Small, step-wise changes

"How do you encourage people to keep their hope," Joan (Kingsolver's friend) asked, "but not their complacency?"She was involved that spring in producing a film about global climate change, and preoccupied with striking this balance. The truth is so horrific: we are marching ourselves to the maw of our own extinction. An audience that doesn't really get that will amble out of the theatre unmoved, go home and change nothing. But an audience that does get it may be so terrified they'll feel doomed already. They might walk out looking paler, but still do nothing. How is it possible to inspire an appropriately repentant attitude towards a planet that is really, really upset? ...

We cherish our fossil-fuel driven conveniences, such as the computer I am using to write these words. We can't exactly name-call this problem, or vote it away. The cure involves reaching down into ourselves and pulling out a new kind of person. The practical problem is, of course, how to do that. It's impossible to become a fuel purist, and it seems like failure to change our ways only halfway, or a pathetic ten per cent. So why even try? When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it reasonable just to call this one, give up, and get on with life as we know it?

... This is a now or never kind of project. But a project, none-the-less. Global-scale alteration from pollution didn't happen when human societies started using a little bit of fossil fuel. It happened after unrestrained growth, irresponsible management, and a cultural refusal to assign any moral value to excessive consumption. Those habits can be reformed. They have been reformed several times in the past. In the last century we've learned that some of our favourite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required are more systemic, and nobody seems to want to go first...

I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion I'm not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and started exercising three times a week, who would hound him about the other four days? These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news... searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or car-pooling or growing a garden, or saving a species or something. Small, step-wise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

Barbara Kingsolver,  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, (London, Faber and Faber Ltd, 2007) pp 345-6.