In light of yesterday’s IPCC report, can we unfuck ourselves?
I’ve heard the different IPCC reports referred to as:
Report 1. How fucked are we?
Report 2 . How did we get this fucked?
Report 3. How do we unfuck ourselves?
(Also the format for the wonderful Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts podcast series)
So, in light of the publication of IPCC report 3 , and with everything else going on in the world right now, I suspect you’re asking: can we unfuck ourselves?
The short answer is yes — but only if we work together.
Here’s a three-step Citizen plan
“The headlines of our times are enough to make anyone feel
helpless. But when we start to think and act like citizens, not just consumers,everything changes.”
That is what it says at the top of the back of my book, Citizens: Why
the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us
So, with that in mind and today with the IPCC report, with everything that’s going on, I thought I’d give you my top three tips to being a
Citizen in this moment in time.
Step 1. Find a home
What I mean by home is not just like the place where you live,
but it could be your workplace, it could be a community of interest,
a club or whatever.
But it’s about finding the community that you want to commit to, that you’re going to make yourself part of that. The people that tou’re going to work for change with. So you’re not just doing it on your own.
Step 2. Find the others
If you’ve decided to commit to your local place and work from
there, then put the Batsign up Look for the Facebook groups.
Who are the people who are already organizing, who are the
people who are already doing stuff?
Find them, because there will be others like you. You’re not going to be the only one.
Step 3. Get together and decide what you want to do — together.
It might be that it just starts with a litter pick or whatever, but it’s deciding together. That’s the crucial thing.
The reason why I emphasize this is that there’s so much talk about individual behaviour change right now — and yes, that matters. It’s really important that we all do our individual bits in the face of the challenges that we’re looking at.
But actually, it’s our collective agency that’s going to add up to so
much more.
We know that we can’t fix these things with our incremental individual changes. We do know those are important.
But if we can find each other, and commit to a place that we’re going to work from, then the change we can make is exponential.
