Photo by Antoine GIRET on Unsplash

71% of the world’s carbon emissions come from only 100 companies, companies over which I (and likely, you) have no decision-making power at all. One of the worst polluters on the planet is, of course, the United States military, and no matter how hard I get out there and vote, no one in my federal government ever seems compelled to rein in their capacity for climate destruction.

Today, after a brief reprieve, that summer heat wave is back here in the Northeast. Meanwhile, the McKinney Fire blows up the Klamath National Forest in my home state, a grim harbinger of the worst of fire season yet to come. I heard this Atlantic hurricane season might bring our first Category 6 storm. Sacred wild rice is being poisoned for another tar sands pipeline while the Amazon gets a buzz cut and environmental activists are disappeared and oil clogs the arteries of the Gulf and the glaciers crack like rotting teeth and mind you: we are still in the calm before the storm.

Climate collapse is here. It is everywhere. Its impacts will come down on everyone— not evenly, not by a long shot — but no one will be untouched by it. Those with the greatest personal culpability for climate change will likely suffer the least of its negative outcomes, but all the same, before this century’s out, every last one of us will feel the heat.

We all have our hands dirty in the global extraction game, but most of us, even in rich countries, are pawns in this game at best. The scale and speed at which climate destruction is perpetrated, and the chief perpetrators of it, have practically nothing to do with you or me. I could go zero waste, compost everything I own, get a Tushy bidet, never drive or fly on an airplane, go vegan, and spend all of my time at climate justice protests and still, nothing I do would even make a dent in global heating.

My actions play a role in climate change, but there is nothing my personal lifestyle changes can do to fix it. More importantly, the narrative encouraging us to take “personal responsibility” for our role in climate change is deliberate and toxic misdirection on the part of those in power who could fix it, or at least take significant steps in that direction. When it comes to an apocalyptic planetary crisis arising from our entire global economic and political order, the reality is that being a more eco-friendly individual is the equivalent of dropping an ice cube into a volcano.

Yet, and I say this with the utmost seriousness, making those individual lifestyle changes is essential to our collective survival.

First, any scenario where human civilization survives this era will necessitate huge changes in what and how we consume. We simply cannot keep extracting from this planet at the rate we’ve grown accustomed to, and as long as it’s profitable for corporations keep devastating the planet, they will. Maybe some miraculous shift in political will can curtail them, but so far, that hasn’t happened. If we want to exert influence over corporations, we have to hit them where it hurts. We have to stop buying their products, using their services and bolstering their financial power.

Boycotts and divestments are proven effective strategies to instigate political change. While our lives are often so interwoven with dependence on ecological devastation, it’s important for us to find any ways out we can. Whether it’s divesting from a bank that funds pipelines, or not buying from Amazon, or biking and taking public transit as much as possible, we have to seize upon every alternative to our continued reliance on the worst offenders of climate chaos.

Not everyone can divest from extraction capitalism, not yet, but those with the greatest ability to do so have the responsibility to get the ball rolling for everyone else.

Second, the more we exit from extraction capitalism, the more alternatives there will be to it. The more co-ops we buy from (or work for), the more community gardens we plant, the more childcare collectives we start, the more tool libraries we launch, the more mutual aid we engage in with our neighbors, the stronger these movements become. If we do not keep trying the doorways out of this system, there will not be doorways out of this system.

The more we create and encourage alternative ways of getting our needs met that don’t destroy our planet, the more such alternatives can flourish. They become more comprehensive, more feasible and more accessible. At the same time, we grow more empowered to experiment with new ways of shaping society and taking care of each other within it.

Third, climate change is a symptom. It, itself, is not the cause of our collective problem. Our problem is that our entire world order is out of balance and premised on what are objectively bad priorities: growth at all costs, extraction and exploitation, the “race to the bottom,” domination, colonization and commodification. This current iteration of civilization not, as most humans have done throughout history, rooted in a deep knowledge of place and a complex, respectful interconnection with the surrounding environment. This civilization is built on seizing and destroying that which we don’t understand.

We have no hope of a future beyond climate change if we don’t change this paradigm. The real task of our time is to instigate a profound adaptation, a fundamental shift in the blueprint of human civilization that runs much deeper than ending our dependence on fossil fuels and curbing global heating.

Changing our relationships with consumption and production impacts more than just the stuff of our lives. Contemporary American life is so devoid of real relationship that it’s no wonder we’re all clinging to anti-depressants and substance addictions to escape the pain of our extreme dislocation. Some of us may have genuine, intimate relationships with our friends, family or partners, but hardly any of us have such relationships with the landscape around us, or with our bodies, or with our labor.

If we want to heal this profound imbalance, we must return to real relationships with the food we eat, with the clothes we wear, with the way we transport ourselves, with the furniture in our houses, with our neighbors, with the work we do, with the places we live. We must learn the names of the plants in our bioregions and practice caring for them. We must learn how to care for our own bodies and minds, and extend that same care to each other as well.

Simply put: there is no way out of this global climate mess without doing the messy, painful and complicated work of collective healing. That healing process can only begin with making personal changes: in our thoughts, our beliefs, our habits, our actions, our priorities and our values.

The myth that our actions don’t matter is just another symptom of the glaring disconnection of our time. Everything on this planet influences everything around it. The whole problem is that we’ve spent centuries pretending we’re not essential pieces of an interdependent ecosystem.

But we are.

You and I may be powerless to stop corporate carbon emissions, but we do have the power to help usher in an era of deep adaptation and societal transformation. Because we have the power to do so, we have the responsibility to do so. Not because it will “fix climate change” — it won’t — but because “fixing climate change” means nothing if we don’t take the leap to live in a different way.