What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

– Jane Goodall

In an earlier section, we talked about how about 100 companies are responsible for most of the emissions being released right now. We also noted that we as consumers don’t really buy from them directly. So how do we fight back at the individual level? How can we curb emissions and cut other kinds of pollution?

By drying up the market for the products that these companies backstop. Voting with your wallet.

Again, I’m not talking about temporary boycotts. Nor am I talking about standing around in the grocery store debating the morality of choosing Brand A over Brand B while the kids are bugging you for chocolate bars or plushies. 

What I’m suggesting is a longer term solution and a systematic approach, whereby you take a look at one purchasing habit at a time, fix it, and then move on to the next habit. 

Let’s use an example. Consider this: Every toothbrush you’ve ever used in your life is almost certainly still around. 

Numbers vary, depending on the conditions and type of plastic, but most figures suggest that it takes hundreds of years for plastic to decompose. (And mostly it seems to go into smaller and smaller bits of plastic.)

Kind of a scary thought, yes? It gets worse if you start doing some math. 

Let’s say the average person changes out his toothbrush once a year. Now consider a small city with 1,000,000 people in it. That means one city generates a million used toothbrushes every… single… year.  

Thus, we’re creating mountains of used toothbrushes that will still be around in ~450 years.

And of course, since you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to tell you that most plastics come from fossil fuels, and that fossil fuels are responsible for CO2 emissions, air pollution, and that oil spills are incredibly devastating. 

So, is there a perfect, zero-impact replacement for plastic toothbrushes?

No. Not yet anyway. But there are products that are arguably better. 

And indeed, that’s the case with nearly everything we’ll look at in the coming sections. 

Nothing proposed will be perfect, and there’s probably no such thing as zero-impact. Given the size of the human population, the law of big numbers will mean that everything we do will have outsized effects on our planet.

But we no longer have the luxury of waiting for heaven-sent solutions. We have to start moving everything we do to at least less bad right now while en route to those solutions that are sustainable or regenerative.  

We’ll start with some of the biggest impact items in your household. One will be obvious, and you’ve probably been thinking about it already. The other might surprise you. 

As long as politics is the shadow of big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

― John Dewey

Whether you’re a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist or an ardent socialist, it’s fair to say that large businesses – multinational corporations especially – have incredible power. It’s also fair to say that that power isn’t always used for the greater good.

John Bunzl and  Nick Duffell, writing in The Simpol Solution, suggest that we are in the grip of what they call “destructive global competition” or DGC. As long as there is one jurisdiction that ‘competes’ by offering low corporate tax rates, lax environmental regulations, soft labour laws, or some other incentive for corporations, then all the other jurisdictions have to do something similar. Otherwise, corporations move jobs elsewhere. No jobs results in no votes for politicians, and of course, unemployment for the citizen. 

DGC is why even progressive-leaning political parties seem to promote the status quo. They can only push so hard in this environment, before losing votes and thus losing the power to change things. 

This must change. It is completely unsustainable, no matter what timeline we consider. 

So what can we do? As a consumer, we’re often told we can punish companies by boycotting their products. That is still true in certain industries, especially for small- to medium-sized businesses, if you can get enough people on board for a boycott. I’m sure you can think of many examples where public outcry and a drop in sales reversed an announced policy or changed a specific company practice. 

It’s not terribly effective in the long term, however, as public attention is fickle. Neither is it much of a bother for large or multinational corporations. Consider The Procter & Gamble Company, which owns something like 65 different brands, with dozens of individual products under each brand line. You could boycott one brand of laundry detergent in favour of another, only to discover, once you read the label carefully, that they’re both owned by P&G. So not only is it hard to avoid that company’s products in the first place, they have so many that a temporary drop in sales for one brand won’t hurt them much.

Boycotts are also only truly available to the privileged: those who have the time and the money to be able to make considered purchases. A single mother working two part-time jobs, and who is reliant on public transit to get groceries, doesn’t have nearly as many choices as a double-income family with two personal vehicles. So while you may be able to avoid one corporation’s products completely should you want to, that corporation is still able to make millions of dollars from other consumers. Thus, we need to do more than just temporarily avoid a product for a while.

How to Take Action:

1. Complain directly to that company’s customer service channel. A drop in sales can be attributed to too many other things: a dud advertising campaign, a new competitor, a sudden price sensitivity, the end of a trend. If you’re going to stop buying a company’s product, you have to let them know why. (Note: Don’t be rude to the customer service rep for any reason. They’re just doing their job.) In a blog post, grocery store chain owner Galen Weston once noted that the most angry emails they’d ever received was when they started wrapping their cucumbers in plastic. A flood of complaints does get attention.
2. Publicly call the company out on social media. Not only is it harder for a company to ignore something being done publicly, but other people will see you taking a company to task, and might be encouraged to avoid the product and voice their displeasure as well.
3. Do both of the above even if you have never bought the product and don’t intend to. For example, I never buy soda, but I have complained to soda manufacturers about their continued use of plastic o-rings to distribute their products. If you see something, say something.
4. Bring the problem to the attention of a larger organization or media outlet, too. For example, it wasn’t widely known that retail clothing stores were actively destroying and dumping millions of unsold items, until it came to the attention of the media and advocacy groups. Now there’s considerable pressure against these “fast fashion” practices. 
5. Rethink your investments. If you are fortunate enough to have a retirement fund, have a hard look at where you’re invested. There’s no point in avoiding a company’s products if you’re actively supporting their current stock market valuation with your mutual funds!  Many brokerages and banks now offer “ethical portfolios,” and while there’s a lot of greenwashing out there, these are worth a look. Talk to your advisor about establishing an investment policy.
6. Push an investment entity to divest. When big investors, like the Vatican, for example, announce they’re no longer going to invest in anything related to fossil fuels, you can bet it makes a difference. Pick a bank, a mutual fund, a private equity firm, your government’s pension plan, and tell them to divest themselves of environmentally-destructive companies.
7. Do the same to your insurance company. Big investments come with big risks, which big insurance companies underwrite. There have been a number of successful campaigns to pressure insurance firms into declining to insure things like pipelines. 
8. Support eco and social justice lawsuits. Individuals don’t have the resources to fight corporations in court, but non governmental organizations (NGOs) do, especially if you donate to their legal funds.
9. Finally, rather than boycotting, which is temporarily abstaining from purchase, permanently and proactively switch to ecofriendly products and services. Indeed, we’ll talk about how to do just that in later posts.

“The idea is to change the nature and value system of the nation as whole” 

― Sunday Adelaja

It’s a frustrating time to be a progressive voter. On one hand, the existing power structures seem inclined to corporatism and incrementalism, when what we need are sweeping changes, fast. On the other hand, the opposition parties in many countries seem actively regressive, and so the choice seems to be vote for the status quo and hope to inch it forward or risk sliding backward. 

It also doesn’t help that world leaders spend a lot of time pointing fingers at each other, insisting that the other country needs to go first when it comes to cutting emissions and reducing pollution. While it’s true that certain countries have outsized numbers because of the size of their population (e.g., China) or the size of their economy (e.g., the USA), the truth is all of us, particularly the rich, so-called “developed” nations have terrible numbers on a per person basis. For example, Canada emits 16.1 tons per person versus India at 1.9 per person.^⁠1 In fact, on this basis, Canada is worse than China and India combined! So don’t assume your country is doing well based on overall numbers. Dig into the data, and use these numbers when you take action. Speaking of which:

How to Take Action

1. Vote! The nail-biting closeness of the 2020 US elections is evidence enough that every vote does count. Make sure you vote in every election that you can, at every level, but especially the national level.
2. Work against gerrymandering, which can happen anywhere. Make sure your voting district hasn’t been tinkered with such that it favours one party over another. 
3. If you can’t vote to move forward, at least vote to prevent harm (to yourself but especially to vulnerable and marginalized populations). Do consider what splitting the progressive vote in your district might do before marking that ballot. The same goes for deliberately spoiling your ballot or abstaining from voting. It might give you a temporary righteousness boost, but it won’t change a damn thing, except maybe to make things worse.
4. Email or call your current national representative and be sure they know how you feel about environmental issues. 
5. Change things from the inside: actively join the party that has the best chance of forming a government and start grassroots work to make the party platform progressive. 
6. Join big organizations that change things from the outside. Groups like the World Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, and others have enough members (and funding) that they can browbeat governments into being better from time to time. 
7. Protest! Join or organize peaceful demonstrations. 

In our next post, we’ll discuss the power behind the throne: big corporations. 

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

– Margaret Mead

In the last section, we talked about how if we want to effect real change, we need to push for system-level change.

We’re going to start with local government.

Why? Two reasons:

1. Your local, municipal-level government is the one that is going to be (or already is) hardest hit by environmental problems, and the related social problems. Polluted water? A problem for your local water treatment plant. Flooding? Your local EMS teams. Heat waves? Also your local EMS teams. Terrible air quality? Your local hospitals, overcrowded and struggling. Too much trash? Your tax bill, inflated by waste management fees.
2. Your local government is the one you have the most direct access to, especially if you live in a smaller community.

So, how can we get systemic change at the local level?

First, pick a single issue and a desired outcome. Yes, there are a lot of things you could try to fix, but if you approach your local government with a laundry list you’ll get exactly nowhere. One thing at a time.

Here are some suggested issues and desired outcomes:

• Plastic pollution: Ban the use of any plastic item (or even all single-use plastic items in your municipality). Sometimes people laugh at plastic straw or plastic bag bans as being silly, but every time one of these goes into effect, it shrinks the market for plastic products, and sends a message that we’re fed up with plastic pollution.
• Air pollution: ‘No car’ zones in your municipality. This reduces air pollution, increases use of public transportation, and starts forcing your city planners to think in terms of making your city more walkable or better for bikes. (This also improves health outcomes).
• Electrified transportation infrastructure: Are there enough car chargers in your city? Are there by-laws in place to prevent fossil cars from parking in charging spots? Are there by-laws in place to help condo and apartment dwellers secure charging spots? Are your public transit options based on renewable energy?
• Electricity supply: Has your local utility upgraded to renewable energy or is it still burning coal? Are you allowed to set up your own microgrid or is that against the law?
• Trash: Does your municipality have an organic waste (composting) system? Is recycling collected more often than trash? How much stuff can be recycled in your city?
• Native vs invasive plants: Does your city have any by-laws about what plants the local nurseries can sell? If they’re not selling native plants can you at least get a ban on harmful, invasive plant sales?
• Invasive plants part two: What steps is your city taking to tackle invasives like phragmites, dog strangling vine, knotweed (or whatever is a problem in your region)?

How to Take Action

There are three ways you can take action at the local government level.

1. Email your representatives. Email them all, either all at once, or one per week. (Put it in your calendar!) Describe the problem, describe your solution, show how your solution would benefit to the taxpayer. Forward news stories from other cities where your solution has been successfully implemented. If you can work out which bureaucrats and front line workers would be responsible for implementing your solution, email them too.
2. Form an action group! Get a bunch of people emailing councillors, attending meetings, circulating a petition, chanting in front of city hall, and so on. Remember, there’s strength in numbers! (Pro tip for getting other people on board: Invite them personally, don’t just put out a general call.)
3. Run for office. This might sound daunting, but you just need to remember that there’s nothing particularly special about the people who have run for office before. You don’t even have to win a seat (although obviously it’s better if you do). Running for council gives you the chance to go door to door to talk to people about your issue and get them on board.

Remember: be specific. Don’t just talk in general terms about zero waste or climate change. Give your local council something they can action. Give them something that would make them look good to voters.

What issue are you going to approach your council about? Comment below.

One’s got to change the system, or one changes nothing. 

— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Not long ago, The Guardian^⁠1 reported on a study that suggested that just 100 companies were responsible for 71 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

100 companies. 71 percent.

Which sounds like an actionable bit of knowledge. Just boycott those 100 and we’re good to go, right?

Except that it turns out those companies are coal, oil, and gas producers that, in general, you and I don’t buy from directly. 

So, that means we have to take a two-pronged approach:

1. We need to make systemic changes.
2. We need to make personal changes.

Systemic changes are up first, because while we can definitely influence things by making small personal changes, we must really kick the system hard to get the actions we want as fast as we need them.

Let me use a real world example to illustrate what I mean.

You probably already recycle your plastic bottles, right? Or maybe you don’t even use them. That’s awesome, and you should be congratulated. It’s important that you keep doing that.

But … as long as the system continues to produce plastic bottles and also doesn’t account for the hundreds of thousands of people who either can’t or won’t recycle them, and also doesn’t account for the bad actor companies that just dump what they’re supposed to recycle, we still have a huge problem.

Well, I hear you say, we just need to get more people to recycle. Education! Awareness!

To which I say: hogsnarfle.

For one thing, we’ve been running education and awareness programs for decades. They only work if people are receptive to the message and can act on it. (Spoiler alert: The system makes it really, really hard to act on it.)

But more to the point, there’s just too many of us!!

Let’s do some math. Don’t worry, I’ll do all the heavy lifting here.

Coca-Cola^⁠2 says that they sell 1.9 billion servings of their drinks in 200 countries every day. 

Now, let’s assume we do such a great job of recycling that a whopping 90% of those serving containers are recycled.

That still leaves one hundred and ninety million containers in our landfills, oceans, and by the side of the road.

190,000,000. 

Every. Single. Day.

(And yes, you could argue that not all of those servings are individually packaged, what with bigger bottles and fountain drinks, but even if you slash that number in half or by two thirds, it’s still mind-boggingly huge. It’s also just the drinks from one company. Think how many other products there are out there?!)

Now let’s be honest with ourselves here. You’ve seen the comments on any social media post. You know what your co-workers and the people in your community can be like. 

Can you really see any future in which we have 90% of people doing the right thing 100% of the time?

No, me neither. And I’m an optimist!

So that’s why we need to tackle the systems first. We must have systems that account for real human behaviours, both good and bad. 

This is the last explanatory/introductory post. In our next section, we’re going to start kicking the system, beginning with your local government.

Today’s action? Subscribe to this blog so you don’t miss a post. There’s a Newsletter Subscribe form on the blog at the right.

¹ https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

² https://www.coca-cola.co.uk/our-business/faqs/how-many-cans-of-coca-cola-are-sold-worldwide-in-a-day

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.’

‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

– JRR Tolkein, Lord of the Rings

The headlines are full of scary images and statistics. Wildfires. Hurricanes. Collapsing ice shelves. Uprisings and protests. All made worse by the surreality of this damned pandemic.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been sleeping well. Or, you know, at all.

Our governments sit on their collective hands and do nothing, or worse, actively roll back progress. Social media has become a doomscroll; a toxic soup of negativity, conspiracy theories, and snark. The future seems uncertain.

The problems seem so BIG. It’s hard to know where to even start. What can I do? Is there any hope?

In my heart of hearts, I believe there is. Here’s why: When I started actively looking for the little glimmers of light in the darkness, looking beyond the headlines, I discovered that there are people trying to fix this.

Hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, just like you and me, who have rolled up their sleeves and are doing something. Taking action in their homes. In their places of work. In their communities.

But they can’t do it alone. None of us can. It’s time for all us to link up and start pushing hard in the same direction.

This isn’t about activism anymore. It’s about action. On this blog I’ve called it ecoaction, but it’s really about All The Problems. Because they’re all interconnected of course.

You. Can. Make. A. Difference. 

Let’s find out how, together.

What will follow this post is a series of posts about practical actions you can take right now, today, tomorrow, and the next day. Some of them will be easy, some of them will be harder, some will be free, and some of them will take money. But they will all be things you can do. We’ll take it one step at a time.

Your first action? Share this post. On Facebook, on Twitter, by email. Share it everywhere you can think of. Encourage them to subscribe to the blog. Let’s get as many people as possible on board. Comment below to let me know you’ve done it!