Thinking globally and acting locally is more important than ever
I expressed in my last post (article, newsletter, whatever we call this wonderful place) how trying to do everything right by environmental standards can make you go a bit crazy. I think this point is especially prominent when you open up the climate section of any news site and find yourself inundated with headlines about a new oil pipeline, another species facing extinction, or a climate disaster halfway across the world. How can one insignificant person feel like they’re having a positive effect on the world when they’re constantly overwhelmed by the terrifying and ever-worsening problems of the entire planet?
“Think global, act local” is a term that seems to have fallen out of use in the environmental space, (often being co-opted by businesses in the late 1980s and 90s), originally coined by a town planner and social activist, then introduced into the environmental content by maybe Friends of the Earth, but also possibly the microbiologist René Dubos. There’s also the evolution of the term by activists into "act globally, act local" due to the need for activism across the entire planet, but I believe we could have a much bigger impact by bringing the focus back to our local areas.
Before we explore this topic, I’d like to preface this article by saying of course global action is important. We risk oversimplification of all the environmental problems in the world by assuming our actions happen in a vacuum. I’ve seen countless arguments about whether banning plastics will actually increase carbon emissions due to the replacement materials, or the fact that if we all start driving electric cars, then the needed electricity produces more CO2 than diesel engineers. There are many, many, large-scale environmental problems in this world, and unfortunately, I (and probably nor you) are going to be able to solve them ourselves. But what we can do, and these actions are often much more available to us, is focus our attention on our local areas and communities and produce a much more positive impact than we would have otherwise.
I believe one of the biggest reasons we need local action–and local change–is because, in an ideal world where we eliminate the need for fossil fuels, and reduce carbon emissions to minuscule levels by finding a completely “green” fuel source to power civilization, we will not be delivered from the ecological crisis. And this is the big, fat, endangered elephant in the room that people like to ignore.
In his book Climate, Eisenstein writes “When we cast ecological healing in global terms, our gaze wanders away from the places we have loved and lost, the places that are sick and dying, the places we care about that are tangible and experientially known and real to us. It goes instead to distant times and places, and our local loves become at best instruments toward a larger end.” Do you want to save your local forest because they sequester carbon, or do you want to save them because it would be a great loss to humanity? If we’re acting on purely global terms in this way, then it doesn’t really matter if you cut down a forest in the Amazon as long as we can build a carbon sequestration plant in Rio, right? Right.
Those of us in the Western world who have the biggest effect on the environment–our increased emissions, our over-consumption, our frivolous approach to waste–are least affected by climate change. Instead, the people who have done the least when it comes to pollution, tend to be the ones most exposed to climate consequences. I understand Westerners are in a privileged position but in a way, we are often the ones who are most cut off from any possibility of reactivating older institutions, ones that know how to live in harmony with the environment and the local land and could guide us to a better future.
(On a related note, I’ve heard suggestions from permaculturists that we need to speak to the indigenous people of our lands and ask them to guide us to a less polluting way of life. Which, if this is a possibility for you I urge you to do so, but it also dampened my spirits slightly as someone who lives on the isles of Great Britain, there are no indigenous people to speak of.)
I also believe that local action can bring back optimism–and perhaps a sense of control–to many people. Many of the solutions we are presented with today often sound unrealistic or downright terrifying, like Bill Gates’ techno-fixes such as spraying dust into the atmosphere to block the sun, or some scientist’s solution of creating a hybrid of extinct beasts such as woolly mammoths to fix the arctic tundra. As Dougald Hind writes “[our] optimism comes in the form of a billionaire’s wish list of technologies that don’t exist yet.”
The writer Sophie Strand talks often about the concept of caring for your local five-mile or 10-mile radius. If all of us worked on improving our local areas, caring for our neighbours, reducing our waste, picking up litter, growing seasonal food, etc, then we would leave the world in a better state. In her book, The Flowering Wand she writes:
“We are neither totally responsible for our current climatological crisis nor totally blameless. This is a call to meditate on the small acts of eucatastrophe that we can enact in our own lives. Noticing a possum, hit by a car, still alive, and bringing it to a wildlife rehabilitator constitutes a eucatastrophe. Allowing a front lawn to run wild with milkweed and goldenrod and clover amount to a eucatastrophe for struggling bee populations. Noticing a friend isn’t returning calls and stopping by to check on them is a eucatastrophe. Protecting old-growth forests from logging is a eucatastrophe. The imperative in the Anthropocene, it seems to me, is not to long for our own happy ending but to try, day after day, in small ways, to give that joyful rescue to someone else.”
I believe this commitment comes from the love of the land, but we often find ourselves so detached from our local areas. None of our food is grown locally, our waste is whisked off to unknown lands, hell, even our entertainment often comes from halfway across the world.
To fall in love with your local area again might take some work. I can’t name the bird calls I hear outside of my window, nor can I name the plants and flowers that I meet on my local lunchtime walks. But I would love to be able to feed my family with foods grown in a local community garden, hang art crafted by my neighbours, and connect with people who live a stone’s throw away from my front door in the near future.
Because If each individual worked to heal their local forest, local wetland, local mountaintop, local lake, local coral reef, then the drilling, and the fracking, and the pipelining would have to stop. I truly believe that if we put our commitment into protecting our local place, whilst respecting the local place of others, we would be able to resolve many of the issues looming climate crisis ourselves.
Inspiration and resources
Climate — A New Story | Charles Eisenstein
The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine | Sophie Strand