What makes you a climate optimist?
When you choose to go under a title like “The Climate Optimist”, you have to be prepared for those questions. “What makes you optimistic?” “Can we really figure this out? “Do you have hope?”
And my answers are — Many things. I don’t know. Do I have a choice?
Obviously, I don’t know if we will figure out the climate crisis and save the future for our children, but if I don’t have hope we will, what do I have? And since hope isn’t something I can find in a pill in the vitamin section of a grocery store, I have to find that source somewhere else.
If you’ve been reading some of my newsletters from the past, you know I believe that seeking sources for things like optimism and hope in the outside world is difficult at best. Too often, it leads to frustration and despair. So to be a successful optimist, you have to create it for yourself!
There are many things that help fuel my optimism but what makes me feel optimistic more than anything else is knowing that I have the power to choose change.
Every morning when I wake up, I know that I have the ability to choose change. And that right there could be the most empowering and hopeful thing there is! Not just knowing that change is possible, but understanding that it’s within your power to activate it and bring it closer!
Photo: Me, shot by Abby Fenton
Human beings are not the issue — the choices we’re making are!
The world we live in today is the result of millions of choices - conscious and subconscious ones - that we’ve been making for decades and centuries, even millennia! These choices make up the design of our world and what we may not realize is that we keep making the same choices, again, and again, and again. Leaving us… you got it — in the same old world!
So if we want something new, all we have to do to break that cycle and build towards something new is to take a step back and think again.
Yes, change is scary, and creating new societal systems and choice architectures takes work. But that’s where all the fun begins — we all get to play a part in consciously choosing what world we want to see next! And doesn’t that make it a pretty damn exciting time to be alive?
So that’s what makes me optimistic. The pure idea that we have the ability to choose again! And when it comes to figuring out the climate crisis and co-creating a new world, it comes down to just that;
To people like us,
finding the courage,
to choose change.
I want you to remember that we can’t know for certain that we’ll figure this out. We won’t wake up one day and turn on the news to the message that “We’ve figured out climate change - breathe everybody!”
This isn’t really an issue to “figure out”. It’s not about removing an obstacle and then POOF - it’s all done and good! No, the challenges we’re facing are about rethinking everything and finding the willpower to choose again! It’s about understanding that climate change provides us with this beautiful opportunity to disrupt the status quo and build something even better, a world much more beautiful than anything we know today!
It’s about finding strength in ourselves and each other and trusting that as long as we’re courageous enough to let go, we can think again and build even better worlds.
We’re already doing this. We’re already inventing incredible new technology, restoring ecosystems, and rethinking wealth. Humans ARE changing, and with that, the world is changing too.
So that is what makes me optimistic; the fact that we have no idea what the future will look like but that right now, we know we have the power to choose change. I can’t say this one enough, so I’ll say it one more time:
It is time to choose change.
Want some more inspiration? Click here to watch a beautiful trailer on how to “Imagine A New Earth” with Katie Patrick.
A book I love on this topic:
A Book of Hope by Jane Goodall and Doug Abrams
*This link enables you to buy the book on Amazon through my affiliate page.
This week on Hey Change Podcast
Tune into this wonderful conversation we had with Sally Ranney, President & Co-Founder of Global Choices.