Am I Really A Climate Warrior?

Category: Education & Awareness

A confession to start

Let me tell you about the moment I realised I might be a fraud.

I was standing in the kitchen, rinsing out a yoghurt pot. Actually rinsing it, warm water, a little scrub, the works, so that it could go in the recycling clean and pure and morally spotless. This came about after my better half taught me the reasons behind needing to clean your recycling before it's recycled!

And then I drove to the airport two days later and got on a plane.

There it is. That's the whole tension of modern environmental life in one embarrassing snapshot: a man who will fight to the death over a yoghurt pot but doesn't think twice about the single most carbon-intensive thing an ordinary person can do. I had somehow become deeply, passionately committed to the smallest possible version of caring, while cheerfully ignoring the big one.

And it made me ask a question I suspect a lot of you have quietly asked yourselves and never said out loud:

Am I actually a climate warrior? Or am I just a person who feels vaguely guilty and rinses things?

The word itself is the problem

Here's my honest issue with the whole thing, and I think it might be yours too.

"Climate warrior" sounds exhausting. It sounds like a full-time job with terrible hours and no pay. It conjures up a very specific image, someone gluing themselves to a road, or lecturing you about your bin at a dinner party, or owning exactly one jumper and being smug about it.

And most of us look at that image and think: that's not me. I've got work, kids, a mortgage, and I quite like cheese and holidays. I care, but I don't want to be… that.

So we do a strange thing. Because we don't want the extreme version of the label, we quietly reject the whole label, and then, because we've rejected the label, we let ourselves off caring at all. It's all or nothing. Warrior or nothing. And since almost nobody wants to be a warrior, an awful lot of people end up choosing nothing.

I think that's a genuine tragedy, and I think it's caused almost entirely by the branding.

The purity trap

There's a thing that happens when you start caring about the environment, and it is absolutely poisonous. I call it the purity trap.

The moment you express any environmental concern, some helpful soul will immediately point out your hypocrisy. "Oh, you care about the planet? And yet you drove here. And yet you eat meat. And yet your trainers are made of plastic. Curious."

And here's the thing, they're right. You are a hypocrite. So am I. So is literally everyone, because it is genuinely impossible to live in a modern economy without leaving a mark on the planet. You cannot buy food, heat a home, or take a job without participating in the system as it currently exists.

But watch what the purity trap does. It sets the bar at "perfect," notices that no human being can clear it, and then uses that as proof that trying at all is pointless and phoney. It's a rhetorical trick, and it's remarkably effective, because it makes caring feel embarrassing.

Let me put it another way, because I think this reframe genuinely matters. Nobody says: "You go to the gym? And yet you ate a biscuit yesterday? Hypocrite." We understand, instinctively, that health isn't a binary state you either have perfectly or don't have at all. It's a direction you move in, imperfectly, while still occasionally eating biscuits.

The environment is exactly the same. It is not a purity test you pass or fail. It's a direction. And a slightly-better-than-yesterday hypocrite who actually changes a few real things is worth infinitely more than a paralysed perfectionist who does nothing because they can't do everything.

The trick they played on you with your "footprint"

Now here's the bit that made me genuinely a little angry when I learned it, and it's the sort of thing this whole publication exists to point out.

You know the phrase "carbon footprint"? The idea that you should calculate your personal impact and shrink it?

Popularised by an advertising campaign. For an oil company. In the early 2000s.

Sit with that for a second. One of the most successful pieces of framing in modern history, the idea that climate change is fundamentally your personal responsibility, to be solved by your individual lifestyle choices, was substantially pushed into the culture by the very industry with the most to lose from systemic change.

It's a magnificent piece of misdirection, when you think about it. While you're standing in your kitchen agonising over a yoghurt pot, feeling personally responsible for the fate of the planet, you are conveniently not looking at the handful of enormous systems, energy, transport, industry, agriculture, where the actual decisions get made. Your guilt is the point. Your guilt keeps you busy and quiet and looking in the wrong direction.

I'm not saying individual choices don't matter. They do, a bit, and they add up, and they signal what people want, which shifts markets. But the idea that you, personally, rinsing that pot, are where this battle is won or lost? That was sold to you. And you bought it, because guilt is a very effective product.

So what's left, if it's not warrior-ing and it's not guilt?

Here's where I've landed, and it's genuinely changed how I feel about all this, swapped the low background hum of guilt for something that feels a lot more like… curiosity. Even optimism.

The most powerful thing an ordinary person can do isn't to shrink. It's to pay attention.

Not attention in a doom-scrolling, anxiety-marinating way. Attention in the way I keep banging on about across everything I write: understanding where the big levers actually are, and then pointing your limited energy, your voice, your vote, and, yes, your money at those, instead of exhausting yourself on the tiny stuff.

Because here's what happens when you stop obsessing over personal purity and start understanding the system. You realise:

• The single biggest thing most people control isn't their yoghurt pot, it's the pension they never think about, quietly invested in who-knows-what for forty years. Where that money sits is a vastly bigger lever than your recycling, and almost nobody ever looks at it.

• The change that matters most is systemic - the grid getting cleaner, the cars getting electric, the policies shifting, and those things move because of votes, pressure, and where capital flows, not because you felt bad in a supermarket.

• And crucially, you're allowed to still eat the cheese and take the holiday. Caring about the direction of the whole system does not require you to become a monk. It requires you to be awake.

That's a version of caring I can actually live with. It doesn't ask me to be pure. It doesn't ask me to be a warrior. It asks me to be informed, and to occasionally point that information somewhere useful.

The honest landing

So, am I really a climate warrior?

No. God, no. I rinse pots and then get on planes and I have absolutely no intention of owning only one jumper. If "warrior" is the entry requirement, I'm out, and I suspect most of you are too, and that's precisely the problem with the word.

But am I someone who's decided to actually understand how this works, to stop feeling vaguely guilty and start being genuinely curious, and to point what I've got, attention, a bit of money, a voice, a website apparently, in a direction I think is right?

Yeah. I think I can manage that. And I think that quiet, un-heroic, biscuit-eating version of caring is not only more honest, it's more useful than all the pot-rinsing in the world.

You don't have to be a warrior. The badge was always a trap. You just have to stop looking away.

And if you're reading this, you already have. That'll do. That'll do nicely.

References

1. Mann, M. E. - The New Climate War (on the "individual responsibility" framing and its origins): https://www.michaelmann.net/books

2. The Guardian - "Was your carbon footprint 'invented' by an oil company?" (BP 'carbon footprint' campaign history): https://www.theguardian.com/environment

3. Nature Climate Change - research on "moral licensing" and individual vs systemic climate action: https://www.nature.com/nclimate/