Why Starting Somewhere is Better Than Doing Nothing
In general most of us care about our planet and aren’t opposed to doing the right thing when it comes to protecting it, but when there is so much conflicting information about the climate crisis and so much greenwashing thrown at us it is often easier to just do nothing and hope governments and big corporations sort things out and make the changes for us.
But doing nothing is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. Doing something is an improvement on doing nothing.
But what something should we do?
The first step towards doing something over doing nothing is to start becoming aware. Aware of how big a topic climate crisis and global warming are for example and how intrinsically linked in our daily lives they are. Aware of the part our individual daily lives have to play in this huge topic and that we each have our own environmental impact.
By becoming aware you are doing something, because as we become aware we often start to see things differently. Take what I like to call ‘plastic blindness’ as an example. I used to be guilty of ‘plastic blindness’ as I happily went about my life without much of a thought for my individual actions having any real impact on the world. But as I started to read more articles and books and watch more documentaries and films about our environment and the problems it is facing it made me think. I paused, took a step back, and considered, and one of the things I thought about was the amount of plastic in my life. I became aware of the huge amounts of plastic that entered my life every day and it shocked me that I hadn’t noticed it before. Without really realising I had become ‘plastic blind’ to the amount of plastic that accompanied every single item I bought.
Once you become aware it is very hard to ignore. Once I realised how much plastic I had been purchasing I began looking at the plastic content every time I went to buy anything, and more often than not it was either made of plastic or wrapped in plastic. By becoming aware of this I began to stop buying things on automatic pilot and I began putting items back, not buying them, and instead thinking about alternatives.
Awareness was the starting point of doing something instead of doing nothing. By consciously becoming aware we are able to consciously doing something instead of doing nothing. Awareness leads to new ways of thinking and education which in turn leads to change.
Businesses owners have the opportunity to make real impact and real change in so many ways in terms of their environmental impact, by taking the first step to simply become aware of their current status they can begin to plan and implement strategies and improvements.
