Circles of influence

Leah Stokes, an environmental activist, wrote about her experiences and describes the concept of circles of influence. Watch the video or read the transcript below to follow her story:

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(Excerpted from “A Field Guide for Transformation”)

“My first environmental actions […] were small and immediate. When my friends and I found out that tiny milk boxes we got at lunch could not be recycled at school, we stopped playing outside. Instead, we spent our lunch hour meticulously cutting up the cartons so we could lay them flat and bring them home to recycle them. We did this for weeks.

In my teens, my actions got bigger and I started to stretch beyond myself. I wrote to the owners of the local grocery store to ask them to stop selling Chilean sea bass – a vulnerable species. I got my family to stop using disposable plates at family gatherings.

When I went to university, I had my first real chance to learn about the climate crisis. I tried to figure out ways to get more people to change how they used energy. The campaign worked: We helped university residence cut around 10% of their energy use. Before I graduated, I helped build on campus a large solar project, whose profits would fund student scholarships. It was clear to me that changing the energy system was the key to tackling the climate crisis. And I vowed to do everything I could to help drive that transformation.

Yet the results were not satisfying enough. I wanted a bigger scale. I saw that changing behaviours was not as powerful as changing institutions. So, I spent the next decade trying to understand how people have tried to change energy policy to tackle the climate crisis. I tell you these stories to show you how […] I’ve lived my life in widening circles. I’ve tried with each passing year to reach a bit further into the energy system and drive greater changes.

When I come to the end of my life, I want the scales to show that I prevented more carbon emissions than I caused. And there is no way to make that happen if I work only on myself.”

As Stokes describes, there are different circles of influence available to us:

The personal or immediate (our personal actions and choices)
Our families and friends
Our communities (ex. school, university campus, community gardens)
Systems and institutions (ex. laws, policies)

Each circle has a larger scope and wider effect than the previous. Our actions can be targeted to different circles of influence.

As we grow from children to teenagers to young adults and beyond, our ability to affect change at wider circles generally increases. However, it is important to remember that you can (and should!) take actions within every circle of influence. Some of the loudest voices for policy change come from the youngest members of society and it’s never too late for someone to start making changes to their personal actions.

If you are struggling to speak out, a non-profit organization developed the Inner Development Goals framework, a foundation for reaching the Sustainable Development Goals. These tools could help boost courage and open your heart to achieving the SDGs.

Actions you can take at each circle of influence:

Personal: Reuse, avoid, or decrease food waste, limit air travel, grow a food or wildlife garden, vote with your money (choose products that are more sustainable and avoid those that aren’t), switch to electric heating and appliances.

Family and friends: Encourage others to take personal actions, share knowledge and awareness of sustainability issues.

Community: Participate in a community garden, volunteer with a local environmental or social justice organization, organize a campus sustainability event, spread climate change awareness.

Systems and institutions: Petition for government action and changes to the law, write to your MLA or MP about issues you care about, vote in elections, and boycott companies with unsustainable practices.

Obstacles

There are a number of obstacles that can limit or prevent your ability to take action on sustainability.

One of the most obvious obstacles is socioeconomic status – individuals and families who are living in poverty are significantly more limited in the actions that can take to promote sustainability than those who have larger incomes and more resources available to them.

Socioeconomic differences are one example of how power and privilege play a role in the ability of individuals, groups, and countries to take action on sustainability. You can learn more about these effects in our module on Sustainability and Social Justice.

Watch the video or read the transcript

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A question of scale

The larger the group or organization that takes action, the greater the effect of that action on sustainability. In the video above, we compared an individual action (giving up coffee) to Canada’s leading coffee supplier changing to sustainable coffee and saw that the action taken by the coffee supplier was much greater than our individual action.

In general, the overall effects of switching to more sustainable options and actions are much greater when they are taken by a large company or organization. Individual actions can also be limited by the choices and policies of companies, organizations, and countries.

“In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic [..] few were flying or even leaving their homes. Yet emissions barely budged – falling as estimated 8%. We need emissions to fall that amount every year until 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Individual action alone won’t get us there.” - Leah Stokes

Another example of this is between countries. Any country that adopts policies and laws to ensure more sustainable actions are made will have a greater effect than any one person can have, however, some countries (such as Canada, China, and the United States) have a larger global impact than others (such as Belize and Grenada).

This can be due to higher populations, higher levels of technological development and energy use, and higher levels of wealth and spending among the people living in the country. In order to move forward sustainably, the world’s largest and wealthiest countries need to commit to action and change.

It’s important to realize that:

Your voice matters... but your actions matter even more.
Your education matters... but educating others even more.
Making sustainable choices matters... making it easier for everyone to make sustainable choices even more.
Making change at home matters... changing the campus, the city, the province, the country, the world even more.

“Push for a political movement that doesn’t exist. Because the politics to fix this doesn’t exist today. So I think what we should do as individuals is to use the power of democracy to make our voices heard and to make sure that the people in power cannot continue to ignore this.” - Greta Thunberg

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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