Introduction to the Topic

Individuals and Climate Change

One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to tackling climate change is defining the role of individuals. Margaret Mead's famous quote above is the perfect starting point for exploring this question. That said, it is a far more complicated question than you might think, and there is no shortage of opinions. Google "individuals and climate change" and you'll get almost 500 million hits in less than a second. And if you choose to dig in to the topic you'll find dozens of books, hundreds of reports and journal articles, thousands of videos, tens of thousands of news stories, and an infinity of social media posts waiting for you. As John Naisbitt notes, it's all a bit overwhelming.

Digging into the topic of "individuals and climate change" you'll find two main lines of argument:

1: That individuals' voluntary decisions and behaviors, particularly with respect to their carbon footprints, are critical to solving climate change (particularly in the face of inaction by policy makers).

2: That individuals' voluntary decisions and behaviors can never scale to the level needed to mitigate climate change, and that focusing on individual responsibility for tackling climate change is (at best) a distraction from what's needed and (at worst) intentional misdirection.

These two contradictory lines of argument lead to confusion among people alarmed or concerned about climate change - 100 million people in the United States alone!

That's why Your Personal Guide sets out to clarify the "individuals and climate change" conversation. NOT with the goal of providing simple answers to complicated questions, and NOT with the goal of telling you what to do. There is no one size fits all answer to the question of "what can I really do about climate change?" Different people in different situations will legitimately arrive at all kinds of answers to the question; this Personal Guide is intended to help you find those answers.

This Personal Guide does not suggest there is a "silver bullet" solution to climate change. As Albert Einstein once noted, focusing too much on searching for a solution can backfire if you don't understand the problem.

While this Personal Guide does explore solutions, and what individuals can do, a key purpose of the Guide is to help you better understand the problem, per Einstein's admonition.

John Brockman carries the idea further in his quote as shown below, relating specifically to the idea of "wicked problems." Climate change has been called "the ultimate wicked problem."

You can start that by clicking on the Trillion Dollar Climate Questions thought in the Plex at left, or by exploring somewhere else in the Guide. Totally up to you!

The Climatographers