Hope & Responsibility
Our planet and nature are truly in peril at the moment. We’re living, err suffering, through many issues we can prevent. Pollution, habitat loss, extinction, and harming living creatures — are some of them. Though yes we need to learn how to focus on ourselves and laugh, we also need to accept our power in making changes, and not pretend that nothing is happening.
There are two main concepts we all use differently in our conversations around conservation and protection. Here are my definitions:
Hope — the strength and power that ties us to our human-ness and lights our path to keep going to create a better tomorrow.
Responsibility — the privilege to use our knowledge in a meaningful and impactful context to make a difference.
For the majority of us, the word responsibility has a negative meaning. We associate it with blame, fault, and guilt rather than choice, action, and empowerment.
When we keep our thoughts hopeful and look at responsibility as our choice we end up empowered to make intelligent and good choices. Our knowledge gives us responsibility — after all, if we know, and don’t use it, how does that make us any different than the ignorant?
Taking responsibility doesn’t mean acting out of guilt — rather it’s acting out of power, out of hope. Taking on the responsibility to take action creates the hope we need.
There are a few hopeful thoughts that I keep in mind keep my actions in integrity with my knowledge and values.
I take full responsibility for my knowledge. Once I learn about the harm our actions are causing to the voiceless and those I care about, I make the very conscious choice to avoid participating in these actions as much as possible. It’s never 100% in our society, we’re all too intertwined into a very harmful system.
My goal is to make life a little better and hopeful for the voiceless -
Avoid harm as much as possible — avoid using single-use plastics, eating mystery meats, purchasing seafood from unknown sources, attending captivity shows, purchasing unsustainable fashion or other goods, etc.
Strive to spread the facts through stories and scientific references.
Discover ways to use my privilege in influencing governmental and corporate decisions.
Spread the word to others who are interested and listening by empowering them to make better choices.
Always remain curious about nature, the threats their facing and action we can take to make our environment a friendlier place for all.
When we learn and know, we cannot go on as if we don’t. Imagine that each piece of knowledge we earn is a rock we’re collecting in our basket. Mother nature is counting on all of us to put our knowledge to use and empower each other. We all have a choice to use the rocks in our basket, we can keep them in our collection admiring it for ourselves, we can share them lovingly with friends and loved ones to admire their uniqueness and story, we can use them to create art, or we can use them to throw at each other. With the knowledge rocks in our basket we can write about nature to inspire, we can strive to make conservation an engaging activity for all.
As writers, it’s up to us how we use our storytelling. Telling and reading stories about nature is one of the most satisfying content I can find out there. It’s writing with passion, emotion, and purpose. It’s meaningful. As much I think I’ve learned about the Ocean, the perils she faces from our daily activities, and her magic, every story is still a splash from a new perspective.
Many high-ranked reporters and writers choose to float the same types of dark stories that cause our minds to sink into the murky familiar waters scrambling to find a branch to take us to some much-needed fresh air. It’s important to know the darkness around us, and it’s more important to provide the hope, that light, that empowers readers and listeners to make a difference.
I invite you to dive into the curious — the mysteries, the unknowns, and even the details of the knowns. Spread the word to empower others to help them help the planet. In other words — help ourselves, help ourselves. We all win by keeping forests, and habitats, and preventing a species from extinction. We can easily become responsible enlighteners.
There’s no arguing that it’s a difficult path. Being aware of the harms our humankind is, most of the time knowingly, causing voiceless creatures requires a special type of mental and emotional strength to turn into positive fuel. It is definitely depressing and most of us suffer through bouts of depression due to what we learn and see. And inevitably we grasp onto our resilience and bounce back determined to “do something.”
Like throwing our rocks into the ocean from the shore and watching the ripple go out. Our hope is our rocks and our responsibility is to throw them in the waters around us. It might create a huge splash followed by wave-like ripples far-reaching, or it might even skip creating more ripples all the way to the other side!
The bottom line is, no, the world isn’t ending. And yet, yes we are in trouble. And no, there is no reason for us to live as if nothing is happening. We’re all so much more powerful than that!
Along the way, we’ve all collected some knowledge about Mother Nature, what’s good for her, and what helps her. We all have a collection of these hope rocks that we can take responsibility to share. Catapult them through our writing and actions to see where they land and marvel at the ripples and waves they produce.
