In 2021, how can we resolve to do better for the climate crisis?

You might expect a climate change blog on resolutions to talk about what eco-friendly choices to make in 2021, but that’s not what my first post of the year is going to be about.

I am usually a big New Year’s Resolutions person (I normally have ten) but not this year. This year we’ve all done so well just to get here, and I think that is really quite enough.

So instead this first post of 2021 is going to be about how we might set our direction of travel for the year when so much uncertainty- and challenge- still lies ahead.

*This year we’ve all done so well just to get here, and that is really quite enough.*

How can we give ourselves the best chance of getting to where we want to get to, both personally and globally, built on something more sustainable, and hopefully more enjoyable, than the short-lived zeal of the ‘new year, new me’ approach?

Why I’m Resisting Climate Positive Lifestyle Resolutions

One of the things that working in climate lobbying taught me is that it’s usually worth listening carefully to those you most disagree with if you want to learn how to persuade them (for more on this see my post On… Politics).

Often I was surprised to find that as I grew to understand that perspective better, there was usually something that resonated with me, despite such deeply different interpretations of reality.

One such example is one that originates from the Biblical heartlands of the USA which is a rationale for not making the necessary changes to avert climate change. It goes something like this;

How arrogant of humans to think they can change the climate. Only God can do such a thing.

We know that, scientifically speaking, this simply isn’t true.

However, there is something else to this perspective that does have truth to it, and that is its take on responsibility.

This perspective rejects the notion that ‘humanity’ is responsible for climate change. And I take the same viewpoint, albeit in a very different way.

Feeling Guilty About Climate Change?

This climate denying perspective reacts against the idea that inaction on climate change leaves us with ‘blood on our hands’, to quote Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking to the US Congress last year.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed and paralysed by guilt about climate change, I hope this perspective might help you.

Because we human beings, with our individual lives and choices, are not responsible for climate change.

No. The responsibility lies instead with the human structures that govern and dictate society, of which we are each of us a very small part and over which no one has complete control.

There is of course plenty to thank these systems for. I am grateful, for example, that I don’t have to organise my own individual rubbish collection each week.

I’m grateful that I don’t have to participate in deciding what should happen to every person that makes a legal transgression that could affect me and my community, and that I am not responsible for setting the legal parameters for that in the first place.

I’m deeply grateful for the NHS, the education system, the electoral system, and for so much that makes our common life together possible.

*I’m deeply grateful for the systems that enable us to live our common life together.*

But these systems are, of course, flawed because they are human and because, like human beings, they are required to continually evolve in order to be fit for purpose.

It is now time for those systems to take a massive evolutionary jump.

So if you’ve struggled to go vegan, quit flying, buy less, take public transport, invest in solar panels, or all the many other things that are indeed good for the planet then it is not because of your own personal failing, but because the systems we are all part of are not yet set up for those changes.

Veganuary

Take veganism, for example (it is Veganuary, after all), which is one of the biggest things you can do to cut your carbon footprint.

Imagine that the meat section in the shops is a third of the size with much less choice available, perhaps because we have lost the option to buy poorly reared meat.

Imagine that the meat is a great deal pricier to reflect the true environmental impacts and the offsetting that is needed to account for that (just as alcohol and sugar are priced to reflect the true health costs).

Imagine that the fruit and veg section is substantially cheaper than it is currently, perhaps subsidised by the little meat still bought, and vegan recipes are abundantly and easily accessible to you because it’s what you eat when you go to friends’ houses, it’s what’s prepared on cooking shows, it’s what most mainstream recipe books contain, it’s the majority of options available at restaurants.

Eating less meat and dairy would come so naturally to us all, it would be our new normal.

An article in The Conversation takes aim at capitalism as the overarching system responsible for climate change, which, whether you are in agreement or not, makes some brilliant points along these same lines;

‘[Blaming ‘humanity’ rather than capitalism] also perpetuates a sense that humans are inherently “bad”, and that it is somehow “in our nature” to consume until there is nothing left.’

All this is not to say that we shouldn’t make carbon positive lifestyle changes, not at all.

It is difficult to think of a much better new year’s resolution than trying to reduce your carbon footprint. There is an abundance of wonderful New Year initiatives, such as Veganuary, flight free 2021, or WWF’s Zero to Planet Hero initiative that I would wholeheartedly encourage you to get involved in.

But it is to say that we should not tie ourselves in knots, beating ourselves up for not getting it right, as I have found myself doing at various points during my journey with climate change.

The anger or frustration we might feel at ourselves (or others) can be harnessed instead to fight for systemic change, such as lobbying for better regulation (see Hope for the Future’s excellent resources for more on this, if you are UK based).

So, I am in agreement with the humility of the climate denying perspective that the responsibility of climate change is not to be born on our individual, human shoulders… although I am also in agreement with Ocasio-Cortez, because a particular responsibility does lie with legislators.

Resolutions and Imagination

It’s my hope that this perspective might release those of us who might be feeling overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility, but in some ways our knowledge of our smallness can also immobilise us, leaving us wondering whether it is even worth trying at all.

We can end up feeling stuck, caught between a rock and a hard place as we try to function within a society that encourages us one way, whilst knowing the changes that must be made take us in another.

So how might we unstick ourselves, personally and globally?

I recently had a coaching session when I was finding that I was really struggling to practice what I preach in terms of self-care.

Liz, who was coaching me, asked me what felt like genuine self-care, and in that moment I really struggled to think of something that didn’t feel like an obligation in some way. Something where I didn’t find I was pushing myself to do it because I know it’s good for me.

Self-care had a legacy, for me, of being something I did to give myself enough resilience to keep pushing on through, back in my workaholic days as the Director of a climate change charity.

Self-care during that time was not about self-love, but about getting more productivity out of myself.

So, to pull me out of the rut, Liz got me to visualise how I would like my life to look in five years… but there was still a blockage.

This, again, is part of the legacy that working in climate change has left me.

Not thinking about the future was one of the ways I stayed sane. I didn’t want to imagine what life might look like in ten, twenty, thirty years… it felt too scary.

And this, according to the author of From What Is to What If, might be the biggest mistake we could make if we really want to save the planet.

From What is to What If

Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of the Transition Network, an international network of communities working towards self-sufficiency in response to the ecological and sociological challenges of the 21st century.

If you want to find out more, you can watch this great two minute video explaining the movement’s history.

Hopkins is in agreement with many of the major thinkers within the climate movement that our struggle to halt climate change is, above all, a failure of imagination. We have not dreamt big enough, or sold a compelling enough vision of just how much better life could be if we took climate solutions seriously, and as time has been running out, we have become less and less inclined to believe it’s really possible.

This is a self-perpetuating cycle because the imagination, like any other mental capacity, is something that weakens over time without use.

With more and more everyday facilities doing the work of our imaginations on our behalf- such as TV, video games, and social media- our society has found itself experiencing a crisis of imagination.

According to Hopkins, this is a major problem because the climate emergency is not a challenge we will be able to think our way out of, but we will instead need to learn how to dream our way out of it.

We will need to imagine something so bold and beautiful that it cannot help but wake us from our slumber and compel us into a brighter future.

So, how does Hopkins suggest we harness this magic climate-solving elixir?

Squeeze the Lemon

When I was first learning about mindfulness, I was introduced to the ‘lemon exercise’, which Hopkins also gives some space to in his book.

My teacher (the wonderful Fiona Watson) asked the group to close our eyes and imagine that we were holding a large, juicy lemon up to our noses.

She asked us to imagine the lemon’s zesty smell, its bright yellow skin, waxed and with small dimples all over it. She asked us to imagine cutting that lemon in half and seeing the juice squirt as the blade cuts through, and then that we lift a wedge of lemon to our mouths and take a bite.

Finally, Fiona asked us to notice what had happened in our bodies during that exercise, and the whole group found that they were salivating as if we really were biting into a lemon, such is the power of our imaginations (I have even found myself salivating as I write this!).

There are all sorts of experiments and pieces of research that bear witness to the incredible power of the imagination. Hopkins has a list of them in his introductory chapter showing that there is very little difference for our minds between imagining we are doing something, and actually doing it.

The ‘lemon excercise’ demonstrates just how powerful our imaginations are.

One experiment, for example, showed that those who practiced a finger strengthening exercise saw a 30% increase in muscle strength, where those that simply imagined doing it for the same amount of time still saw a 22% increase.

And we can unlock these powerful benefits simply by practicing using our imagination.

Hopkin’s book is structured as nine chapters, each of which asks a ‘What If…?’ question that give us a heading as to how to cultivate more imagination. These are…

· What if we took play seriously?

· What if we considered imagination vital to our health?

· What if we followed nature’s lead?

· What if we fought back to reclaim our attention?

· What if school nurtured young imaginations?

· What if we became better storytellers?

· What if we started asking better questions?

· What if our leaders prioritised the cultivation of our imagination?

· What if all this came to pass?

Over the next few week’s I’ll be exploring some of these questions with my subscribers, so do sign up if you haven’t already.

What’s Blocking our Imaginations?

The opening chapter of Hopkins’ book, however, didn’t exactly grip me.

He opens with a utopian vision of homegrown food, community projects, and perfect social integration (he says it isn’t utopian, but it definitely is). It is the progressive’s dream.

But reading it initially, I didn’t find the vision at all compelling. In fact, it kind of irritated me.

Why?

Because I didn’t believe it could happen.

And this is exactly what often blocks us from being able to envisage something better for ourselves; our internal protective mechanisms fire up and start getting involved in the conversation.

Don’t even bother getting your hopes up, that will never happen.

Why not save your energies for something more realistic?

How bad do you really want that anyway?

This is one of the ways in which the stories we tell ourselves about where we are headed become self-fulfilling prophesies, as I explored in my final series of last year On… Story.

It’s the same kind of blockage I encountered during my coaching conversation with Liz where I was struggling to visualise my desired future.

Visualising the Future

*A post-swim-feeling photo from this summer.*

In the end, Liz was able to uncover a small glimmer of hope, which is that I love to be anywhere where there are large bodies of water… the sea, lakes, rivers, preferably anywhere that I can in and have a good swim too.

‘What does it feel like, to be in the water?’ Liz asked me.

‘It feels like the kind of excitement I used to get about Christmas when I was little… I can’t explain it, but it’s just the best feeling.’

So that became our starting point.

Liz asked me what I saw myself wearing as I visited the sea, what house I was living in at the time, what work I had been doing that morning, or would be doing the next day. About the people I would see, the books I would read, the hobbies I would give myself to, and suddenly, sure enough, I found myself so excited about this possible future I was well and truly unstuck.

Self-care, I realised, was finding ways to live that kind of life now, and there were all sorts of ways of doing that.

So I spent time with that vision each morning, adding detail, letting the excitement of it seep in, allowing it to pull me out of all the things in my life that made me feel like change wouldn’t be possible.

It turned out to be a major moment in my recovery from climate activism burnout.

And so, if visualisation can be so powerful for us on a personal level, surely it can do the same for us on a global level, and this is again why the stories we are telling ourselves about where we are headed are so important.

Just as visualising a finger strengthening exercise actually had physical benefits, so does visualisation our desired future help us to achieve changes in our own lives, and beyond, by weakening the parts of our brains that say real change is not possible.

Imagining our future gives us a heading when we feel stuck, but the practice of actively visualising it regularly is especially powerful because it embeds that destination in our subconscious.

It becomes a part of us, meaning that our brains are working away at finding a roadmap to get there even when we are not consciously trying to find a solution.

The subconscious processes information around 500,000 times more quickly than the conscious, so it would make sense that it is worthwhile taking our greatest dreams to our subconscious.

*Imagining our future gives us a heading when we feel stuck, but the practice of actively visualising it regularly embeds that destination in our subconscious.*

My Challenge To You

This week I would like to encourage you to spend some time visualising where you hope life will take you, and where you hope to take your life, over the coming months and years.

Of course, none of us know where life might be taking us, and what will unfold, but visualising your desired future gives a heading for where you want to pour your efforts here and now.

If, like me, climate change is weighing on you, this might include visualising a kind of life that is in alignment with your desire to do something about climate change, or that makes it possible for others to do the same.

Find something that brings your heart alive, something that fills you with excitement.

And then work from there. What are the little steps that you can do, right here, right now to get there?

And when you’re struggling for motivation for those little steps, return again to that wonderful vision you have for yourself and this world.

**About Me** I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.

Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.

On… Resolutions