Leave a BIG Footprint
How quick are you at shaming yourself or the people around you? (Quiet thoughts count.) How often do you feel like you should “do the right thing” more but aren’t doing enough?
When it comes to lowering our footprints, we can always do more, and the world is fast to remind us of just that. If we don’t hear it from ourselves, we get incentivized by oil companies to calculate our impact so that we can “do the right thing.” (The irony obviously being that they’re dumping over the responsibility on us, but I’ll leave that discussion for a future topic.)
The truth is that on the quest to lower our footprint and minimize ourselves as best we can, we will always be behind. This means we will always feel like less than we deserve, which in itself disempowers us when we should be MORE motivated to take action.
In my thinking, we need to shift the narrative on this. In fact, we should make our footprints not smaller, but BIGGER. As big as we possibly can.
Because guess what? We are not the root of all evil. We, the human species, are not the cause of all disasters. Our actions can be, but we are not, which means that if we have the power to harm the Earth, we also have the power to make it even more beautiful than how we found it.
Below is a short excerpt from Chapter 10 in The Climate Optimist Handbook. Let these words sink in as you read them. Do they resonate with you and if not, how can you start shifting the narrative on the stories you tell yourself? How can you allow yourself to wake up in the morning and feel inspired and excited to step out into the world and make your presence here on Earth be felt and seen in the biggest, most beautiful way?
Chapter 10 — Leave a Big Footprint
What if your presence shouldn’t be felt less, but more? What if the answer isn’t to retreat into shame but to step out into your power? Maybe your existence here on Earth is so meaningful you owe it to the world to leave as big a footprint as you possibly can?
I know it is.
I know it because you’re alive, and to be alive means to have the opportunity to do the extraordinary.
It means you have the ability to make history and leave the world even more beautiful than you found it. To be a climate optimist means to insert yourself back into the cycle of life and ask, “How can I matter? How can I leave a big and beautiful footprint on this big and beautiful Earth?”
Mother Nature is waiting for us to join her squad again, and forgiving as she is, she will welcome us with open arms. We are her children too, just as much as the bees and the trees and the sea turtles. We are nature. We are beautiful and wondrous and the most powerful mammal on Earth. Why wouldn’t we use that power to do as much good as we possibly can?
The time has come to step out of our shame caves and into empowered action. Let’s leave a big footprint, and let’s do it now!
These were excerpts from Chapter Ten: Leave A Big Footprint. The book consists of a total of 75 chapters, broken up into 6 different parts. If you want to feel inspired and empowered as a climate activist, let your journey start here:
