Happy new year 2019!
May the year bring you peace within, help you to be more grounded, find your aspirations and motivate you to turn ideas into projects and projects into plans. I certainly hope 2019 will do just that for me and intend to be very active in the process - stop talking about doing things and actually do them.
This simple statement came after intense questioning and re-assessment of the past year 2018, which I found particularly depressing from environmental and political perspectives. Extreme far-right and populists leaders either got in power (Trump and Bolsonaro) or confirmed their power (Putin and Erdogan, Assad), environmental damage have been proven to get faster and our window to act has never been so small. As an environmentalist, I found it hard to find meaning to my actions, both on a professional and a personal level. Indeed, the realisation that nothing will properly change (environmentally and socially) if the economic system of neoliberal capitalism remains in place properly hit me. I've known this for a while as this is what I specialised in in my post-graduate research, but the full and violent understanding of it, emphasised by watching over and over again the video of Greta Thunberg's speech at the UN made me clearly doubt
1) the impact of my own actions and
2) if I wanted, on a professional level, to keep working in the environmental sector.
While I could hardly picture myself working in another sector, I find it particularly challenging to work in an industry where you constantly feel like you're loosing more and faster rather than winning (or at least going in the right direction), despite all efforts. Although this is of course subject to change, being an honest environmentalist (or just honest) you know that many fights are already lost as it is too late to reverse the trend for many environmental issues: there is no chance we won't reach a serious degree of global warming, we have lost an incredible amount of species and this isn't set to stop anytime soon, emissions have started rising again in 2018...
Having said this, I'm not sure I could do anything else. Indeed, one thought struck me: I want to know that I helped. Whether it was useless, minimal or the smallest change, I realised that I would be at peace with myself (one of my 2019 intentions remember?) only if I know that I did something,
I thus realised that inaction would be, for me, worst than withdrawing to focus on something else.
I guess my point is the following: what matters is what feels right for you. It sounds hippy-like, but you rarely see people saying "it feels right to me to destroy the planet, consume unethically, let children refugees die without help" (I mean, it exists for some us of course, but this is not the majority of people). Despite what we're meant to believe, humanity overall is full of qualities, encompassing compassion, love and understanding. Because these do not have a proper place in a patriarchal and capitalist society, we often forget that there are integral part of who we are. They remain nevertheless essential to understand what makes us feel at peace, and that we are part of a wider group, which is itself part of a wider place (= Earth).
So yes, Happy new year and find what feels right!
Mathilde