Getting Where We’re Going With Climate Action
Our Story Together Subseries Post #1.7
We have everything we need to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
However, that doesn’t mean we have it all, right now. Rather, we have what we need to make our vision and values into reality, to create both vision-hope and action-hope.
In other words, if we choose to accept the challenge of our destiny, if we say yes to our future, we can make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster.
Does this sound daunting, even overwhelming? Here’s the good news.
Even without a Climate Movement ARTC has created today’s clean tech and will continue and produce products and processes that make climate pollution reduction easier and cost-effective.
Even without a Climate Movement Climate Action Supporters will provide political support for politicians and government officials to make improvements at the margins where political costs or benefits for action are modest.
Even without a Climate Movement Climate Action Supporters have helped to create a market for climate friendly products and a modest impetus for businesses to be “greener” at the margins.
But here’s our wake-up call: the other three Catalytic Sources of Transformation, on their own or even in combination, will come nowhere near what needs to be done without the Climate Movement.
The Catalytic-3 won’t cut it. We must be the Catalytic-4, with the Climate Movement first among equals.
We don’t need marginal change or incremental change. We need disruptive change, transformative change, the likes of which the world has never seen. And such disruptive change must not make the rich richer and the poor poorer. We must work to make it just, enhancing the wellbeing of everyone and everything.
That is why we are indispensable — not as lone individuals, but together, big enough and broad enough and active enough so our story cannot be suppressed, missed, or ignored. We have the help of the other Catalytic Sources, but we must choose to call forth their climate action potential; we must choose to help create climate action synergy; we must choose to continually push the boundary of what is possible; we must choose to leapfrog the impossible to land in a future beyond our dreams, bright and fair; we must choose to make this future come faster.
For Climate Action Athletes, our story, our destiny, is to become a part of the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world, the greatest cause of freedom of our time.
Our story is about stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better and living in and living out all of our values.
Our story is about achieving victories on all of our Olympian Fields of Action, including ARTC Fields and business Fields and the Fields of government decision makers.
Our story is about making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster.
To paraphrase David Bowie, together we can be heroes for more than one day. We can be heroes for the rest of our days.
For Climate Action Supporters, our story is about choosing to join with the Climate Movement to put our efforts together over the top. In so many instances Climate Action Supporters will be needed to have those in power do what’s right, to have business leaders see the light, to inspire inventors and innovators to change the course of the future and help make our future come faster.
In these cases Climate Action Supporters are the clinchers, the closers, the calvary. On countless Olympian Fields of Climate Action, victory by Climate Action Athletes is only possible because they have been lifted up by Climate Action Supporters. As the Athletes run the race, Supporters cheer from the stands and sidelines, staff the water stations, help keep them on the right track, lift them up at the end, and tell their stories of victory through all the communications channels available to them.
The future cannot afford for us to dream small. Ours is a time for regular folk to choose to become heroes together. Nothing less than greatness is our calling.
In the future, when our children’s children’s children ask their parents to tell them again the story of when people just like them long ago saved their world from climate catastrophe and created one filled with justice and beauty, where hunger has long since vanished, where nothing stops people from becoming who they really are and sharing their gifts with the world, where the Earth is teeming with all the creatures saved way back then, their parents will try to beg off, saying “But we told you that story last night.” Of course it never works; the children always win.
You see, in our future, the children always win.
Some who don the pessimizer persona may sneer at our vision, waiting for us to fall on our faces to confirm their lazy, debilitating pessimism, content to be cynical slackers taking cheap shots while sitting on their keesters.
Well, I’d rather be audacious in creating a better world, living out the courage of our convictions, than someone who has taken on the pessimizer persona and shrinks from the challenge, letting their kairotic moments to make a difference vanish one by one, becoming smaller and smaller until they themselves disappear.
To these folks I implore you: don’t let your life be small! Take off the pessimizer persona. Get off the couch, join us, and find your Olympian Field of Climate Action.
For both those wearing the pessimizer persona and those of us who wonder whether we will achieve all that we hope for, here’s the real truth: every step towards our vision is a victory of the human spirit.
In choosing to live in and live out our values we bring more love into the world, more justice, more beauty, more creativity, more freedom, more wisdom, more pragmatism that helps us attain our vision, more sustainability, and more success in achieving our vision, all through non-violence.
Will all of our audacious vision come true? Who knows. It’s a genuinely open question, and therein lies hope. The future is ours to shape.
Emily Dickinson wrote: Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.
The dawn is here. Time to create our future. Time to walk through every door, together. Beauty and justice and love await.
If you are new here, check out our Intro Series and other posts in this Our Story Together Series. If you like this post, please “like,” comment, and share. And thanks for all you’re doing.