Happily, many of us just had a short break, a breather, a catnap away from the fretting and the struggling and the urgency and foreboding that comes with working on sustainability.
As you rise and turn to your overcoats and galoshes once more, take stock of your own impact, of what your contributions mean to us all.
How? We suggest the George Bailey method: what would the world have been like if you had never been born?
There’s gold in them thar’ hills, but the process of getting it out of the hills is a costly one for the environment. Headlines such as, “The Environmental Disaster That is the Gold Industry,” are not encouraging to the argument that mining gold is worth it.
A cross-country trip via Greyhound occasioned a stop in the blasted moonscape of Sudbury, Ontario. It was a weird place in 1975, with a giant Canadian nickel presiding over a town with no trees, no animals or birds, just rock stained black by metals.
What led to the destruction of greater Sudbury’s environment, and the 40-years of painstaking, award-winning repairs, bears examination.
We can — and we must — change the odds that the climate will tip in our favor. We do this both by changing the speed at which new, more sustainable ideas spread, and by changing the rate at which those ideas turn into actions.
A tipping point is, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point,” after which something — an idea, a product, a belief — takes off, grows exponentially. It is, as Malcolm Gladwell put it, the point where it “spreads like wildfire.” In the case of our climate however, we’re not concerned with one single tipping point, but two.
