As I rock my daughter tonight, I can’t help but feel her again, that lump in my stomach. The news is always bad. Climate disruption is accelerating, bee mortality is exponential, glaciers are melting at high speed. Letting myself be carried away by its regular breathing, I think again of the much too short countdown which gives us a small margin of maneuver to try to lessen the predicted catastrophe. A little less than three years. She won’t even have started kindergarten.
There is an urgent need to act, that’s for sure. Urgency that politicians and companies take their courage with both hands and make a solid 180 degrees, of course. Yes, there is an urgent need to act, act, act, that’s what we’re told, it’s true.
But acting is exhausting, and I understand that. For many, it’s just one more thing on the endless to-do list — pressing things that seem more important to us than distant, fuzzy issues that don’t affect us so directly (yet). Then there is this weariness, the feeling of helplessness, the fact that we tell ourselves that our small gestures will not change anything on the board. […].
However, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that many solutions are in fact so much simpler than one imagines, since they do not consist of actions but rather of non-actions. Do nothing. Not mowing the lawn to help our pollinators. Do not put pesticides on our green spaces. Do not buy new clothes from factories fast fashion. […]
Would it be possible to do less, to want less, to possess less? Would considering a reduction be less demanding than asking people who are already out of breath to make efforts? It would certainly not be enough in itself, but it would already be an excellent start, right?
My daughter smiles at me. I believe she agrees.