Fixing the Climate Crisis
Let's cut through any distraction, apathy, or dis-information and distill these issues down to something we can wrap our heads around. Below I describe the five simple steps that we can all take that will have the maximum positive impact on planet earth and the natural world
Grow Your Own Food
Living in cities can cut off our primal connection to nature. Whether it's one pot of basil on the window sill or a two-acre community garden, urban farming is a revolution that is changing the world. It provides the freshest, highest-quality, chemical-free local food, it erases food deserts, and maybe most importantly, it reconnects us to nature and its miraculous cycles. Re-establishing that intimacy is Step One in saving the planet.
Don't Buy Factory Farmed Meat
Industrial-scale meat production is a 20th century phenomenon. Globally, raising food animals is the #1 cause of deforestation and species extinction, the #1 consumer of fresh water, a leading cause of climate change, and the principal cause of recent pandemics. CAFOs have cramped, unsanitary, terrible conditions that produce oceans of concentrated toxic animal waste. THE SOLUTION? Eat less meat, and only buy meat from local, smaller "traditional" style farms. This will significantly diminish the ecological and moral harm caused by eating animal products.
Eat Organic
Pesticides kill the "good" bacteria that trigger plants to sequester carbon from the air and store it in soil. Earth's soils are carbon-depleted, yet they already store more carbon than the entire atmosphere and all forests on the planet combined. So pesticide-free soils have the potential to lock away more carbon than any other method. THE SOLUTION? Eat Organic. To go one step further, eat regenerative organic.
Vote for "Extended Producer Responsibility"
This is already signed into law in the U.S. state of Maine, and soon in Oregon. Basically this makes manufacturers responsible for the environmental costs (pollution, toxins, packaging, etc.) of their product by adding these costs to the purchase price. This shifts the focus to the beginning of the product lifecycle rather than the end, and shifts responsibility to the producer of the waste and pollution rather than to the consumer or to society at large. Without this, there is no direct financial dis-incentive to polluting the planet.
Join Community Choice Energy
We need to shift to cleaner renewable energy as our source of electricity. Making the change at the community scale has myriad advantages. Tens of millions of people in thousands of communities around the world have already joined community groups that either purchase renewable energy facilities collectively or take charge of deciding where their energy is sourced. It's cheaper and greener and it removes utility-company monopolies. Just search "community choice energy" in your area.