Localize!
Facts: People need wild animals 🦬🦉| Feelings: In-person climate community 🫂 | Action: Localize!🗳️🌱
Welcome to We Can Fix It, where we tackle the climate crisis with facts, feelings, and action. Written by me, climate scientist Kim Nicholas.
Hi friends,
Did any of you start working less after my January post? I did! I’m now at 80% time, and enjoying my time off! I do feel more crunched during the work week, and I’ve dropped a few balls (ugh). But I also feel more focused on what matters. On Sunday night, I feel ready to go back to work.
How’s working less going for you? Let me know in the comments!
And now, without further ado: let’s talk about why people need wildlife, not just nature; the feeling of in-person community; and activating locally.
Action: Localize!
Whooo boy! Global news is a big fat downer right now, huh??
Local action is a powerful antidote to overwhelm. Start where you are.
The nonprofit Local Futures offers a fabulous Localization Action Guide, with 137 practical actions that can:
🫂 Bring communities together
🍎 Improve human health
🌍 Reduce environmental impact
🤑 Reduce inequality
🗳️ Strengthen democracy
🌱 Connect us with others and the earth.
What is localization?
Localization means creating economic structures for communities to meet more of their needs locally. It’s not about isolation or ending trade, but about collaboration.
Take action to localize!
The Localization Action Guide is packed with practical actions. Here are some I love, especially those that build solidarity. (I had to cut some personal faves, like shipping by sailboat— close to my heart as Simon and I learn sailing from scratch!)
You can sort actions by five groups: individuals, community groups, governments, businesses, and institutions.
Each of six themes has detailed actions, resource links, and case studies where these actions are already working!
Consumption
Meet real needs, reduce unnecessary consumption.
Practice simple living: Live more on less, celebrate holidays without consumerism, downshift (work less!).
Be part of a gift economy: Participate in a Buy Nothing Group or Really Really Free Markets.
Join a neighborhood sharing network: Borrow and lend tools and resources.
Energy
Reduce energy use, ditch fossil fuels, shift to local renewables.
Build community-owned renewable energy: Establish a cooperative “solar garden” for affordable energy for renters and low-income neighbors, or bring locally-owned renewable energy to your community.
Promote car-free towns and cities: Advocate for actions and policies to make your local streets more human-friendly.
Finance
Make the money we save, borrow, and spend serve local communities.
Bank locally: Move your money to a credit union or community bank. (Here’s my breakup letter to my old mega-bank.)
Start a local investing group: Fund community businesses using crowdfunding and local stock exchanges.
Community
Increase sense of belonging, support community spaces and local media, engage in local democracy to strengthen bonds with friends, family, and neighbors.
Implement participatory budgeting: Let local residents propose and vote on public investments for local benefit.
Organize a citizens’ assembly: Support local Climate Assemblies for bold action.
Create a neighborhood climate group: Collectively transition away from fossil fuels towards resilient communities.
Business
Support local businesses instead of global monopolies, spend money to build stronger local economies, resist corporate globalization.
Shift subsidies from global to local: Push for public funds to support public benefits, including small and local. (You can cite our research showing 40% of EU farm subsidies, over €26 billion a year, are misspent!)
Resist corporate concentration: Join campaigns to fight global corporations, monopolies and big box retail, and strengthen local businesses.
Food
Produce healthy food, provide equitable livelihoods, and support diversity.
Support community land trusts: Preserve farmland and open spaces for generations to come. (Shoutout to my hometown Sonoma Land Trust!)
Start a yard sharing program: Connect homeowners with unused yards to neighbors eager to grow food. You can scale this up to your whole community.
Can these actions really make a difference?
I love how Local Futures answers this question:
We think so. Although they are often small and localized, taken together they are vital to recapturing economic democracy from global monopolies. They provide venues for connecting with like-minded others and strengthening the bonds of mutual interdependence. They provide opportunities to reject the monocultural ideas and practices that destroy the beauty and diversity of our planet. And they create "lifeboats" – living hubs of social health, human and ecological wellbeing, and economic resilience – to carry us through the turbulence of the coming decades.
I hope this gets you started! I highly recommend you dive in to the full Localization Action Guide.
Thanks to Local Futures for this incredible resource, and to We Can Fix It reader Elizabeth for sharing it with me!
Facts: People need wild animals
The Problem: Animal Benefits Are Invisible
When you close your eyes and picture “nature,” what do you see?
For many, including myself, it’s landscapes: mountains, beaches, forests. Plants, not animals.
The invisible benefits of animals are a problem for international conservation policies, which focus on protecting habitats while overlooking who lives there.
Wildlife isn’t just a cute addition to nature. Animals are essential for ecosystem health and the benefits people rely on.
With wildlife populations in decline, conserving “empty forests” won’t sustain the nature we need.
Our study: Wildlife’s Contribution to People
A lunch chat about whale poop sparked our new study, published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity. Led by my friend of 25+ years Becky Chaplin-Kramer, our research analyzed how wildlife supports human well-being.
Using the “nature’s contributions to people” framework — widely used in biodiversity science and policy, and for decision-making in business, investment, and development— we categorized benefits as material (medicines, food), nonmaterial (culture, recreation), and regulating (clean air, healthy soils). Each of these also helps maintain options for future generations.
From a synthesis of scientific reviews, we found wildlife directly supports two-thirds of nature’s contributions to people. We also argue that wildlife support the remaining contributions indirectly, through shaping the ecosystems that provide these contributions.
For example, wildlife benefit people:
materially through food from hunting and fishing and the livelihoods they support.
nonmaterially through art, music, biomimicry, the inspiration of birdwatching, and supporting identities and traditions like catching the first trout of the season.
by regulating healthy ecosystems, like grazers keeping grasslands open and diverse, beavers building dams that can regulate and clean water, and birds eating crop pests.
Takeaways
People need wild animals. Scientists need to study them, and policies need to conserve them. The accompanying report by WWF, Nature’s Technicians, concludes:
Wild animals play irreplaceable roles.
Protect remaining wildlife.
Rebuild wild animal populations, especially species that support ecosystem services.
Feelings: In-Person Community
I spent an evening in a theater packed with people who care about climate action, then had a beer with some of them, and it was life-affirming and lovely!
It was fun and irreverent (yes, a goose puppet named Camelilla bragged, “Why own a car when you can just call a limo?”), but also real and vulnerable, like Nina’s powerful essay on grief. Moments of interaction turned to real conversation and made the stranger next to you feel like a friend.
I joined my first climate protest in 2014 and watched them grow in size and power. In 2019 in Stockholm, the crowd was so massive it took half an hour just to start moving. Goosebumps. But since the pandemic, and increasing restrictions on peaceful protest, I’ve missed the same level of in-person climate energy.
This evening filled my cup and reminded me: nothing replaces meeting people face-to-face. It feels amazing to be surrounded by lots of real people who care. Huge thanks to Maria Wolrath Söderberg, Nina Wormbs, and Isabelle McAllister for making this magical evening happen!
Parting Tidbits
Upcoming talks, come see me here
I’ll be online with the Royal Scottish Geographical Society talking personalized climate action April 8, and in-person at Napa RISE on regenerative ag on May 1. Join us!
Let me know if you want to collaborate on something for SF Climate Week!
Book Recommendation
What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. I loved hearing the voices of deep thinkers and doers in the interviews, who had new ideas on how to bring the climate revolution to the red-state countryside (Brian Donahue), turn extractive fishermen into regenerative ocean farmers (Bren Smith), and offered insights from the youth climate movement (Xiye Bastida). A good counterbalance to the perspectives making headlines right now.
xo,
Kim
Thanks so much for this! I was wondering if you could speak a bit about localisation when it comes to being an immigrant. Like you, I left my home country to work at a foreign university. Do you experience any challenges (linguistically, culturally, etc.) in being able to localise? I admit I am always scared to step out of my bubble and use my language skills!
Thank you, Kim! This is yet another newsletter from you that feels so uplifting! I can't say how invaluable that is in times like these - in Germany, "climate change" was no issue at all in our recent elections. And those who care about the most important issue we all face can feel really alone. Thanks again!