Climate change
What to do after you've changed your light bulbs
By Kevin Wilson
When you see news reports on climate change, how do you feel? Worried? Angry? Scared? Those are all common reactions, and it's very easy to get stuck in them and feel helpless to do anything to make any difference. So we continue doing mostly what we've always done, while maybe changing some light bulbs and turning the heat down a little.
Individual responses seem ineffective measured against the scale of the problem, and it's true: what one person alone does makes very little difference. But individual actions do matter, when many individuals do them.
In wartime, governments show by their actions that our personal actions matter. "Dig For Victory!" "Is Your Journey Really Necessary?" What we eat, how we travel, how we heat our homes, even what we wear makes a real difference when we do it together with others. Sharon Astyk (www.sharonastyk.com) says that "more than 70% of our (greenhouse gas) emissions are tied directly or indirectly to home life and purchasing."
Our individual actions make a difference when we take them together as part of our community. For example, the production of industrial meat in feedlots and its transportation over long distances puts out a lot of greenhouse gases. If one person stops eating industrial meat, that makes a difference, but it can feel like a lonely road and hard to keep up the changed habits. If a dozen families do it together, they can share meals, share recipes for non-meat dishes, share non-industrial meat sources, support each other when it seems hard, form a buying club, be visible in the community, spread the habit to others, and make much more of an impact.
Take energy conservation. Improving your insulation, draft-proofing your house, and even installing solar panels is expensive and a lot of hassle, whether you hire someone to do it for you or do it yourself. Imagine if a group of homeowners in a neighbourhood got together, worked on each other's houses to do do-it-yourself projects, and clubbed together to get a deal on insulation, solar panels, and installation. Everyone gets a better deal, more gets done because the group keeps each other moving and the visibility of a bigger project encourages others to get on board.
There's a worldwide movement towards this kind of community action. One of the models for it is called "Transition Towns." The Transition model started in Totnes, England in 2005 and as of January 2010 there were 265 official Transition Initiatives (towns, islands, valleys, villages, forests, even a postcode). The Transition model uses community action to rebuild 'resilience'--the capacity to withstand shocks from the outside, to reorganize and keep going no matter what happens. Shocks like those from climate change, resource shortages, and economic instability.
People like me and you are joining together all over the world, taking concrete action to change the things about our society and the ways we live our lives that are leading us into trouble. Growing food, organizing alternative transport networks, creating local currencies, installing local energy generation capacity, and changing our own habits to give us a world and a society we can continue to live with for the long term.
All this doesn't mean that government action is not needed. But what we're seeing, as at Copenhagen, is that governments won't take actions that are not "electable." We have to show them that we really do want them to take real action on climate change, by taking real actions ourselves.
Transition Town Powell River is your local Transition group. You can find us on the Web at transitionpowellriver.wordpress.com (where we have links to many other useful resources), email us at transitionpowellriver@gmail.com, or phone Kevin at 604 483-9052. We're planning a full schedule of events in 2010 including film screenings, workshops, community roundtables, arts contests, bike picnics and more, leading up to our Great Unleashing. Contact us and get involved!
