Leave a BIG Footprint

+ Love from Jane Goodall

Nov 16, 2022

When you open your inbox to an email from the legendary Jane Goodall herself, you need to pinch yourself a little, even as a sleep-deprived new mama! I am so humbled by her testimonial of The Climate Optimist Handbook that I had to share it with you!

“In the face of the warming of the globe and all the harm this is causing to our planet, many people are losing hope, becoming apathetic, and doing nothing. This is deeply concerning because every individual has a role to play in solving the problems we’ve created. There are many ways you can help and Anne Therese Gennari discusses these in this timely and inspiring book.”

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Shifting The Narrative on Your Footprint

How quick are you at shaming yourself or the people around you? (Quiet thoughts count.) How often do you feel like you should “do the right thing” more but aren’t doing enough?

When it comes to lowering our footprints, we can always do more, and the world is fast to remind us that. If we don’t hear it from ourselves, we get incentivized by oil companies to calculate our impact so that we can know how to make smarter choices. (The irony obviously being that they’re dumping over the responsibility on us, but I’ll leave that discussion for a future topic.)

The truth is that on the quest to lower our footprint and minimize ourselves as best we can, we will always be behind. This means we will always feel like less than we deserve, which in itself disempowers us when we should be MORE motivated to take action.

In my thinking, we need to shift the narrative on this entire equation. In fact, we should make our footprints not smaller, but BIGGER. As big as we possibly can.

Because guess what? We are not the root of all evil. We, the human species, are not the cause of all disaster and death. Our actions can be, but we are not, which means that if we have the power to harm the Earth, we also have the power to make it even more beautiful than how we found it.

Below is a short excerpt from Chapter 10 in The Climate Optimist Handbook.

Chapter 10 — Leave a Big Footprint

What if your presence shouldn’t be felt less, but more? What if the answer isn’t to retreat into shame but to step out into your power? Maybe your existence here on Earth is so meaningful you owe it to the world to leave as big a footprint as you possibly can?

I know it is.

I know it because you’re alive, and to be alive means to have the opportunity to do the extraordinary.

It means you have the ability to make history and leave the world even more beautiful than you found it. To be a climate optimist means to insert yourself back into the cycle of life and ask, “How can I matter? How can I leave a big and beautiful footprint on this big and beautiful Earth?”

Mother Nature is waiting for us to join her squad again, and forgiving as she is, she will welcome us with open arms. We are her children too, just as much as the bees and the trees and the sea turtles. We are nature. We are beautiful and wondrous and the most powerful mammal on Earth. Why wouldn’t we use that power to do as much good as we possibly can?

The time has come to step out of our shame caves and into empowered action. Let’s leave a big footprint, and let’s do it now!

The Climate Optimist Handbook - How to Shift the Narrative on Climate Change and Find the Courage to Choose Change.