What can you do about climate change? Whatever you do best.

What can you do about climate change? Whatever you do best.

This is an all-hands-on-deck situation.

During a particularly dark, wildfirey, social injusticey, covidy moment of 2020, I read this quote (paraphrasing) in Emily Atkin’s “Heated” newsletter. It slowly but surely changed the course of my career.

At that time, what I was doing about climate change—composting, reusing, biking— I would not count among “what I do best.” What I did best was visual storytelling, and I used that skill to make Instagram posts for reality TV shows. Meanwhile the world burned, quite literally, in neighboring hills in Southern California.

Doing (next to) nothing about climate change made the anxiety and despair even worse. But doing something was scary, too. Knowing that I would be looking straight into one of my deepest fears daily had me pretty worried about how much I could handle, how much of a normal and happy life I could lead.

But it’s so much better this way. Pulling motivation to work from the same source as my core beliefs, rather than segmenting life into “what I care about” vs “what I work on,” is life-changing.

Despair and anxiety, where I was, is a lonely place. What I never expected was how much joy and community is inherently built into constructive action. I regularly meet people who are working on climate solutions with more rigor and passion than I’ve ever seen. Connecting with people around the world in a meaningful way has become effortless.

Humans want to make things better. Humans want to be a part of something. When we get to be a part of something that makes things better, really cool stuff starts to happen. Hope finds its spark. I hope that this Earth Day brings even more inspiring people off the sidelines and into the ongoing party of climate solutions. The beauty of a solutions space is that one solution doesn’t cancel others out. There’s room for everyone here.