A GENERAL UNDERSTANDING OF CLIMATE CHANGE …
AND YOUR INDIVIDUAL ROLE IN IT
AND YOUR INDIVIDUAL ROLE IN IT
May 14, 2025
Is it true? Or is it a politically‑motivated hype? Certainly, the questions deserve a fair consideration—because our lives are on the line.
The collective mindset in societies generally defaults to blaming large companies for nearly all the consequences of climate change—and, rightly so. But, let’s think further about this point of view.
Would those large corporations continue to produce their goods, and emit harmful greenhouse gases, if there were no customers for what they produce? Of course, ‘customers’ can be individuals or sizable organziations—but all are driven by humans. So, aren’t those companies the suppliers for fulfilling the needs and wants of humans?
Even as we might view corporations as powerful entities completely independent of our personal lives, they are actually part of the system that sustains our lives.
Existence of life is possible only within systems.
This is true for humans, for the Earth, and for any living or moving or reproducing creature. All elements in a system correlate, and depend on each other to sustain each other’s existence.
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THE ESSENCE
SUSTENANCE OF HUMAN LIFE
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Even during the primitive stages of human life on Earth, thousands or millions of years ago, there were systems that enabled our forebears to survive and reproduce, resulting in our own lives today. These systems included: the system of their bodies to function properly; the systems they developed to find and grow and prepare food; the system of the Earth that provided the means for finding and growing food; the system that generated breathable air; the system that propelled them to live and produce new life.
And so, all facets of human life correlate. Today, big corporations produce various goods to fill our needs, whether those be the daily goods to sustain our lives, or goods several stages removed from our everyday lives (such as bridges or other seldom‑used infrastructure). In addition, they produce in order to satisfy our countless desires for unneeded but wanted pleasures. So, whose fault is it that we have to deal with climate change?
Of course, many the corporations could—and absolutely should—employ better ways to produce the goods we want them to create. Of course, the responsibility rests with them to alter their manufacturing processes in order to operate in harmless ways. And, of sad course, the financial interests of corporate stakeholders often drive corporate decisions in conflict with those of the consumers.
Yet, the actions of individual consumers are the overlooked culprit in the matter of climate change. While this statement is not an acquittal of corporations as the largest and by all means the most determining contributors to climate change, this is—in fact—an intimation of individual persons’ responsibility for doing their part to reduce and stop climate change.
And, ‘doing’ doesn’t just mean picking up after yourself … it also means taking actions to compel those large polluters to change their ways in order to serve the envrionment, and people, in the first place.
HOW MUCH POWER DO INDIVIDUALS HAVE?
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No matter whether we are talking about enormous shipping boats, about manufacturing facilities burning fossil fuel, or the industrial‑scale grazing of livestock, most of the ultimate beneficiaries of those activities are the individual consumers: you, and I, and our families, and friends, and neighbors. Because:
- The shipping boats transport the shoes, or clothes, or electronics, or any number or type of goods we buy for our everyday lives
- The manufacturing facilities manufacture their goods for our consumption
- The large‑scale farming and agricultural activities are done in order to produce the food we buy in our everyday life
There are three major ways an individual (or family) can help reduce climate change:
- To press companies to use climate‑friendly methods to produce their goods, and eliminate unnecessary practices
- To reconsider personal demands for the goods we purchase—which in turn will affect large corporations’ outputs and polluting activities
- To pay attention to, and be mindful of, everyday habits (such as food waste, paper waste, plastic waste, and the thoughtless ease with which we buy then discard goods just because it’s no longer needed, or is effortless to replace)
In short, a fair part of climate change is caused by personal activities and waste—driven by negligent ways of conduct, and a mindset that dismisses the scale of the effects that personal actions can create. But when this mindset will change, we will cease to be just helpless endurers of the consequences of large polluters’ negligent and self‑serving ways. Our role is to take action on a personal level, and to compel large polluters to do the same on a large scale … because if we don’t, they certainly won’t.
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