My life spans most of this graph. It’s ok to have been an idiot who is indifferent to this. It’s not ok to keep being one. https://twitter.com/kevpluck/status/1349886709459107840

Here’s where I began.

Here’s roughly where I started thinking deeply about it.

Slow incremental steps to being better and caring more followed.

Here’s where I started trying to be a properly active voice for change.

Along this personal path from the era of 319 ppm CO2 to our current one of about 415 ppm (a 30% increase) I’ve made 3 really important good decisions:

2 of them were intentional, one of them accidental.

(Plus of course very many bad decisions)

The first big intentional decision was to become a vegetarian around 1985.

I’d reacted against my own first year at art college in Lincoln, a year of beer, chips and saveloy, quite a lot of weed and very little exercise. I was terribly unfit.

In my next year at Bournemouth…

…I started running, discovered the disc sport Ultimate, and read a few books on deforestation and food.

Becoming a vegetarian was part of a health drive.

In over 35 years I only lapsed for about 3 months after a trip to Norway in 1990 where trying to be veggie was really hard

…The other big decision weaving its way through that time and up to nearly a decade after was to not learn to drive and therefore to not own a car.

This was a happy accident. My dad had tried to teach me to drive before I left home and he was a *very* bad teacher…

…That put me off driving. And led me to rely on cycling everywhere. Which I loved and had always loved. It was an easy decision but it wasn’t really intentional.

When I finally learned to drive at age 29 it was only ever a thing to do when I ‘had’ to. I still cycled most places

…But throughout the 90s climate change wasn’t on my mind. It was barely on my radar. That changed in the early 2000s but it was very very gradual.

And that era was full of things I did with no thought about the emissions consequences at the time.

Things like…

…I commuted daily from Portsmouth to London for 3.5 years: home > bike > train > bike > work > bike > train > bike > home.

~2h:15m and about 75 miles each way.

And about 5 times round the planet in aggregate

…And then I started working for myself and have mostly been working from home for 16 years.

That was about being around for my kids growing up. I was thinking and reading a bit about climate change but it seemed distant and had nothing to do with travelling less

…In 2006 @algore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out. I’ve never actually watched it but climate change was now being talked about, and my interest grew…

…One of the prototypical social media sites at that time was Janrain’s Jyte ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janrain#Jyte). I can remember discussing climate related issues on it and hearing for the first time the now familiar denialist arguments

…14 years later, denialists are still pumping out the same ignorant tropes.

But over the last decade I was doing nothing more than being an allotment owning, composting veggie cyclist.

I’d become much better informed but climate was next to invisible in politics…

…The situation was patently crazy.

And then in November 2018, @ExtinctionR arrived – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-46247339 – and my immediate feeling was “thank fuck”

…With hindsight, I can see I’d just been semi asleep. Kinda but not really listening to people who had been working on waking us up for years. XR were just building on all of that.

But now I was properly awake and there’s no going back to sleep

…I’m grateful to XR for pushing me to get active. I’ve been involved with them. They were the right tactic for the moment. But their theory of change feels wrong to me.

I need to figure out my next steps

…One of XR’s major failings is trying to divorce climate action from partisan politics. There’s much more besides that people like @NafeezAhmed have written about https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-flawed-science-behind-extinction-rebellions-change-strategy-af077b9abb4d

I have a hunch about where to focus energies but lockdown has weirded everything tf rn

…Anyway, the main point of this thread is to reflect on how it can take a man in his late middle age the best part of 30 years to wake tf up, and with hindsight accidentally do some things right along the way