You already care about the planet. You recycle. You buy organic. You know roughly what your carbon footprint is and feel bad about it on the right occasions.
None of that is wrong. It’s just aimed at the wrong problem.
The ecological crisis isn’t a technology problem. It’s a perception problem.
We’ve turned the living world into a museum – something to visit, manage, admire from a distance, and occasionally donate to.
And museums, however well-run, are full of things that are no longer alive.
You can’t have a relationship with a museum exhibit.
The fix isn’t complicated. Pick one place – a garden, a park, a patch of scrubby woodland behind the car park. Go back to it. Not to study it or improve it. Just to be with it.
Do that regularly enough, and something shifts. The place stops being scenery. It becomes yours. Not in the ownership sense – in the way that a friend becomes yours.
You start to notice when something changes. You start to care in a way that isn’t abstract.
That kind of caring changes behaviour. Not because you’ve been persuaded. Because you’re no longer separate.
The recycling is fine. But relationship is what actually moves us.