Staying Grounded

Literally means what it means I don't get in a plane unless I have too. It's one of the most insane things that we as humans are collective signing up to at the moment, air travel.  Along with plastic it should be outlawed. All these amazing Instagram accounts endlessly recording our blatant disregard for the future of the human race, the Earth's atmosphere, our oceans and well all our other Earthlings.

It was an interesting time in my life when I started to get savvy to the real impacts of carbon fuels on this planet. It was one of those things that we all kind of knew about but as of yet nobody had fully done the research and we were beginning to find out. What I soon realised was my concern for the planet was a futile examination of what we actually hoped to achieve. As it wasn't the future of the planet that was at steak it's the future of the human race.

Monumentally what was important here was that up until this point in my life I had failed to be exposed to people that actually cared about the environment. I had always cared about the planet it had just been very hard to engage anybody that I knew to take the same interest. My family especially. It's times like these when we look back we begin to understand how locked into survival mode many people are and that change is difficult. Breaking habits can be hard in relation to personal growth, even when they are necessary for the evolution of a species. Change can be challenging to embrace until it becomes law.

What became clear through my activist friends was that radical individual action could help and that with a team of passionate people sharing in the same journey we were able to motivate each other to move forward. It was the first time that I had experience a real sense of community, the ability to share ideas, find new ways and access support to beat out a new path. From bicycle maintenance to green energy there were ways forward with collective evidence.

 

Activist groups that had seemed like they might be very radical were making perfect sense and going to extreme length to be heard. They were involved in Plane Stupid and Platform. What became clear as a result of the Direct Action tactics that they were willing to undertake they were targets for the establishment and that they perpetuated the legacy of great change makers like Emily Pankhurst, Ghandi and Nelson Mandela.