(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Our cosmic ‘ship’ is ‘taking on water’ fast! When the pump isn’t working — try using a bucket [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-12-21 Our cosmic ‘ship’ is ‘taking on water’ fast! When the pump isn’t working — try using a bucket. Along with several other DK climate diarists, I regularly promote the value of individual, often hands on action, to combat environmental collapse. From differing, but collateral perspectives, we all try to point out that such action is available to anyone, that it can be begun immediately and that it leads toward collective and broader based solutions. Our proactive experience informs us, and we put forward methods such as gardening, land reclamation, consumption and waste management, education, and climate focused GOTV, as well as many other suggestions for doable contributions to environmental health restoration. In this way, dedicated individuals can make surprisingly sizable impacts, canceling or even reversing their carbon footprint while inspiring others to do the same. It is an ‘on-ramp’ approach, not a dead-end alley. Too often, this message is met with resistance and an attempt is made to ‘school’ those of us promoting it, on its lack of meaningful effectiveness. Essentially, the ‘lesson plan’ offered is that considering the enormity of the problem, individual action is inadequate, and that the most effective recourse to combating climate collapse is through broader legislative and policy changes on the part of governing bodies and corporations. But the fact that progress along these lines is glacial and our time is running out, doesn’t seem to dampen their conviction that it is preferentially effective. For a variety of reasons such ‘good intended’ resistance, appears to me to be largely denial and often ego based. This ‘compulsion’ to disqualify pro-individual action, needlessly casts shade over its veracity. Despite the fact that none of us ever suggest that this is the only way forward, our message is frequently received as if we do. This is likely projection, as such response rarely takes the position that all contributions have meaning and that ignoring one over another might be counterproductive. Often the manner in which our proposal is ‘shot down’ implies that we are naive to the scale of the task at hand or fathom the depth of our predicament. But this couldn’t be further from the truth, as for the most part we are all too well aware, often more so than those who imply we are not up to speed. Generally speaking, opinions on DK can frequently be backed with ego projection, rather than a well rounded grasp of the issues, allowing subconscious emotional reactions to step ahead of a better considered response. The need to be right and thus ascendant, can derail any attempt to find common ground through respecting opinions that differ, and in this way, nurture mutual support and constructive dialogue. Ego recognizes that the danger in employing such expansive methods of communication is that one might actually learn something, threatening certainty. Many times ‘critics’ degrading the value of individual action, provide no statistics or sources for their assumption of its ineffectuality. Furthermore, suggestions for ways to participate in broad based solutions are often omitted from their critiques. Yet as promoters of more direct hands-on approaches we frequently describe them and provide links as well. This begs the question as to exactly what these ‘best intentioners’ are actually doing other than offering their inadequately conceived opinions. For a long time, I hadn’t known of any broad-based estimation or overview of the impact individual actions were having, until I read here some time back, that its aggregate might be reaching a critical mass necessary for having impact. Aside from this, I remained unaware of any specific clearing house collecting such data or a group attempting to monitor it. However from the information I gathered from various sources, I was able to intuit that there must be a largely nebulous aggregate of multitudes of independent people engaged in insular pro-actions, with substantial variability to their efforts due to the wide choice of options available — and that they were essentially off the radar… …but this appears to be changing… This article reveals that the youth of the world are not just worried, but starting to take action — much of it in small individually tailored ways. Climate change is driving a global youth revolutionThe Christian Science Monitorhttps://www.csmonitor.com › Environment › Climate-c... Here are various revealing excerpts from Sara Miller Llana and Stephanie Hanes’ article : “In our travels, we met [young] innovators and regenerators, activists and adapters, conservationists and challengers. All of them, in their own ways, are pushing back against the silos in which we’ve understood our world in industry, environment, or geography. They are seizing on a crisis moment to tackle the inequalities and injustices that have long saddled their nations—crafting a new ethos about consumption, “progress,” and what it means to have a good life.” “According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 60% of young Americans—Generation Z and millennials—told pollsters they are “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change. But around the world, that percentage is much higher. In a global survey conducted by Plan International, 98% of youth ages 15 to 24 said they are worried about climate change. But they aren’t just worrying. They are making generational shifts in everything from what they eat to where they work. For instance, 20% of those aged 18 to 24 in Britain don’t eat meat—mainly because of their climate concerns. In Europe, there is a growing move toward “climate quitting,” with many youth choosing to avoid working for automobile or energy companies to make their work lives better match their environmental values.” “It will take many people doing lots of little things, she believes, like this fieldwork she is doing as a volunteer for a local nonprofit, to slow climate change.” (my bold) “Individually, the stories of these young people can seem small, like pinpricks of light flickering against a supercharged storm of politics-as-usual, economic and cultural norms, and a global inclination to avoid the realities of climate change. But as we met more people, we realized that very little the Climate Generation does is truly isolated; this is a generation that is spectacularly connected.” And this is a “think global / act local” perspective provided by “Trust for Public Land”… https://www.tpl.org/blog/conservation-is-climate-action …which presents a host of different small-scale localized nature-based actions which individuals can take, often through community efforts, to provide long-term sustainability to other climate actions large and small. When you are committed to any cause, you can immediately sense when someone else is not, and it doesn’t take much time to arrive at more certainty when weighing words. I find the assumption of ineffectuality applied to individual climate action repeatedly thrown in the face of those of us who propose it to be tiresome. In many cases I immediately recognize it as a knee jerk reaction most likely founded in the subconscious threat our proposal poses to their denial based inaction. However, having nothing to go by other than their comment, I am forced to ‘read between the lines’ to surmise this, and so I necessarily speak generally. I understand the danger inherent in doing so, as I could run the risk of committing the same injustice to some of them, that they sometimes do when they make assumptions about those of us who promote individual action. However, while I promote such action as a way to get around the ‘log-jam’ of ‘blocked’ large scale societal responses to this emergency, I offer the option not as preferential, but as immediately operative, its value enhanced by the dynamics of ground-up growth. I do not promote small as preferable to large (or vice-versa), but rather action as preferable to none and doable as preferable to deferred. 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