If scientists are correct about climate change, industrial civilization as we’ve known it for several generations will have to morph into something more sustainable, but if history is any indication, such transformations come with hellish transition periods, where the old guard clings to the familiar while battling the avant-garde for supremacy. Thus, evolution staggers forward, convulsed by conflicting interests, until the new paradigm settles into normalcy. In this moment of uncertainty about the future, we can use the very real probability of global crisis as a stimulus to work consciously for significant paradigm shifts.

Shifts happen because of two factors: evolution and the activists who stimulate it. Evolution works to create adaptability and complexity, and human development seems to work on principles of innovation in tension with inertia. However, climate change appears to be occurring at a pace difficult for innovative activists to address in numbers equal to the task of averting disaster. The information we currently possess suggests that environmental disequilibrium can create chaotic and unpredictable adjustments in the planetary biosphere, which in turn will cause perturbations in civilization. Worst case scenario: human progress is dealt a blow, causing regression in many areas to earlier levels of consciousness and technological competence. To avoid such a fate, those at more advanced levels of awareness and empathy must act in prolonged resistance to those entities and persons contributing to climatic disruption, while also re-inventing civilized life in the biomimetic image of long-term sustainability. This creates a Grand Struggle for the hearts and minds of people everywhere, and brings to bear our most fundamental morals.

Crisis activism feels weighted by desperation because the stakes appear alarmingly high. The planet has nurtured and sustained us for millennia; metaphorically, we nursed from her abundance and built our human edifices from her body. Now our success as a species challenges us to grow beyond our primeval needs and habits, to cultivate a new relationship with Earth based on respect, empathic kinship, and knowledge of complex planetary systems. Yet there are barriers to our maturation: cognitive dissonance results in the irony of environmentalists driving internal combustion cars to lectures on air pollution or flying to climate change seminars. We know what to do, but the will is weakened by inertia and uncertainty.

Climate change challenges our most fundamental morality—the urge to survive—and threatens cherished comforts and security for which we have labored centuries to achieve. In this, we need an ultimate ethical argument, for instance revolving around time: if killing a person quickly (that is, in a short amount of time) offends our laws and mores, does killing them slowly (that is, in a greater amount of time) deserve the same prohibition? At the core of this argument lie three realities:

• There is a difference in human flight/flight capacity between clear, direct violence and obscured, indirect violence, and while we have adrenaline for the first, we have nothing but our intellects and empathy for the second, which at this stage are less developed and widespread than are needed;
• Those who have gained wealth and power through the old system of burning fuel to obtain energy or using natural resources to prosper will not easily surrender their traditional source of livelihood.
• It can be counterintuitive to protest those entities that have helped construct the civilization surrounding us, toxic as they may be, or to disentangle ourselves from the oily net of dependence.

In the face of these limitations, two types of activism offer individualized empowerment to address climate change:

• Private: Bright Green environmentalism focuses partly on the power of consumerism in a capitalistic society to influence trends, the obvious method being judicious use of money to purchase items, such as electric cars and solar panels, to pull patterns of consumption in sustainable directions. Other examples would be vegetarianism, efficient transportation, recycling and reuse, localized organic food generation, and technologically-appropriate production of goods.
• Public: Civilizations have a long and important tradition of collective demonstrations, protests, standing up, speaking out, and the power of written or spoken language, but if you drive twenty miles to reach a climate march, you’re part of the problem, and that’s hard to take, because people’s hearts are in the right place, and often political and social change is at least partially effected when the tipping point of protesters is exceeded.

Activism may reach its crescendo with collective effort, but climate change solutions are ultimately psychological and emotive. Individual actions can lead to organized social movements, which in turn affect political policy. We’ve been through this process many times: Civil Rights, Gender Equality, LGBTQ rights, and many others. The pattern is generally the same: 1) a seemingly intractable norm, 2) emergence of diversity, 3) reaction against diversity, 4) struggle and conflict, 5) slow acceptance of the new norm, and 6) establishment of the new norm as status quo. Then, of course, the pattern continues, perhaps into perpetuity.