Last weekend I met up with a woman who was thinking of becoming a Greenpeace active supporter. Looking back on the conversation, Emma reminded me a lot of what I was like when I was in my mid-20s. She was well-informed about climate change issues but she was also quite depressed about the chances of things changing before it’s too late.
She told me that the more she learned, the more she became overwhelmed by the scale of problems the human race is facing. This made me shiver. I thought back to a time when I had similar feelings and I was so close to a ‘green breakdown’ that I stepped away from activism for several years because I just couldn’t face thinking about the problems any more.
The lesson I have learned from that period of my life is that I have to choose my battles carefully - rather than try to throw myself into absolutely everything that’s going on. Becoming an active supporter with Greenpeace really helped. It gave me a structured way of being active again without having to take on the responsibilities of setting up and running campaigns from scratch. It also connected me to a ready-made community of friendly and motivated, eco-minded people.
I mentioned this to Emma and at the end of our conversation. I also told her that the one thing we have all got to hold on to is ‘hope’. The bottom line for me is that if you don’t laugh, you cry. As for the future, nothing’s certain but we have to try. As I get older, I’ve become more resolute in holding on to hope and refusing to get lost in the abyss of despair.
Talking about hope doesn’t mean you have to get all spiritual. But personally I think there’s a bigger picture. Some people call it their ‘god’. Some people call it Gaia. Whatever this ‘other’ is, I think it’s giving us humans a chance. If the world really was being suffocated by the excesses of the human race, I think the Earth would have booted us off by now - biblical stylee - perhaps through a wipe-out plague or a mega-flood. But that hasn’t happened. Yet. So I think we’re being given one final chance to turn ourselves around.
To me, there are only two types of people in this world: those who give a damn and those who don’t. It’s up to all of us who ‘give a damn’ to get together and make our vision of the future a reality. United action is the only way to go. I recently gave a speech at Glastonbury festival about the dangers of nuclear energy and, at the end, a very nice woman piped up and said, ‘Will you be our prime minister?’ My response was that we are all our own prime ministers now. With everything we do, we have to act in everyone’s best interest, not just our own.
So, I left Emma with three thoughts: a) stay positive, b) do all you can but c) don’t burn yourself out. I wish someone had said this to me when I was her age. But then again, being an arrogant twenty-something, I probably wouldn’t have taken any notice anyway.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the front of the book, The Greenpeace Story:
‘The optimism of the action is better than the pessimism of the thought’. - Harald Zindler, Greenpeace Germany.
Camilla Berens, network co-ordinator, Greenwich Greenpeace
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