Local Vinnie Dakota Stan

Hey, if you're ever feeling awful because you're super overwhelmed by the news, too overwhelmed to do anything, but you feel like you can't stop without being a horrible person who's just sticking their head in the sand...

Try thinking of it this way:

Maybe the moral thing to do actually IS to never look at the news...

so that you have the energy and will and lack of huge, petrifying fear needed to help

We've seen over and over again, especially in the climate movement, how often it's small, local efforts at making a difference that really start to change things

There's no moral value to being burned out and depressed.

Yes, knowing what's going on in your state/country/the world is good if it's something you can actually sustain

But if you have to choose between following the news/doomscrolling/etc. and actually having the energy to help?

I think that in the vast majority of situations, morally, you SHOULD choose to do something to help

Showing up to your city council meetings, or cleaning up trash in your neighborhood, or volunteering at a food pantry, or registering people to vote, or joining the underground abortion pill network, or doing a fundraiser for bipoc-led nonprofits, or mailing books to people in prison, or seedbombing native grasses, or phone-banking for a nonprofit you care about, or building benches and leaving them at bus stops, or knitting hats and giving them to unhoused people to stay warm, or starting a community garden, or sponsoring refugees for immigration, or taking a stand at school board meetings, or, or, or

all do infinitely more to help other people than doomscrolling and sharing depressing news posts ever will

In the 1980s, scientists concluded that if current trends continued the ozone layer that protects our planet would be nearly destroyed in a couple of decades. 

What followed was a massive international effort to ban chlorofluorocarbons–and the reason you probably haven’t heard much about the hole in the ozone layer lately is because those efforts worked. Rather than seeing the ozone layer completely destroyed by 2050, it is instead well on its way to full recovery.

Sometimes it seems impossible that our world could severely limit or halt our reliance on fossil fuels when they are such an ingrained part of modern life. In the 1980s, when scientists started sounding the alarm about a hole in the ozone layer, it seemed similarly impossible that the world would come together and agree to limit their use of chlorofluorocarbons.

It was not easy, but they did it, and we are living in a better world as a direct result of all those who took action to protect our world from the threat of impending environmental disaster.

“Even with the complications and caveats, the world’s response to the ozone crisis should be seen as an instructive, even inspiring, success story–one that can perhaps inform our response to the climate crisis.” 

This is real btw