As COVID-19 has expanded around the globe, many of our worlds have seemed to shrink. We see too little of nature, receive too much bad news, and settle for virtual companionship in place of actual community.
A post-COVID-19 world will not be the same one we knew before, but it can be a better one. “When we get past this crisis, which we will, we will face a choice,” says United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres. “We can go back to the world as it was before or deal decisively with those issues that make us all unnecessarily vulnerable to the crises.”
As the Earth Day is observed again this April and as plans are being put in plan to move forward, you’re invited to draw inspiration from people and projects already working to make the world a better place.
Recognize your strengths
“I was planning to be an astrophysicist,” admits Katharine Hayhoe. Instead, Hayhoe is a climate scientist, university professor and the host of the digital broadcast series, Global Weirding. “I realized I had the exact skills that we need to address this urgent problem.”
The urgent problem she refers to is climate change; and her exact skills include the ability to bring wide-ranging technical information down to a local scale, so that people can apply it in their lives and use it to inform their decision-making. “Because,” she explains, “hardly anybody ever talks about this issue. And if we don’t talk about it, why would we care? And if we don’t care, then why would we act and why would we demand that others act too?”
When she isn’t writing papers or teaching graduate classes, Hayhoe continues to use her voice. An advocate of remote communication even before the COVID-19 pandemic, she can be found on social media, creating webinars, giving lectures and participating in online discussions. She contributed to Seasons 1 and 2 of Years of Living Dangerously, which aired on the National Geographic channel in 2016; and her latest episode of Global Weirding discusses climate change in the context of the COVID-19 virus, a theme she also tweets about regularly.
In 2019, UNEP recognized Katharine Hayhoe as a Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation.
Be part of the solution
“We’re in business to save our home planet.” This is the battle cry at Patagonia, the outdoor clothing brand founded by avid sportsman and rock climber, Yvon Chouinard, almost 50 years ago. Having observed the extent to which nature had already been destroyed, Chouinard was determined that his own company must adhere to a principle of no harm. Read more…
Fundamentally, this has meant creating high-quality products, designed to last. Because, explains Lisa Pike Sheehy, Patagonia’s Vice-President of Environmental Activism, “one of the most effective things you can do for the climate is to keep your clothing for longer.”
Beyond its commitment to impact-neutrality, however, the company is proactive in finding solutions to environmental challenges. In the 1980s, it adopted a self-imposed tax to generate funds for grassroots organizations working on environmental issues. It works with its customers to repair and reuse or recycle their old clothing items; and allows employees to leave work for up to two months–with full pay–to work for non-profit organizations on an environmental issue that they care about.
