In Praise of Smaller Actions
We all know that climate change is a problem of system change, not individual behavioral change. So what’s the point of small actions?
When it’s a drop in the ocean, why even bother?
Smaller actions can build credibility. It is difficult to advocate for system change when you are not doing what you can on a smaller scale.
A caution: occasionally smaller actions can also reduce credibility: we always need to be clear about our commitment to deep and rapid system change. We never want to convey the impression that we believe such system change is unnecessary. The possibility of addressing environmental crisis merely through many small voluntarist activities that “all add up!” is now long passed (if indeed it was ever a tenable possibility).
However …
Smaller actions can give solace. Smaller actions can demonstrate and cultivate a practical willingness to make changes in our everyday lives. Because the bigger changes of net zero will demand many such changes, it is important that we explore what such changes feel like, and the ripple effects they may have. It is important that we cultivate narratives, skills, and ways of thinking around these changes, so we know what to embrace, what to resist, and what to re-imagine.
Smaller actions can provide practical assistance to those who need it. Many smaller actions can be done in ways that benefit those most vulnerable to climate impacts. What looks like a small difference from afar can feel like a big difference up close.
When done creatively and reflectively, smaller actions can be a kind of practice-led research into climate change mitigation and resilience. They can be ‘cognitive’: they are a way of finding things out, and a form of knowledge in themselves. Smaller actions can be a form of hope that is actively engaged with the world, as opposed to a form of ‘hope’ that is really just burying one’s head in the sand.
As we write in the early 2020s, there has been precious little scientific modelling done around how we get to net zero by 2050. And at the moment, most of the modelling that has been done includes a substantial role for expert elicitation: in other words, a systematic survey of people expected to have predictive expertise … a kind of highly educated guess. So can we really get there? Let’s hope so! If so, how? The UK has made a commitment, but the strategy is as yet very unclear.
Smaller actions can constitute a societally-led exploration of options. Everybody taking whatever small actions they can, while also continually highlighting how the impacts of climate change are distributed across society, and advocating for deeper system change: that’s what a true societally-led transition to net zero looks like. All those smaller actions do sometimes combine in unanticipated ways, and occasionally they may allow new options to emerge, options for policy or options for grassroots action, options that would otherwise have remained invisible.
Smaller actions can go viral. And quantitative change can produce qualitative change. As testing grounds for larger actions whose parameters are not yet known, smaller actions can help to nourish climate justice activism, to build climate resilience, and to ready society for what the future throws at us.
Smaller actions are opportunities for pre-emptive regulatory alignment. That’s what being ahead of the curve means. By the time we’re told to start doing something, we’ll have already been doing it for ages.
Smaller actions can prove it’s not “either / or.” Sometimes we can get stuck in a loop of inaction. We think if we try for big changes, we’ll fail, and if we enact small changes, it means we don’t believe in big changes. Taking small individual actions while organizing for big collective ones is the perfect way to break the cycle. And it may help others break it too.
Smaller actions can be symbolic. They can change the way we think and talk about larger actions. They can be opportunities to reflect inwardly and to communicate outwardly on where we are in this transformation.
Smaller actions can be reparative. They can attend to, preserve, and elaborate ways of being in the world that run counter to patterns of domination and extractivism.
Smaller actions can be prefigurative. To misquote Alaisdar Gray: Work as though you lived in the early days of a sustainable ecology.
Smaller actions are opportunities for innovation, experiment, and imagination.
This article is a fork of an appendix in the Sussex Humanities Lab Environmental Strategy, published in 2020 by the Sussex Humanities Lab Carbon Use and Environmental Impact Working Group.
