What can I do?

1. Three Spheres Framework

One helpful guide is the Three Spheres framework, which identifies different levels at which to act.

• Personal Sphere - The outer sphere is the personal sphere of action where we acknowledge that our beliefs and values shape how we view the world.
• Political Sphere - Next is the political sphere where we join with groups of people who share our values to engage in policy development and decision making.
• Practical Sphere - Finally, there is the practical sphere where we enhance our knowledge and expertise and change our behaviour and engage with technical responses at the community level.

2. Visioning – Let’s Dream Together

One great way to begin transforming our world is through visioning what a healthier, happier, attainable future might look like. Naomi Klein urges us to "picture the world we are fighting for…to dream it up together”.

Imagine and prepare

Klein outlines that “deep transformation” requires two things; imagination and preparation.

Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Network states, “One of the key challenges with creating a low carbon, more resilient future is imagining what that might be like”.

Thomas Homer-Dixon refers to the visioning process as “…cultivating a prospective mind”. Homer-Dixon states “…if we’re going to have the best chance of following a different and positive path, we must take four actions”.

These actions are:

• Reduce stresses on society and the environment – slow down the rate of change.
• Cultivate a prospective mind – in order to cope with surprise and opening our minds to radically new ways of thinking.
• Build resilience into our critical systems – such as energy and food supply networks.
• Prepare for the breakdown of society – necessary to create a sustainable and equitable future.

3. Guides—From Personal to Group & Bottom Up to Top Down

There are many handbooks to lead you forward in your personal transition. Here are just a few of them:

For the Lazy

You can start with the United Nations guide called, “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World” This tongue-in-cheek guide describes four levels of action beginning with what you can do from your couch. Can this get any easier?

David Suzuki Top Ten

The David Suzuki Foundation provides a personal guide listing the top ten ways you can stop climate change:

1. Get charged up with renewables.
2. Green your community.
3. Use energy wisely.
4. Eat for a climate-stable planet.
5. Consume less, waste less, enjoy life more.
6. Divest from fossil fuels.
7. Invest in renewables.
8. Help put a price on pollution.
9. Vote in municipal, provincial and federal elections.
10. Tell your story, listen to others.

Reducing Flood Risk

The Home Flood Protection Program is a residential flood risk reduction education program that was launched by the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo in 2016. The goals of the Home Flood Protection Program are to help residents take action to reduce their flood risk and reduce damage in the event of a flood.

Climate Atlas

The Prairie Climate Centre has developed the Climate Atlas of Canada and there you will find an online guide titled “Take Action”, developed around the practical (i.e. technical), political and personal spheres of action. This is a Canadian perspective on the Three Spheres Framework for supporting transformation in our changing world.

Groups

Making a personal transformation is a good start but it is not enough; to be effective you must work with other like-minded people as part of a group. There are a number of organizations with extensive resource material to assist individuals and groups in transformation.

Transition Network

The Transition Network is an international movement of communities coming together to re-imagine and rebuild our world. This is a bottom-up grassroots movement with extensive resource material designed to guide people through the transition process towards building more resilient, more inclusive and sustainable communities.

New Dream

The New Dream is a USA-based organization empowering individuals, communities, and organizations to transform the ways they consume to improve well-being for people and the planet. These are just two examples of bottom-up grassroots organizations with extensive resource materials and guides to visioning and engaging in a transformation of the way we live.

BOTTOM UP Bottom-up strategies at the community level are possibly the most important activities with the biggest impact. Getting engaged and becoming active in the transformation to a cleaner and fairer society can take many paths.

What do you do best? Think of these strategies along two lines; one is reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases (mitigation) and the second is building resilience in our rapidly changing world (adaptation). And these are not mutually exclusive. Joining a group is the most powerful way to become active. For each of us it is just a matter of deciding what you do best and then joining the group that speaks to you the most.

Canadian Organizations

There are many organizations in Canada actively working on environmental and social initiatives, including Toronto350, Leadnow, Environmental Defence Canada, and the David Suzuki Foundation, to name a few. For a comprehensive summary of local groups in our area check out the Grey Bruce Sustainability Assets Map.

TOP DOWN It is important to also work from the top down. From a political perspective The Leap is one of the first Canadian organizations to prepare a manifesto for a new society and a Green New Deal policy perspective for transforming society.

Sustainable Canada Dialogues: 10 Policies

A comprehensive policy to address climate change has been developed by Canadian scholars to guide government in addressing climate change. A group of more than 60 scholars from every Canadian province, known as the Sustainable Canada Dialogues, outlined ten key policy orientations at the federal and provincial levels of governance. And they continue to monitor progress rating Canada’s climate policy action.

Vision Green

The Green Party of Canada has a comprehensive six-part vision developing a green economy and addressing climate change.

Project Drawdown: 100 Ways

In Project Drawdown, Paul Hawken and his team of researchers have identified the one hundred most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change.

Cities Lead

Cities are leading the way on reducing emissions towards zero-carbon strategies. The 100 Resilient Cities initiative began in 2013 supported by the Rockefeller Foundation19 dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges of the 21st century.

And not to be outdone, the United Nations has published a resilience handbook and through their Urban Habitat initiative have developed a City Resilience Profiling Programme.

I hope this helps you get started; this is just a sampling of what is available to us all. As we say in the film, “Let’s just start, what we share is more important than what divides us”.
- Dr. John Anderson