Great Scot May 2020 Great Scot 159_MAY 2020_ONLINE_V3 | Page 35

‘1. Change by individuals is meaningful. All change, regardless
of how large, meaningfully occurs at a micro level – reaching global
carbon neutrality means that every individual in the world must
cut back on carbon usage, individual people need to change their
voting patterns and individual people need to be convinced of its
significance to their lives.
‘Teaspoons of Change is founded on the idea that when
individual people each give a tiny bit, the effect when we engage
global citizens into real action quickly adds up to be noticeable.
By encouraging individuals to set small, achievable goals, we
encourage a more accountable and meaningful form of engagement
with these global issues.
‘2. Effective change is nuanced and difficult Every person is
different – giving up petrol-driven cars for electric vehicles, for
instance, is much easier for a city-dwelling family than for a rural
family. Giving up coal is much easier for developed economies than
for developing economies.
‘So much nuance is missing from the discussions surrounding
poverty or climate change at a national or even state level, where
politicians talk in dollar amounts and broad strokes about hitting
carbon neutrality without suggesting plans for actually achieving it.
‘Throughout the day, d’Arcy never shied away from the difficult
questions about how we, as young people, should strive for a better
future, whether in relation to coal miners in Kentucky or food waste
at Scotch.
‘3. Communication is the greatest barrier to change Even when
change is made, too often it ignores the needs of communities.
d’Arcy shared two stories which encapsulated the problematic lack
of communication between the helpers and the helped. The first was
of a school which had received whiteboards for every classroom
from western charities and yet could not use them, because of a
lack of whiteboard markers in the mountainous region where the
school was situated.
‘The second was of two large $40,000 generators being donated
to a psychiatric hospital in Sierra Leone, with both being unusable
because they were so powerful that they shorted out the electrical
grid.
‘In both instances, I was reminded of the fraught system where
charities and governments create solutions for people rather than
with them, choosing generic one-size-fits-none solutions rather than
unique solutions for unique communities. It is so important to know
and understand the global community and its actual needs, and to
come up with workable solutions.
‘What was most inspiring about d’Arcy’s talk, however, was
the way in which he “walks the talk” – living a waste-minimal life,
using no plastic bottles for the past nine years, going into remote
communities in Kyrgyzstan to climb mountains but also to teach,
and printing business cards on waste cardboard. The talk was
nothing short of eye-opening.’
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