, in that he challenges the foundational concept that economies are made up of individuals taking actions in their own best interests. He also challenges the idea attributed to Adam Smith that competitive markets lead to the best solutions for the largest number of people. “That was never Smith’s position,” Frank writes in his book Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work. “His signature insight was that the pursuit of narrow self-interest often leads to socially beneficial outcomes, but not always.” In fact, Frank points out, markets often create horrible outcomes for the group. In our relentless protection of market freedom, we frequently create a world in which all of our hands end up being tied, forced to make decisions we would not actually want for ourselves and that don’t serve anyone particularly well.

The reason is that market logic misunderstands the way humans behave in relationship with each other. He describes this relationship as “social pressure” or “behavioral contagion,” but it basically means that beyond self-interest, we tend to want to do things other people are doing because we’re social creatures. This can be a positive or a negative force, but in a competitive market economy, the result is often negative because it nudges people into making certain choices that seem to serve the individual, but replicate like a wildfire until all of us are suffering as a result. The simplest analogy is someone standing up at a concert to see better, but eventually everyone is standing and nobody can see better.

Frank gives the example of the size of our cars. The sport utility vehicle was virtually non-existent before 1966. In 1975, it accounted for just 2% of total vehicle sales. In the 1990s, that all changed. By 2014, SUVs had become the highest-selling passenger vehicle category in the United States, products whose nominal purpose is almost never used by consumers, whose size and design make roads less safe for everyone, and that spew greenhouse gases at higher rates, putting human civilization at risk. In other words, there was a spark of popularity and a perception of individual benefit, and behavioral contagion took care of the rest. And we’re all worse off for it, driving around these big, stupid cars.

Pretending that individual actions are isolated from group behavior leads to these enormous cascades of actions with negative impacts. But it can also be a good thing, in that if we take individual actions that have positive impacts for the collective, behavioral contagion can lead to sweeping societal changes. 

The power of this effect can be seen in emergent patterns of smoking and heart disease, which became evident in a landmark public health study. For the past 72 years and counting, epidemiologists have been monitoring the behavior and health of thousands of individuals over long periods of time in the unassuming town of Framingham, Massachusetts. The now-famous Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 in order to shed light on the causes of coronary heart disease, of which researchers knew very little at the time. The cohort began with 5,209 volunteers, and is now on its fourth generation of participants. The study is one of the most fruitful in medical research history, and in 1961, identified major risk factors for heart disease that still guide prevention and treatment. But as different researchers dug around in the data Framingham has churned out over the decades, they also found some unexpected phenomena regarding social networks. Specifically, that the actions of others in the vicinity were strongly correlated with an individual’s own actions. When it comes to unhealthy risk factors, the data has shown that if your spouse, friends, and co-workers, say, smoke cigarettes, your own likelihood of smoking significantly goes up, like way up. Same thing if they quit. That’s maybe not that surprising, but the effects reach even beyond people you know, as far out as three degrees of separation (the friends of your friends’ friends). What that means is that behaviors of people you don’t even know alter the probabilities that you’ll behave in certain ways. Only at four degrees of separation do the network effects become negligible. Similar outcomes have been observed surrounding obesity rates and even happiness. 

When it comes to smoking, Frank points out that sky-high taxes on cigarettes actually didn’t change most smokers’ behavior. People liked smoking, after all, and it was and still is a super cool thing to do that makes you feel good and makes everyone like you more. But a minority did quit as a result of the higher cost, and that sparked behavioral contagion, which is what actually drove down smoking rates over the years in the U.S. Over time, laws prohibiting smoking took hold, but the social attitudes changed well in advance. 

This is all relevant to climate change and individual behavior for a couple of reasons. First, Under the Influence concludes with an explicit case for a revenue-neutral carbon tax, meaning you levy tax on unwanted behavior, but then give the money back to the public to spend. If you do it in a progressive way, meaning it favors the poor, the idea is that you’ve basically created a financial prompt for people to do certain things, but without punishing the working class.

This is where Frank and I part ways to some extent, not because I think a progressive carbon tax is a bad idea, necessarily, but because it runs into some of the hard limits outlined in Climate Change as Class War. For one, it overlooks the lack of leeway most people have when it comes to carbon consumption, a far cry from the decision to smoke or not smoke cigarettes. It also omits the production side of oil and gas, and the very powerful people who are deeply invested in an eternal fossil fuel economy, regardless of consumer trends. And to Huber's final point, even with a tax credit attached, a top-down financial policy to manipulate public behavior remains a loser of a campaign.

Similarly, while I think Huber’s strategy is stronger given his power analysis, his recommendation for workers to take control of utility companies feels simultaneously like a tall order, but also a narrow one that’s dismissive of more decentralized climate solutions like mini-grids or local energy cooperatives.

There are, however, conclusions we might take from both theses that are compatible and powerful in the sense that they challenge us to rethink the role of individual behavior in climate change, beyond the buying power of a self-interested market actor. Huber encourages us to break out of the box of consumer choice, which is imposed upon us as a way to shut the working class out of societal decisions that could truly impact the energy economy. Frank’s observations about behavioral contagion present exciting ways to think about how collective action actually takes shape. Rather than isolated entities looking out for ourselves, we are actually parts of a whole, like birds in a flock, and the right decisions can create vast emergent changes that unfold surprisingly quickly. 

Another implication is what this says about the power of social movements. Behavioral contagion is interesting to an economist for how it shapes market behavior, but it is not limited to that. One of the most literal expressions of collective action that would benefit from such contagion is solidarity with unions, which we’ve seen surge in recent years, holding tremendous power to actually shift production, as Huber points out. But also think of the power to change culture, which in the case of smoking, caused use to plummet and forced policy that made it illegal in public places, across vastly different political landscapes. 

The way we communicate online takes on a powerful, if a little scary, meaning, with that in mind. In her book on online social movements, Twitter and Tear Gas, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci defends what was often called in the late 2000s “clicktivism” or “slactivism,” first by challenging the idea that the online world is separate from the real world, noting that it often reflects what is happening in the physical world:

When Facebook friends change their avatar to protest discrimination against gay people, they also send a cultural signal to their social networks, and over time, such signals are part of what makes social change possible by changing culture. Many protesters I talked with cite their online political interactions as the beginning of their process of becoming politicized.

Critics of online political expression and organizing claim that such platforms rely too heavily on “weak ties,” which don’t yield meaningful action. Tufekci counters that, “for people seeking political change, though, the networking that takes place among people with weak ties is especially important.” People with strong ties already share similar views; it’s the weak ties that “may create bridges to other clusters of people in a way that strong ties do not.” Social scientists call these connections “bridge ties” and “weak ties are more likely to be bridges between disparate groups.” In other words, a bridge tie is the friend of the friend of the friend who quits smoking, and influences whether or not your immediate cluster quits too. In Egypt, during the Arab Spring, Tufekci documents how, as these online, symbolic actions piled up, it “created a new baseline for common knowledge of the political situation… not just what you knew, but also what others knew you knew, and so on—that shifted the acceptable boundaries of discourse.”

It does feel as though we are entering frightening new territory regarding social contagion as fascist ideas take hold of the internet and fascists take control of social media platforms. But the social media we have today will not be the same way we communicate en masse in decades to come, though the way human ideas spread will always be the same. Saying out loud what makes you angry or sad or hopeful, in whatever venue you have within reach, has a contagious effect. The sentiments that you share and actions you take are not just your own, but one part of collective sentiment.

They are not the entirety of activism, but they are part of it. Like the teens wearing green bandanas in support of abortion rights in Argentina, or professionals and working class people shouting anti-Shah slogans from their rooftops at night during the Iranian Revolution and then going to work in the morning, or American students wearing keffiyehs. These actions signal more than mere personal virtue, they signal social virtue—that something that was once tolerable will no longer be tolerated.

Catalytic Cooperation

If we leave this discussion all pumped up about the power of the individual as part of a collective, but dismissive of consumer decisions, and skeptical of centralized public utilities and federal carbon taxes, surely there is something else this tremendous people power can generate. Surely! I would point to the potential for systems change through decentralized, community-level solutions, which have can have a far greater global impact than people often suspect.

This idea was explored in a dedicated section of a 2020 issue of Global Environmental Politics, which drew attention in climate circles when it published because it challenged a long-held assumption that climate change should be considered primarily a collective action problem, which basically means that nobody wants to be the one to make a sacrifice for the benefit of the collective. Researchers instead found that localized power imbalances are far more important factors blocking climate action, and that individuals are often more than happy to alter their lives with the understanding that it benefits the community.

For many years, climate negotiators have believed that nations fail to take action largely because they don’t want to do the work or pay the price if everyone else isn’t doing it too. The thinking is that because the benefits are collective and the costs are individual, there’s no incentive for individual action without some binding agreement. People don’t want to help carry something if there’s a chance other people are going to fake lift, also called “free ridership.” It can be a very difficult problem to solve, as you have to get everyone on board with some kind of an enforceable pact. It is also, the authors found, totally not the reason we don’t take action on climate change. At least it’s not the main reason.

Instead, argue political scientists Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger, climate change is more of a “distributive conflict” problem. This means that power struggles at the domestic level are far greater obstacles to action, and when the conditions have been right, nations and sub-state actors have been more than willing to make sweeping changes, independently of whether or not others are doing their part too. 

Why is this a big deal? Because for decades, it was assumed that you had to resolve free ridership as the main obstacle, through treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol. When really, it seems that free rider concerns were mostly lame excuses for inaction—“governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do, and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free-riding has been in place or not.” Within each community, there are some actors that want climate action to happen, there are other actors that do not, and the outcome depends on who has the most power. These battles can be won. 

In the same issue, public policy researcher Thomas Hale uses the distributive conflict article as a springboard to explore the interplay between local conflicts and global change. He arrives at a model of collective action that he calls “catalytic cooperation," arguing that even though we can better understand climate action as a collection of domestic power struggles, resolving those struggles is still a version of global change. It just works differently than one big treaty that makes everyone do something. It's emergent.

Hale points out a few unique features of how people respond to the climate problem that sound a lot like Frank's behavioral contagion argument. First, while it’s often assumed that climate action is a collective good that requires individual sacrifice, there are actually many climate actions that provide both public good and private benefit—better transportation, less time in traffic, clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, new industrial sectors and jobs, etc. In other words, it doesn’t have to be austerity policy. In fact, some people benefit quite a lot, which increases the likelihood that certain groups of people will take the lead in climate fights. 

But most relevant to our discussion is the fact that climate action offers increasing returns. More benefits are unlocked for more people over time, and more people join team climate. One straightforward example is the reduced cost of renewables over time. Another is that local climate wins form new constituencies that build power. An example that comes to mind is PUSH Buffalo, a Black-led New York nonprofit that does energy efficiency overhauls, neighborhood renewable energy projects, and job training to directly benefit locals. In 2008, PUSH Buffalo created the Green Development Zone, a 25-square block section of Buffalo's West Side that offers community-based renewable energy, urban farms and gardens, green space, pollinator gardens, a community center, and green affordable housing. They’ve not only revitalized their own community, but PUSH has also become a force within state politics as constituents have reaped the benefits of local solutions. 

A final reason for increasing returns is that climate action changes norms. “Norms progress through a life cycle from emergence, to a ‘norm cascade’ in which they become widely followed in practice, to internalization, in which they are embedded in the beliefs and preferences of most actors. As more action takes place, more of this self-reinforcing logic applies.” Hale also argues that we can create “catalytic institutions” that spur these processes along. These might be national or global policies and treaties that back up leaders on the ground, but his research mainly makes a strong case for decentralized local solutions as a form of global climate action. Such local advances could be as radical as leaders on the ground are able to pull off, and then spread like, well, contagion. 

Combined, these findings offer a model for starting with individual needs, building up to community solutions that benefit both individuals and the collective, then shifting global norms (not just consumer norms) that unlock widespread change. One of the big sources of climate pessimism is the idea that there are some immovable tendencies in human nature that make this problem particularly difficult, if not impossible to solve. That idea has fueled repeated failed attempts at top down policies and blunt, market-based instruments to force all of us selfish people to consume resources in a certain way. 

But what if that view of what’s holding back climate action has always been kinda bullshit? An excuse for the powerful? The reality is, individuals support and oppose climate action for all kinds of reasons, and those motivations have the potential to spread like wildfire and pave the way for whatever form of change we need. 

Practice Makes Perfect

There is one final way that I want to suggest we think about individual behavior as it relates to climate change, and that is just a way of living like the people we would like to be, even if surrounding systems aren’t ready for it yet. I often think about this interview with Tatiana Schlossberg, who wrote a book called Inconspicuous Consumption about the very topic of how to bridge personal and systemic change. She made the point that, even if individual action is not making a difference in a world of billions of people, “I think it’s important for me and for people who care about this issue to try to live in line with our values, because I want to be the kind of person who, if I learn more information about the harmful things that I’m doing, that I act on them.”

We might think of how personal lifestyle changes are not a tool of absolution, or symptom of guilt, but a way of walking a path toward the radical change demanded of society. It's not unlike movements such as Occupy governing themselves through egalitarian, participatory democracy, seeking to live their values within efforts to change systems. Prefigurative politics describes when a group seeking societal change strives to reflect that change within its own practice. So the culture the group creates, how it makes decisions, the experiences people have, should all resemble the world we are striving for. It’s often described as a way to begin building the new world in the shell of the old. Or as Rebecca Solnit describes it in her book Hope in the Dark, “the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded.”

That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it’s a temporary and local place, this paradise of participating, this vale where souls get made.

That last part references a Keats quote, as Solnit cites earlier, “That’s why John Keats called the world with all its suffering ‘this vale of soul-making,’ why crisis often brings out the best in us.” 

Personal lifestyle changes might act, not as a meaningless form of “doing my part,” or merely as a means to some other policy, but as a way of being the kind of person who lives in the world we want, even if it doesn’t exist yet. Individual action can be where it starts, community solutions is where it leads, and then we reach global change. And until we get there, we’re ready for it. We’ve been practicing.