Take Action Tuesdays

 

Well, that was fast.

I no sooner announce that I am going to do 8 weeks of climate action per How to Save a Planet (or How 2 Planet as I call it) then I find out that Tuesdays are action days. This week's action: learn more about energy storage and create a climate venn diagram to find the place where what brings you joy, what you're good at, and what needs doing intersect.

My venn diagram is above.

Since my job is in informal education and I am literally paid to do outreach about watersheds and soil health, this is a no-brainer. My climate action is to make the climate connection  to these topics explicit and then teach my little heart out.

There is a long standing tension about whether education is action. And in my opinion it is when you are trying to effect systemic change, not because education automatically leads to behavior change or voting in a certain way but because it creates a social norm that people must agree with or resist. This is why the backlash to "CRT" aka a version of history that includes the perspective of marginalized groups is so fierce. What is taught is normed. And people, despite the current obsession with individual exceptionalism, are deeply social creatures and will tend to act according to norms.

I have dear friends who maintain that unless the work directly results in achieving results through power then the work is not action. Action is purely political. And I get that, hence my commitment to becoming a climate voter. Community organizing is the point on the arrow of systemic change. Education, however, is somewhere way back on the shaft. It's not what will ultimately make the change but the change won't be made without it.