A volunteer pulls an injured animal from a drain, a team clears a polluted riverbank, a counsellor calms an anxious young person, and we feel the world getting better. Yet the roads keep eating the habitat, fresh waste drifts down by evening, and the pressure at home stays where it was. We are eager to ask what more we can do for the world, and far less eager to ask what we must stop doing to it. What if the one solving the problem is part of what needs solving?
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 31 October '26
During London Climate Action Week earlier this year, I was asked where an ordinary individual should begin acting against climate change. The word ‘begin’ carried an assumption: we have been acting all along. Every day we buy, travel, build, earn, consume, raise children and make choices. The environmental crisis did not arise because humanity sat idle; much of it arose from what we have been so busily doing. Before asking what new activity might save the planet, should we not look at the activities that brought it to this condition?
An injured animal is pulled from a roadside drain and nursed back to health. Volunteers clean a polluted riverbank, and an anxious young person receives counselling and recovers. Yet the animal may have been hurt because roads and buildings had encroached upon her habitat, while the waste in the river may consist largely of products we go on manufacturing and buying. The young person’s distress, too, may have a great deal to do with what family and society expected of her. Each case has been dealt with, and the conditions producing all three remain more or less where they were. We are eager to know what more we can do for the world, and far less eager to ask what we must stop doing to it.
