Learn How to Align Your Action with an Effective Theory of Change
If you are like me, you want your climate action to make a difference. You want what you do to lead to positive and significant social change. After all, if we are going to turn the tide on climate before 2050, then we have to change almost every system that touches our daily lives.
Eager to take part, we try all kinds of actions, often never knowing if they will actually lead to the change we want and need. As individual everyday folks, we typically don’t know how to evaluate the effectiveness of our actions.
Don’t worry. You don’t need…
You will protect the Florida coast too
Have you ever been to the Bahamas and bathed in the amazing crystal turquoise waters there? Or seen videos or pictures of them, like the one above that I took when I last visited in January 2020?
Seven Principles to Guide Your Climate Steps
Last year I received a note from a friend in South Africa in response to one of my articles. In it, he urged me to expand the scope of my writing; from being U.S. centric to having a more global perspective.
Let the words of Greta Thunberg, Amanda Gorman, and other youth leaders guide your climate action
Over the past two years, it’s been clear that youth across the world care deeply about global warming. The youth movement and the voices of its powerful young leaders, like Isra Hirsi, Varshini Prakash, and Jamie Margolin in the U.S., Leah Namugerwa in Uganda, and Greta Thunberg of Sweden, have been growing stronger and louder.
How will you up your game in 2021?
2020 was a year of rude awakenings. One of those awakenings was around climate change. Even with much of the world locked down for a significant part of the year, the needle on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions did not move enough. The latest U.N. report on the state of the climate, released in early December 2020, confirms that the climate crisis was in full swing in 2020.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres put this in stark terms in a speech on the state of the planet at Columbia University. He said, “Humanity is waging war on nature.” Then, after outlining how…
This holiday give to one or more of these 30 Non-Profits working on climate solutions.
As the end of the year approaches, many of us are thinking about what gifts we want to give our loved ones over the holidays. If we have financial means, we may also be looking at charities to which we want to give year-end contributions. Why not combine the two and give a donation in someone’s name to a non-profit working on climate solutions?
For the past five years or more, my husband and I have been doing just that. …
Change how you celebrate the holidays to care for the planet.
“It is I who must begin,” Vaclav Havel states in the first line of his poem of the same name. “It is I who must begin. Once I begin, once I try — here and now, right where I am, not excusing myself by saying things would be easier elsewhere, without grand speeches and ostentatious gestures, but all the more persistently — to live in harmony.”
In this statement, he issues a clarion call to himself, and each of us, to start right where we are. …
A Thanksgiving Contemplation/Meditation
In the past week, Thanksgiving week in the United States, everyone was paying more attention to the practice of giving thanks for all we have. And now that the holiday is over, I’m realizing that I can experience gratitude any time. This morning when I sat down to meditate, gratitude for the earth arose spontaneously in me. With it came a sense of peace, renewed energy for climate action, and an insight that I am often moved more by my fear for the future of the planet than by appreciation.
How to modify your mindset to support your climate action.
With Black Friday here in the United States and Christmas a few weeks away, everywhere we turn, we hear messages telling us to buy more. It’s very easy to get caught up in the consumer mindset that pervades the western world. Like a fish not knowing it is swimming in the water, we often aren’t aware of how everything around us encourages us to want and consume more.
The cultural milieu we live in, and the systems all around us, depend on perpetual consumerism and growth. We’ve built our whole economy on expansion. To keep the engine of commerce going…
Tips for leaning into these emotions to help you take climate action
I didn’t realize how much I was holding my breath until the U.S. election was over. When I heard that the country elected a new president, one who took the climate crisis seriously, I exhaled so deeply it caught me by surprise. What happened next also caught me by surprise.
After the initial flood of relief rushed through me, a profound sadness rose up from deep in my belly that I hadn’t known was there. As I sat with my feelings, I realized I’d been masking and holding in my grief about the many lost opportunities to reduce greenhouse gases…
Krista Kurth Ph.D.
Writing about what matters. Climate Activist, Former Director Green America Center, www.climateactionforeverydaypeople.com/blog, www.kristakurth.com
