How to Start?

By Isabella Brunt

1.     Change your attitude.

The most effective thing you can do is work on changing your attitude to activism and climate change. It’s important to consider the small things you can do individually to start to be conscious of your impact on the planet. Being open to this change, and growth, has a ripple effect that those close to you will notice. As you move through life with a renewed passion to fight for this Earth, you will inspire so many of the people you meet, subtly shifting the organisation of action away from individual changes and towards collective, communal change.

In the words of Sareya Taylor, a member of the White Mountain Apache and Navajo person, we must ‘treat the Earth kindly because it takes care of us as people’.[1]

It is now a widely held belief that the outlook we must have if we are to believe we can turn things around is hope. Hope as a framework in which to act is disputed, with many claiming it to be too late for that. However, I argue that it’s compatible with, for example, XR’s claim that we need courage. It takes courage to be hopeful, and we must be. We must have radical hope, for despair won’t get us anywhere. A plethora of writers and activists have written to urge us to be radically hopeful, such as Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark), Jane Goodhall (the Jane Goodhall Hopecast on Spotify), and – more contemporarily – Josephine Becker, who is one of my favourite people I follow on Instagram (@treesnpeace). She’s written a great article about how important it is that we move beyond the optimist/pessimist approach. Instead using ‘hope as a practice that calls on our responsibility to show up, constantly, and act for change no matter how big the chance of success, but just because it is the right thing to do.’[2] Big thanks to her for putting it so eloquently. Hope is necessary because it inspires action.

Winona LaDuke, renowned activist and program director of Honour the Earth instructs us

‘Do not operate out of a place of fear. Operate out of a place of hope. Operate with love and hope.’[3]

[1] https://acespace.org/2020/10/11/indigenous-peoples-day-2020/

[2] https://shado-mag.com/all/why-optimism-and-pessimism-are-both-redundant-in-the-climate-movement/

[3] Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, CA, Oct. 14, 2019