It has been another month of reckoning with the climate crisis as we witness record heat and extreme flooding across the globe. Preparations for the United Nation’s Conference of the Parties in November are fraught with tensions as this year’s host, Abu Dhabi, aims to give fossil fuel companies a bigger voice. Hard to feel hopeful when it seems like the apocalypse is upon us and the nation states of the world are cowards, paralyzed by their loyalty to the markets and consumer culture.
Last week, I attended a community comment session hosted by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency for their Zero Waste Plan. I was moved by the comments of a waste hauler from the suburbs. “Be bold,” he said, “incremental change isn’t enough.”
I am in conversations about the climate crisis with my adult children often, and I almost always find myself reminding them how change happens, grounding in the understanding of fractals – patterns in nature that scale out. Being bold on a global scale seems impossible, and it is.
The 24 hour news cycle doesn’t often share with us stories of resilience, joy and hope. The stories of hyperlocal climate solutions, being created and enacted by frontline communities and black and brown people each and every day aren’t easily available. Yet they exist and if we apply the idea of fractals, we are invited to trust that all of these local solutions are scaling out and that together, these patterns of communities living into a just transition will also weave together to create the future we want.
Let us share these stories with one another and lift up solutions, resilience and joy. As the Zapatistas say, we make the road by walking. Let us also continue to dismantle the systems that perpetuate the climate crisis, let us hospice those systems well so they cannot return.
We CAN do this. It is time. Be BOLD in your family. Be BOLD in your community. Be BOLD in your region. Together.
Susan Phillips
Executive Director