The Personal Climate Pledge: Signing On To the Sustainable Future
A collective sigh of profound disappointment spread across a large segment of the US population in the summer of 2017 when our nation became the only non-participant in the Paris Climate Accord.
That contrarian act seemed to doom the US to a powerless position in the face of the globally-recognized dangers of unaddressed climate chaos. Ignored by the United States, this chaos would only get worse — an unforgivable crisis we would leave to our children. It would be a catastrophe created by choices my generation had made, in lock step with recent generations since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. And knowing the consequences, we now would play no part in the solution?
An immediate resistance arose among U. S. governors, mayors and communities to say, “Yes our state or municipality will seek to comply with the goals set in Paris, even though our president has chosen for us to not participate officially as a nation.”
And so, carbon credits, mitigation measures, tree planting and other CO2 reduction efforts have continued to be pursued by groups smaller than nations because it is the right thing to do together for the common good of the human community.
But against the unwieldy and slow implementation of any good idea at the level of a state or city, why couldn’t individuals set their own goals and set their own near-term target for immediate action?
What if you and I could step up and commit to intentional changes today — to create a different path forward in the way we use energy and natural resources in our lives, and in a way that would recognize the Paris goals and have a cumulative impact on the global climate future?
Out of this thinking, the Personal Climate Pledge was born. In one small organization in a Blue-Ridge Virginia county with a single traffic light, a small group of citizens over a period of a few months. They created a set of desired household outcomes with specific energy-and-resource goals that could be achieved within a given period of time. In brief, the pledge states that:
By 2020, I will reduce by 20%: my home and travel energy demands; my household garbage and trash stream; and my purchase of distant versus locally produced goods and services.
A resource page is provided for pledge-takers, to offer suggestions for concrete steps that could lead to reachable goals for change. A refrigerator magnet included in the provided packet of pledge information simply displays the words “The Pledge” and shows a graphic of the Floyd Village Maple — a local and well-known symbol of life that continues from generation to generation.
The artwork of the tree on the pledge and magnet would be a constant reminder of one person’s part toward solutions, as well as of the larger global effort millions were making individually and one community at a time, to solve the most complex social and biological threat in humankind’s existence.
Soon after the launch of the project early in 2018, the local NPR station in Roanoke, Virginia took notice and asked for an interview of some of the principals. You can read the transcript or listen to the three-minute audio recording of Robbie Harris’s compilation from those brief interviews.
But I come back to a question the interviewer asked me that did not become part of the finished story. Robbie wondered: “Haven’t we undertaken things like this in the past — to use less energy, to recycle more, to take better care of the land? What makes this project and pledge any different?”
Towards answering that question, I offer three things that might give this declaration greater reach and impact:
First, signing one’s name to something is a seal of promise that gives the document extra personal power, and carries accountability. It makes the abstract and impersonal become the concrete and personal. By signing, you have given your word and stated your intentions to take a specific set of actions during a stated time frame. You are as good as your word.
You have pledged and signed. This is commitment of a different order than simply reading and affirming such notions of change and underlining a few sentences in a forgotten magazine, three months or three years ago.
Second, more and more people — as indicated by the almost universal nation-state acceptance of the principles stated in the Paris Accord — recognize the urgency of the need to address climate chaos. This is a matter too long ignored or deferred to another administration, another generation. The age of doubt is over.
The issues of personal accountability in global issues — our energy and carbon and water “footprint” — is no longer a foreign or abstract idea. We are beginning to realize the urgency of the need to apply the brake and not the accelerator as climate crises grow more frequent and costly.
But thirdly and perhaps most importantly, the pledge is crucial just now because these new habits must point the majority of Earth’s people towards a truly sustainable future — not the unsustainable doomed-to-fail future where our current and soon-to-be-past growth-economy would have carried us.
That future sought by the Pledge will rely almost entirely on an energy source that is not based on carbon and will operate out of an economic understanding that is not dependent on the assumption of infinite growth on a finite Earth. The new economy puts the well-being of people and planet higher in the equation than profit. Ecology subsumes economy. It must.
You might say the pledge is a compass needle. Signing it is not the end but the beginning. It points us in the right direction so that those who come after us might actually reach and enjoy a sustainable future.
If you find merit in the idea or the specifics of the SustainFloyd Personal Climate Pledge, be aware that it is the intention for the project that it be freely reproduced. Nothing in the packet (that you can receive by mail) is proprietary other than the name of the organization. Please allow this early work to ignite the Pledge in your own community.
We encourage you to download the package file or email info@sustainfloyd.org for a hard copy which will include a refrigerator magnet. And if you have specific questions, call 540–745-SEED for more information. And good fortunes with your community’s efforts to Take The Pledge; and take it from there!
