If you’re interested in climate change and degrowth, this article “Small Acts, Big Change? Reconciling the Behavioural Science of Action and the Politics of Systemic Transformation” is a good short read about human behaviour and small environmental acts. (The Minority Report Publication, July 2025).

From the article: “Their concern isn’t that small actions are wrong—but that they can be misused. In the policy world, incrementalism is often not a stepping stone to transformation, but a tool to delay it. Getting an electric vehicle, installing solar panels, or buying carbon offsets are framed as steps in the right direction. But in practice, they can create what systems thinkers call a sunk cost trap. Investments in marginal improvements often lock us into status quo systems, making it harder to imagine or enact real change. This is because these policy proposals focus on individual climate actions, locking us into systems that perpetuate business as usual.”

“The way out of this trap is neither to abandon individual action nor to double down on personal purity. It is to reorient small acts so they contribute to large-scale transformation. In other words, we need to make individual action political again—not in the partisan sense, but in the collective sense.”

For more thoughts also check out the Qualicum Institute’s sustain-a-babble page https://qualicuminstitute.ca/sustain-a-babble/.