Introduction

So why with all the words that have been written about climate change and climate action and all the words that will be written about climate change and climate action do I feel that I have something to contribute?

I am not a climate scientist. But since climate scientist have been warning about climate change for 50 years and the systemic change we need hasn't happened, maybe it doesn't matter that I am not. I am a fifty something year old grandmother with degrees in science and education still looking for a job to support myself and contribute positively to the world. Still being unemployed gives me the luxury of time and time is what the world doesn't have right now.

I have been working towards living sustainably for several years now, ever since a friend of my daughters pointed out that all the other causes I am invested in don't matter if we don't have a livable planet. We have reduced our waste, reduced our consumption to mostly secondhand goods, changed our already vegetarian diet to be 70 % unprocessed and tried to walk everywhere within a 30 minute walk.

 However since the release of the IPCC report my sense of despair and urgency has increased tenfold. This is not a game that we can play at being sustainable we have to BE sustainable. Looking around me at other people in my small rural Eastern Australian town I don't know that many people have the knowledge, skills, fitness and experience to survive what is going to be a rough ride for the rest of our lives. We are looking at steadily increasing natural disasters: heatwaves; extreme storms; cyclones; droughts; and floods which will cause social unrest (perhaps collapse) and food shortages.
We are probably already locked into a 2 degree Celsius rise in temperature but every action we take reduces how bad it is going to be. I don't think that inaction is a moral choice. We haven't acted, we haven't taken it seriously and that is why we are where we are now. We need a total remaking of society, but this is not a case of depriving ourselves but recognising that all the stuff didn't actually make us happy anyway. A sustainable future will actually be more fun, more satisfying because it will be based on relationships and using our bodies and brains to solve our problems.

But some people find it difficult to imagine a low carbon future where we use no fossil fuel energy and consume 80% less stuff.

So because other people are often amazed at the way we live I thought I would share our journey and the big picture ideas as I see it.

Read climate change articles I have collected here and find my daily climate actions here.  Follow me on Instagram and Twitter.