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One simple act you can take today for the planet's kids

Each morning I wake up exhausted. Between my kids complaining about Zoom school and not seeing their friends, trying to get breakfast, lunch and dinner prepped before I have to log into work, the fear of losing my job (which gives my whole family health insurance), the tension of our American political system, the heat, the fires, the hurricanes, most days, I just want to dive back under the covers and give up.

Jane Goodall, though, got me out of bed this morning. I listened to her being interviewed by Krista Tippett the previous day. She explained how she created her organization Roots and Shoots to speak to a younger generation who’d grown increasingly depressed about the state of our planet. Their goal is to empower youth to make the changes they need to see in their communities to find hope, and meaning. With the help of her organization, kids create vertical gardens to feed their communities, help their schools go zero waste, and fight oil corporations in their communities. She ended the conversation with the saying, “We didn’t inherit this planet from our ancestors, we’re borrowing it from our children.”

Borrowing the land from our children.

For years, I’ve been waiting for a superhero to swoop in a remedy this debt I’ve actively taken on my kids’, and yours’ Earthly accounts. But I have to admit, we’ve got no Wonder Woman, no Black Panther, not even an Ant Man.

But maybe, I thought in the early hours before dawn this morning, we have something better than that—we’ve got YOU.

A squad invested in hope.

We want our planet to be habitable for our grandkids.

We want our kids to be ancestors to future generations.

But we know from our toddlers, desire is simply not enough. The future we’ve created cannot be mended unless we ALL take direct action. I’m not talking about massive action, like creating this new super enzyme that can eat the Earth’s plastic, nor getting 300,000 people to protest in New York City, nor even writing 500 postcards to voters—though if you do have time, here’s a great resource.

Squads need people with all kinds of skills. People are out there doing AMAZING work. Right now! We’ve got Project Drawdown creating solutions to combat the real culprits of this climate crisis; and how much I admire the innovators dreaming up solutions over at TED Countdown. We’ve got the planet’s smartest scientists on the task.

So where does that leave us?

In one of our first parenting classes at Kai’s preschool, his teacher, Mame Campbell announced, “Kids don’t have to share.” She explained that parents, wanting to be nice, force our kids to share their toys. But she said, “Imagine if someone came in your house and walked into your kitchen and started throwing all your pots and pans and food around. And when you complained, I looked up at you and said, share, share.” The reasons we urge our kids to share is to teach them generosity and kindness. But when that one kid always breaks your kids toys, we stop inviting that friend over to our house.

It’s time to stop inviting the perpetrators of our climate crisis into our houses. And to do this, we need to take one small step at a time.

Because we’re busy and exhausted, we need to trust that the smartest minds on the planet are doing amazing work to ensure our kids have a habitable planet. Unless you’re going back to get a PhD in how to capture carbon, as parents, our work is to raise good humans who won’t allow those destructive kids into our houses any longer. And we get to model the values we want our children to embody.

But to do this, we need start small.

You can commit to one tangible solution a week, right? Something easy. Something real that you can do to feel like you are making meaningful change in your kids’ and grandkids’ futures.

The aim is to locate a dash of hope in the process of taking advantage of this incredible moment in our planet’s history to get us all out of bed each morning.

This Week’s Act of Hope

This week, I want you to do something very easy that will act as a metaphor for the work we’re committing to do together. I want you to plant a seed. It could be just one or a whole packet. It could be wildflower, broccoli, lettuce, anything that has a good chance of surviving autumn. If you live in a cold weather climate, find a little windowsill inside and place the plant there.

Because what we eat matters as much as how that food is grown, as a squad, we need to be reminded that we can grow our own food, and nurture our own ideas. Plus, we’re showing our kids that we’re actively tending to the Earth we are borrowing from them.

Every day, I want you to give that seed three seconds of your attention. That’s it.

And if your seed sprouts, share a picture with me on Twitter, Instagram or email (michele@michelebigley.com) and I’ll share it here!

Until next week…

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