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Can a policy maker focused on limiting climate change expand that commitment to include the health of children exposed to fossil fuel air pollution too? Not all strategies to protect the climate keep the air healthy. Carbon offsets don’t help reduce local air pollution but replacing a polluting facility with solar or wind power would clean the air and protect the climate.
These days it is not always fashionable to talk about love, caring, or our responsibilities to one another. The shortest path to finishing a project might seem like it calls for narrowing focus, not expanding it. We might tell ourselves we don’t have the strength to open our hearts any wider, lest they break wide open.
Yet the basic fact remains, we are all interconnected, and our hearts may be stronger than we think.
And, when we open our hearts to include the concerns of others, the odds of reciprocation are good. The asthma coalition is an ally for a tired climate activist just as much as the climate activist might be able to help the asthma advocate. There’s a practicality in that. The steps we might take at our heart’s dictate can be good strategy for change too.
In the same article that I quoted from above, Donella Meadows names this alignment of the ethical and the practical, and I’ll end with her words:
“As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to believe that which they know.”
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