Your individual action doesn't matter (except it does)
Can we put this argument to rest
The whole “individual action doesn’t matter” argument drives me a bit mad. It came up on Threads again this week and I can’t let it go. Their gist: we need systemic change, and individual climate action just helps your conscience.
Yes, we need systemic change. But is it actually happening? Is it happening fast enough? And when industry does act, is it genuine? The supermarkets are a perfect example. They started selling “imperfect” produce a few years ago, odd-shaped carrots, wonky apples (sold in plastic bags, naturally 🙄). But it’s a tiny fraction of their fresh food sales. The rest of their business still demands that producers meet strict cosmetic standards, and anything that doesn’t make the cut goes to waste. It’s straight-up greenwashing. It looks like progress, while the actual problem stays exactly the same.
I could write a whole newsletter about supermarket greenwashing. I wrote my thesis on it, as it happens. Comment below if that’s of interest, or maybe I should start a YouTube channel to discuss this kind of thing?
Here’s what frustrates me about the “individual action doesn’t matter” crowd: the science disagrees. The IPCC report has an entire chapter (Chapter 5, if you’re the type to look it up) on behaviour and lifestyle changes. These changes are within our control and could reduce emissions by 40-70%, with the right policies behind them. That’s enormous.
So what can we actually do? The three big areas are transport, housing and food. Drive less, bike more, take public transport. Use less energy at home. Eat more plants, less meat, and waste less food. These aren’t just feel-good gestures, they’re good for our health and our wallets too. Not everyone can do all of these things all of the time, and much of this becomes easier with the right government policies. But collective action builds political pressure, and that’s how systemic change actually happens.
Individual action and systemic change aren’t opposing forces. You don’t have to pick one. The answer isn’t to throw your hands up and do nothing until governments act. It’s to do both.
Also this week, the Herzog protests. I went to the Perth one. Much bigger ones happened around the country, especially Sydney, where the footage of police punching protesters on the ground and pepper spraying people kneeling in prayer was pretty hard to watch.
The thing I keep coming back to is: what did they expect? You invite a president the UN found responsible for inciting genocide, and you’re surprised when people protest? The whole thing was entirely predictable and entirely avoidable.
Yup. Not only does the science agree that individual actions move the needle, so do our hearts. That's a big part of it too - the immensely motivating feeling of being able to actually do something, which has a knock-on effect elsewhere. Hope as a verb, a doing-stuff word, as a reaction to the knowledge that nothing is certain so the game is still afoot. I feel like the "the people with money have all the power" folk are also the ones who'd argue for hopelessness in other areas, and that's a telling thing.
Also, a nice thing I saw recently, also on Threads, via environmental scientist Katherine Hayhoe (also on Substack): everyone gets the story where a time traveller goes far back in time, changes a tiny thing and accidentally changes the present for better or worse. Nobody questions the narrative logic of that. But hardly anyone applies this in the other direction: by changing a tiny thing in our present, what if we can radically change our future? Surely they're an identical story?