Podcast: The Art of the Possible

In my latest podcast, I hope to inspire and uplift you all by talking about my philosophy around, “The Art of the Possible” and how that might help us cope with climate change and life in general. I also explain a bit more about what we’re doing at My Carbon Zero and how that started from this “Art of the Possible” thinking.

Right now, after decades asking governments to solve climate change on our behalf, not much has happened. The problem with the 2015 Paris Agreement, for example, is that governments committed to keeping climate change below 1.5 degrees but when they signed on, we were already at 1 degree warming! Everyone acknowledges we need to keep carbon below 450 parts per million in the atmosphere to avoid catastrophe, yet we’re already up to 418 and that’s rising sharply. We’re in trouble.

With temperatures setting new records almost daily in some parts of the world, climate change is here upon us, right now, and it’s not going away any time soon. We’re going to have to live with it and its many dire consequences, but we must also do everything we can to keep the impacts as bearable as possible. We must ask ourselves, “What can I do about it?”

This is where “The Art of the Possible'' comes in. When we worry about big issues like climate change, poverty, and racism, we’re told that they’re big, so big and ridiculously complex that there’s nothing we small individuals can do about them. Pretty quickly, we feel disempowered, that we need someone else to fix the problem for us. We lose our agency.

That generally doesn’t get us very far as our ‘progress’ on climate change shows. And that brings us back to the original question of what each of us can actually do to take action. We have to look in the mirror, inward, rather than outward, and stop expecting someone else to do our part for us. If we can focus on that rather than telling others what they should or shouldn’t do, we might make more progress. Telling people what they should do, most of the time, just pushes them away. There can’t be any blaming or shaming at this point; we’re all complicit in creating climate change. No, now it’s about taking that first, small but extremely crucial step in your own journey to climate action.

If we’re going to find a way to live with climate change, we need more compassion in the way we approach ourselves and each other along with the plants and other species that are suffering and dying as a consequence of our carbon-guzzling lifestyles. We have to expand our mindset, start thinking more broadly and inspire ourselves and others to take small actions. That’s exactly what we’re doing at My Carbon Zero, trying to inspire people and businesses to take credible climate action.

That means inspiring them and supporting them to reduce their own emissions, help others to reduce their emissions, remove carbon from the atmosphere and inspire others to join the journey too. That’s The Art of the Possible. By taking small actions like travelling less, reducing food waste, eating less meat, and using renewable energy, we can make changes that really will help the planet and ourselves and others. We can plant trees, and support actions that mean less of them are cut down for our consumer pleasure. We can do this. All these little actions add up and end up making a huge contribution. We just need to start.

Overall, I think that when we think about any problem, be it climate change, poverty, gender issues, whatever, we can find a way forward if we think about “The Art of the Possible” rather than getting stuck on all the things that stand in the way of us doing something. Nothing is impossible. If we can think positively about what we each can do right now and then celebrate even the first small steps that others take and encourage them to keep going, soon enough all these little steps become one, then two medium steps, then one, then two large steps, and before we know it, we’ll be on our way to progress.

That’s how real change is made. We don’t get change pointing fingers or waiting for others to solve problems for us. At the end of the day, I still believe that people are good and want to do good things, it’s just now about helping them get started, helping them look at the issue through an “it’s possible” lens, rather than through despair at their inability to make the slightest bit of difference.

Again and again, the question we must each ask ourselves is, “What can I do on my journey to make my contribution?” At My Carbon Zero, we’re here to help you get started and then to help you fly.

#letyourselfgo

Listen to more podcasts here.