Fresh Start with Your Personal Climate Choices

I’ve proposed that choosing personal climate actions start with an inventory of your current reality. Like locating your position in a shopping mall in my last post, it’s finding the You-Are-Here spot.

Pinpointing your position is easier if you take note of why you are thinking about climate actions at all. Why are you considering your personal choices in the sprawling mall of climate actions? And why now?

It may be that climate has long been a huge iceberg of an issue for you, always a bit visible but hard to get a full view of the unseen bulk of it. Or it may be that you just followed the fleeting impulse to click on this climate blog. Either way you have a chance to examine your reasons and capture them in a useful way.

If you’re someone who likes journaling or even getting a bullet list down, take a minute to write two or three reasons about why you’re considering (or reconsidering) your choices now. Writing gets your ideas out of you head where you can look at them over time.  Any sheet of lined paper will do. Any app screen that you can date and reliably save will do. That may be enough to get you going.

Retrievable Lists

I know this is not rocket science. You already know how to keep lists of things To Do. But . . .  for actions you’re not going take today you need a memorable place to keep it. Be ready to experiment with ways to store it list so you can find it and revise it at will. Whenever a climate event rocks your world a bit, that’s when you want to go get your list. Having it on the refrigerator door may be enough.

Then, Simple Steps

·       Date your list and start with your reasons at the top.

·       Then begin to list actions that spontaneously occur to you.

·       To avoid everything in one overwhelming list, consider jotting things down in three piles.

·       Let the first pile be climate actions you’ve already tried and have some experience with. (You can mark them as still of interest or cross them out to show you’re done you’re done with them.)

·       For two more piles, try separating those actions based on what
-   you care about most from
- you think might be most effective.

You can probably already tell from the reasons you wrote down whether your interests are driven more by feelings and intuition or by facts and logic.

Revisable Lists

Expect to keep marking up your list over time, adding the new date. Or if you’re neater you can start with a fresh worksheet each time. This is only a start but you have begun a style of personal inventory for actions that will fit your motivation and situation. Rather than following someone else’s top ten climate ideas, you’ll be building a designer brand options list.

More to Come

Follow coming blogposts for more exercises in building a personal climate profile for your your current reality.

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