By

We get a lot of email here at Team Climate, and one of the most common questions is “What can I do?” That’s why, last fall, we added a One Thing You Can Do section to our newsletter. Since then, we’ve looked at everything from Valentine’s Day flowers to boiling water.

This week, we wanted to take a closer look at the “one thing” approach.

“There are two sides to the coin,” said Carina Barnett-Loro, a senior program manager at the Climate Advocacy Lab, an organization that aims to encourage climate action.

On one side, she said, taking small actions can help foster or reinforce a person’s identity as an environmentalist and lead to deeper engagement. Maybe, she said, “they start by changing a light bulb and they end up putting solar panels on their house.”