What Can One Person Do in the Face of All This?

Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

It’s Earth Week. It can admittedly feel silly or even performative to take only one week or even just one day, like Earth Day on April 22 of this year, to focus attention on the planet and its needs. But we shouldn’t tumble into cynicism. Traditionally, humans have always divided our calendar into many observances—Christmas, Lunar New Year, Memorial Day—so we can intentionally focus our attention on what the day or period truly means. Earth Day itself is a commemoration of the birth of the international environmental movement in the year 1970, a moment worthy of celebration and an inspired way to motivate action and activism on behalf of the planet.

It’s also common to feel overwhelmed at the magnitude of the climate crisis. After all, in the face of something as dire and all-encompassing as global warming, what can one person even do? And are we simply making ourselves feel better, or even worse, merely virtue signaling when we determine to change our patterns of consumption to reduce our personal carbon or waste footprint?

This sort of thinking can lead to despair and paralysis, especially when the headlines are filled with every sort of evidence that we are collectively failing. So I prefer to turn this question around. Because each of us is, by definition, just one person on this planet, what part can each of us play in the solution? The mathematical truth is that 1 person = 1 part. We don’t have to set out to make a big impact by some objective measure. Indeed, that sets us up for frustration and failure. By focusing first on changing our own personal thinking and practices, however, we quietly set examples for our children, friends and communities, but even more importantly we subtly shift our own mindsets and habits. From that point, we might grow more open and attentive to the issues because we now have a stake, we now have made sacrifices and adjustments, we’re now part of the folks who want something done.

Where that then takes us varies from person to person. It does no one any good to be in a constant state of guilt or outrage over every unrecycled piece of plastic or every trip with the family in the car, especially when it is a much larger system that has trapped all us consumers in its cycle. Such First World angst or finger-wagging certainly doesn’t help solve the climate crisis. For my part, when I find that I have extra energy and the passion to do something about a problem, I get involved in my community so I can channel it more productively. And if you ever think that a few concerned citizens can’t ever have an impact, you should listen to the story of Ella Lage, an ordinary mom in Berlin, who through a few simple letters got the entire city to begin to divest from fossil fuels.

This planet, which we honor and respect with greater urgency this week, doesn’t ask us to be anything but good caretakers of the small part of it with which each of us has been entrusted. Our dependency on fossil fuels ultimately can be broken by billions of humans each doing just that. But effective caretaking begins from a place of quiet resolve and informed thought. I like to begin from there and see where it takes me.