"What Can I Do?" Part 1 — The Personal
A Matter of Degrees
Dr. Leah Stokes, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson
4.8 • 533 Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2022
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As climate people, we hear this question again and again: "What can I do?" Many of us are trying to figure out how to help address the climate crisis. So, we're taking on that critical question in a three-part miniseries. The first episode is all about The Personal — key ways we can act on climate in our own lives and create meaningful, durable change. Hint: it involves stoves and cash.
This episode features Sarah Lazarovic, artist, writer, and head of communications and brand at Rewiring America, and Marilyn Waite, managing director of the Climate Finance Fund and author of Sustainability at Work.
For more info on electrifying your home, head to Rewiring America's guide to Electrify Everything in Your Home. For more info on moving your money, turn to Marilyn's guide to Sustainable Banking and Investing. Also mentioned: Carbon Collective, Sphere, Atmos Bank, and Earth Equity Advisors.
Be sure to check out Sarah's comic "100 Things You Can Do to Help in the Climate Crisis," her book A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy, and her newsletter Minimum Viable Planet. We quoted from Leah's essay "A Field Guide for Transformation," in the anthology All We Can Save that Katharine co-edited, and Bill McKibben's invaluable newsletter The Crucial Years.
Next time, our miniseries will turn from the realm of The Personal to the realm of The Professional. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and don't miss a single episode this season!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you work in the climate space, you're probably used to hearing one question over and over again. |
| 0:06.0 | Is there anything I as an individual can do to open the door to change? |
| 0:11.0 | But what can I do? |
| 0:13.0 | What can we as individuals do? |
| 0:16.0 | What measures should an individual take to reverse the effects of climate change? |
| 0:26.4 | We both get asked this question all the time, which frankly is exciting. |
| 0:34.5 | It's so encouraging that more and more people want to be involved in this critical work for a just and livable future. |
| 0:41.0 | Yes, I love it. Everybody is welcome to join club climate. But, you know, |
| 0:47.5 | it can be a tough question to answer on the fly. It can be hard to tell people what exactly they can do at any given moment. I totally agree. And I find it actually kind of stressful because I feel somehow responsible for helping give |
| 0:58.1 | good answers to this question when the truth is that the answers to it are incredibly complex |
| 1:04.1 | because the climate crisis is complex and it touches so many aspects of our world and our |
| 1:10.2 | lives and you know we each need to be finding |
| 1:14.4 | a great way to be of use within that bigger complex situation. Yeah, but telling people it's |
| 1:22.8 | hard and complex is not going to help them. So that is why we decided we were going to take some time ourselves to really dig in |
| 1:31.5 | how we could answer this question. |
| 1:33.7 | What can I do? |
| 1:35.1 | And that's going to be the topic of our first three episodes this season. |
| 1:39.8 | Yep. |
| 1:40.3 | We thought it was high time for a mini series on a matter of degrees, and we couldn't think of a better topic to do than answer this question. |
| 1:49.2 | What can I do through a few different lenses? |
| 1:52.5 | And in this first episode, we're going to be starting with the personal. |
| 1:56.0 | What can I do at the individual level to take action on climate change? |
... |
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