RIPPLES – your secret superpower?

One of the first books that ERA’s book club read was Jen Gale’s Sustainable(ish) Living Guide, which acknowledges that nobody ever manages to make all the right choices all the time but that does not mean we cannot try to make some decisions based on living ever more sustainably, one small step at a time. Recently Jen posted the following on social media and has given her permission for us to reproduce it here. It is an idea that I have been mulling over for a while:

Could ‘ripples’ be the 'sustainability superpower' that's so secret, we don't even know if we have it?!

I bang on in The Sustainable(ish) Clubhouse about the 'ripples' we create when we do something different, in a more sustainable way. 

Most of the time, we can't see these ripples. We don't even know they exist.

But they're there.

Whenever we do something, it's never in isolation. People see us. People hear our conversations. People take notice. 

It might be the people in our household, colleagues at work, other families on the school run... And they probably won't say anything. 

But they've seen you.

You've planted the seed that doing something differently is possible. 

Here's a couple of great examples from our regular Friday Wins thread in the Clubhouse:

'I met up with a lovely friend last night who is a huge fan of fast fashion and fast homewares, and she said that some of my social posts about “you don’t need to buy storage containers, you can reuse what you’ve got” has properly stopped her from buying loads of those kinds of things 🥰🥰'

'I just noticed that a few years ago, I was the only one on the street walking my kids to school. Now, there are normally 4 other families also walking their kids to school who used to drive every day. One of them commented a while back that she saw us walking and thought she should too.'

How brilliant are these?!

Our individual actions are always WAY MORE than simply individual actions. 

Yes, they will have a positive impact on our own carbon footprints (or should that be negative impact if they're going down?!), but they are always way bigger than we give ourselves credit for.

Our actions, our conversations, our social media posts matter, and really do make more of a difference than we think.

Have you seen any ripples from your own actions?