How Can You Save The Planet?

We the people have the power to save or destroy our planet with our choices every day.  Learn about practical actions you can take every day to help environment and climate and save the wildlife on planet Earth.

Julie Smith, 9/16/26

This is a summary of Chapter 27, At The End Of The Day, in the book, “2050: What’s it Gonna Be?”.  You can download the full chapter, as well as other chapters.  References are here.

If you've read my other blogs, by this time you’ve heard it all from my point of view, so you’re pretty familiar with my position on our environmental emergency.  It’s us.  All of us.  We have nobody to blame but ourselves for this mess.  We blame big oil and big ag and industry and the ultra-rich as we consume their products.  We blame the government and politicians when we’re the ones who voted for them.  We whine about all the construction as we grow our population.  We’re horrified at the decimation of wildlife as we buy food that was grown on land sprayed with pesticides to kill every last insect, and we apply poisons to our yards to keep them flat and green.  We donate to save the elephants like that will make everything better.  If only.  What helps is not buying the products.  Which means that we consumers have to change.  We can’t blame others for trashing our planet.  We have to eventually look in the mirror.

It turns out that most of us are concerned about global warming, and there’s even a new field of study evolving around climate change and mental health.¹  A poll in 2020 by the American Psychiatric Association found that 67% of American adults were concerned about climate change,² and a study in 2024 reported that 85% of Gen Zers are concerned.³   The deniers only make up 10 – 14% of the population, which means that most people in the U.S. do buy the science.⁴  Millennials are the first to truly understand the damage we are doing to our planet, and probably the last with the chance to do something about it.  If so many people are worried about climate change, how can we continue to leave it by the wayside and not do anything about it?  One reason might be that most people don’t know where to start, so we experience a sort of paralytic complacency.

The reality is that climate grief is real and we should be talking about it and doing something about it.  Yet, we don’t.  It turns out that 65% of Americans report that they rarely or never talk about global warming with friends.⁵  For my part, I can say that when I bring it up, it makes people nervous and they’ll either change the subject or basically tune me out.  My own husband has shut me down on numerous occasions, calling me out as tedious and annoying.  I’m currently finding an outlet, not only in writing, but also by involving myself in local environmental activism, which helps a lot.  This provides a formal background in which to recruit and educate locals and help to drive faster actions. 

It’s absolutely true that environmental sustainability is a depressing topic of conversation.  Yet, it doesn’t have to be.  It can be exciting.  We can do this.  Hilary and I already are, and my point is to spread the word about what can and must be done.  It really does feel good and empowering to take action that truly makes a difference.  I honestly believe that our planet and our species can have a good and happy future.  If we can rein in our consumption, most of which we don’t even need for happiness, and combine it with the awesome technology that our amazing and creative human minds have developed over millennia, we can have a wonderful world ahead for ourselves and future generations.

Even though I continue to maintain that we are all at the root of climate change, in reality we’ve had help.  That help has been in the form of professional con men paid by wealthy corporations to keep us thinking that our planet is a non-issue that doesn’t deserve our attention.  A hugely important example is the landmark study put together by Stanford Research Institute scientists for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association that represents the oil and gas industry.  They warned that increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere would cause increasing temperatures that could cause melting ice caps and rising sea levels and serious climate problems.  Their findings were buried for the sake of profit, as climate denial and misinformation took hold.¹⁰    We also saw in Chapters 24 - 26 that the oil industry is just one among many cons that we’ve been subjected to.

It’s the same with every environmental issue we have, at which big corp is at the center of misinformation.  Science tries to honestly report a serious problem, corporations and trade groups counter with misinformation and the public has no idea who to believe.  Let me put it this way.  Never trust big corp, trust the scientists.  There are far more ethical scientists than there are ethical corporations.  Indigenous protectors of land and wildlife in the face of mining, farming and forestry are still under constant attack, supported by local political puppets.  Did you know that more than 1,700 earth defenders have been murdered in the past 20 years?¹²  And those are just the ones that we know of.

              As we lose wildlife and wild lands, we tend to forget how the world was over generations, and we tend  to view the current world as the norm, which is another reason why we lack urgency.  There’s a term for this, “generational amnesia” which describes what our parents and grandparents remember.  Personally, I remember road-tripping by car as a child, and my dad had to clean thick blankets of smeared insects off the windshield every time we stopped for gas.  Now we almost never have to clean, unless the roads are sloppy from weather, and then it’s mud we’re cleaning off, not insects.  We used to have hundreds of birds around our yard, and power lines would be covered with them.  Now there are hardly any.  They’re so scarce that we can practically give them each a name.  Oh my god, that blue jay came around today!  Adults may see nearly dead landscapes, and kids see them as normal, because that’s all they know. 

In 1998, The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World Report showed that trends in environmental indicators were generally down:  “Forests are shrinking, water tables are falling, soils are eroding, wetlands are disappearing, fisheries are collapsing, rangelands are deteriorating, rivers are running dry, temperatures are rising, coral reefs are dying and plant and animal species are disappearing.”¹³  And that was nearly 30 years ago.  Of course, now, it’s worse.

Our ignorance of the extreme value of insects in local and global ecosystems is scary.  The war on insects that is being waged in homes, gardens, and on farms reflects that ignorance.  In the U.S., the fear and loathing of insects started only about a hundred years ago, when big corp began promoting toxins to make them go away, playing to our human mentality to control and dominate anything that we might find annoying.  They buzz in our ears, some may bite us and carry diseases, but, hell, you can say the same for pets as well as children and even some adults.  The reality is, we ALL carry diseases.  We absolutely need to build more compassion and appreciation of nature, including these small creatures, and not just despise them across the board.

To overcome our ignorance, we need to advocate, educate and set an example.  Ecoliteracy is the basic understanding that everything is connected, and that we humans are animals and are dependent on the earth and all the other creatures that live here.¹⁴  Pollution and pesticides have consequences for other life and for us humans even if we may not understand the details of the impacts.  Even if we live in a city and don’t feel connected to nature, we’re still dependent on the photosynthesis of plants for oxygen. 

A study in 2023 identified six different interventions to motivate behavior change: educating others by providing data, giving feedback on past climate-related behaviors, setting personal goals, urging people to act more sustainably, providing financial incentives, and establishing social comparisons that highlight sustainable behavior wherever it appears.  The last was found to have the most impact.¹⁵  Basically, we notice what others are doing, do it ourselves and spread the word.  I hope what I’m doing in my life and in my book, "2050: What's It Gonna Be?", inspires somebody to take action.  With every inspired person, we can move another step closer to salvaging what’s left of our planet.

Despite the devastation we are inflicting on our wildlife, a huge array of life yet remains, and they should be our entire reason for being.  After all, we are a part of the intricate web of life on our planet.  From the joy of listening to birds sing and fly beautifully in the sky , to the gratitude of seeing a moose or deer on a hike, or to watching the hilarious games of chipmunks and squirrels playing chase, we can personally see the special beauty of each.  Think about that. We can’t fly, so watching a bird fly can be magical if we look at it that way.  Magic seems to die as we grow up and forget that the real world outside is full of mystery and beauty that we stop noticing.  But it can return to us as soon as we restore our connection to the earth and our brethren by getting outside.  We need to remember that our bodies and our being are part of the earth and made from the earth, just like all the other life on the planet.

It would also help a lot if media would cover more climate change, since it’s our biggest global problem.  Currently, people don’t understand the disastrous situation we’re in and what’s really going on because it rarely makes the news.  In fact, in 2023 corporate TV (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) news only spent 17 hours covering climate change in the entire year, which is less than 1% of total news.⁴  The more of us who are actually aware of the urgency of our situation, the better, obviously.  If you really want the truth, turn to ethical and balanced publications like High Country News, National Geographic, Discover Magazine, Outside, Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening and Audubon, to name a few examples.

The true challenge is to change our ways.  And, it’s true that we will inevitably be forced to change eventually because if we don’t, the planet will force us to, and it won’t be pretty.  I strongly believe that we’ll be much better off in the long run if we change now.  We have a lot to do in the coming decades, so a good time to start is now.  Start simple.  How long can you go without buying something you don’t need?  Can you strive to at least include 10% organic food in your diet?  Can you reduce meat and dairy by 10%?  Can you start shopping at the local Farmer’s market?  Then go from there.

We individuals have to take necessary actions to reduce our individual carbon footprints.  It’s not hard.  We’re spoiled, and now we have to grow up.  This is a time of great opportunity.  We know what we have to do, and the challenge is to do it.  And, we can enjoy watching things turn around, and know that we made a big difference in our lives, our world, our wildlife, our families, and future generations.  We can take a hike through a beautiful meadow or a vast forest or an endless desert, and feel the clean air around us, see the birds flying above and singing among the bushes and trees, catch a glimpse of a lizard or a chipmunk or a beautiful beetle or even a moose or bear, and feel good about it.  We can visit the ocean and swim among the healthy coral reefs thriving with colorful tropical fish, the clear clean water enveloping us as we glimpse all manner of colorful fish, and, yes, the occasional shark, and feel good about it.

The Table below reviews the carbon emissions reductions that my husband Hilary and I have achieved, which is well on the way towards the needed 80% reduction for the U.S. by 2050.  Our average is probably about 80%, because in years when we don’t make a major purchase, or take a long airplane flight (in 2024 we did both) our reductions will actually be very close to 80%.  This has been a long journey over about 20 years, starting with small things, like recycling, eating organic, minimizing meat and dairy, and growing from there.  The solar panels, battery and all-electric equipment were installed in three stages over an 8-year time span, and we went to an EV three years ago.  It feels good to do something about our problems, certainly better than looking the other way and hoping they’ll take care of themselves by magic or something.

If you start your journey now, or if you’ve already started it, you should easily reach an 80% reduction by 2050, and your carbon footprint will continue to decrease over the years.  If we all do this, it will help our planet, our wildlife and humanity a lot.  It’s up to us to make carbon footprint reduction cool socially, and the alternative unacceptable.  And think about how fun it will be to actually see our metrics improve.  To see emissions decreasing.  To see wildlife increasing.  To see forests increasing.  To see our happiness index increasing.  Now wouldn’t that be a joyful environmental story for a change?  Fingers crossed.