Making the Shift
Credit: jointheshift.earth , website design by LEAP
Making sure future generations have a beautiful, healthy planet to enjoy requires shifts in our current behavior. And behavior change can be challenging, to say the least. We’re all creatures of habit. We like what we like and change always sounds hard. Sometimes it is hard. But it can be rewarding and even fun!
It’s not like we can ignore the damage we’re doing to life on the planet – it’s all around us, on the news and on social media every day. We try to distract ourselves to avoid the gnawing feeling that things are not going in the right direction, but we honestly just don’t know what to do. The truth is, we can’t permanently get rid of that sensation, that gnawing feeling. It always comes back. The best way to fight it is by doing something, even something small, and building on that.
I recently found a fabulous tool to help us do just that – it’s a personalized guide to “Climate Solutions for Real Life,”created by climate scientist Dr. Kimberly Nicholas and the team at Project Drawdown. For a little background, Dr. Nicholas is a Professor and Sustainability Scientist at Lund University in Sweden. She’s also the author of one of my favorite books, Under the Sky We Make: How to be Human in a Warming World as well as a monthly newsletter, a Substack, and a Podcast, all called We Can Fix It. She is simply inspirational.
Project Drawdown is a team of scientists and creatives who are on a mission to share rigorous climate science in actionable, compelling ways through storytelling and stakeholder engagement. Their YouTube channel is amazing – for a great primer on the need for greenhouse gas drawdown and effective climate actions, be sure to watch their five-part series called The Drawdown Roadmap.
But back to shifting our behavior with Climate Solutions for Real Life. This fun exercise asks short, simple questions to create a personalized path of actions you can take as a citizen, professional, investor, consumer, and role model. When you’re done with the exercise, you’ll get a beautiful pdf guide summarizing the actions you can take in any of these roles. I’m so glad I went through the process because it showed me some new ways I can make a difference.
I urge you to do it, too, and if you identify a shift you want to make, but need some support or a sounding-board, please reach out! I’m here to help you, your organization, or your community.
Because (you know) we’re all in this together.