Climate Change - Why personal responsibility matters

Last week I saw the amazing Clover Hogan, a young climate activist from Australia give a TEDTalk 

The link to her talk is on this week's written blog on our website, I encourage you to watch it - it's fantastic!

 “Climate change is not your responsibility, because it is outside your control, but what is your responsibility, is the things inside your control.”

So what does Personal Responsibility for Climate means?

For me, it all comes down to the things I have been speaking about on my weekly blogs for the past 2 years.

You can choose to;

1. Continue to live your life as you are..

OR

2. Continue to live your life with an added commitment to reducing your impact on the planet.

Two clear choices and no wrong answer.

YOU are in charge of your life and what do you with it is completely up to you.

I would not chastise anyone for choosing Option 1, however know that I am choosing Option 2 because I want to look back on my life in 10 years time and know that I did everything I possibly could within my control.

But the question that comes to mind for me now is How do we empower people to choose option 2?

There might be many answers to this question, I can only tell you what provoked this mind-set change for me personally.

Up until 2012 I used to live my life within the realms of Option 1. It’s not that I did not care about Climate Change, I just did not know enough about it and my view was the problem was far too colossal and so, there was nothing I personally could do about it. This was despair more than denial.

It took me a couple of years to educate myself - reading blogs, attending workshops and webinars, reading books and implementing my new found knowledge at my workplace.

To my surprise, the things I applied at work started to have a positive impact. I could see that our carbon emissions were reducing month by month and year by year.

I was absolutely hooked. I realised that I did have a place in the fight against Climate Change. And so I decided my life’s mission would be to become a key player within that fight.

At the end of the day, we have the choice to define our own path, and what we do with our life is up to us,