Recycle better. Drive less. Eat better. Save harder. Be more resilient. Know better. Do better. Bla bla bla. It's a lot, isn't it? It's also a terrible strategy for social change.
There is a cupboard in my kitchen where the reusable bags live. Well, sometimes.
The rest of the time they are in the boot, or on the back seat, or hanging on the stair rail, or in a different bag inside another bag (which is the bag equivalent of a Russian doll and about as useful at the checkout.) I still suck at this. But guess what? I'm not using plastic bags. Why? Because they don't exist anymore.
I can be well-intentioned and organised. I can even do this consistently, for a while, if I am well slept and nothing else is going on. What I cannot be is organised on behalf of five million people, one Tuesday at a time, forever. Neither can you, or anyone else.
Making structural problems a matter of individual effort is a terrible idea. Few of our biggest challenges, whether it's single-use plastics, carbon emissions, obesity, housing, waste, or road deaths, can be solved through personal virtue.
Individual effort works beautifully for individual problems. If your inbox is a swamp, you can drain it. Nobody else has to agree (though some of the people waiting for a reply might have feedback.)
But once a problem needs coordination, once it requires ten thousand people to do a slightly inconvenient thing at the same time, indefinitely, with no feedback and no reward... willpower is a waste of time. The only thing that moves the needle is shifting the default. Change what has to happen, and you change the outcome for everyone.
In 2015, Wales passed the Well-being of Future Generations Act. The logic is simple: election and budget cycles incentivise short-term decision-making, but good public policy making needs a long-term lens. Big problems (climate change, social equality, economic sustainability, et al) need multi-party coordination over many governments, and investment that mightn't pay off for a long time.
Most countries throw their hands up in the air and blame each other. Wales changed the law so public bodies have to demonstrate long-term thinking, prevention, collaboration, and integration. The Future Generations Commissioner keeps track of how things are going and publishes a report every five years. Public bodies are required to respond to the Commissioner's recommendations, and report on their own progress every year.
There have been tangible shifts in the way the Welsh government plans and spends money. In 2019, the Future Generations Commissioner campaigned heavily against a proposed £1.4 billion, 14-mile expansion of the M4 motorway because it violated long-term climate obligations. The project was eventually scrapped, with funding redirected toward the South Wales Metro and more local and sustainable transit. Changes to the national curriculum, the introduction of free meals for primary students, more integrated social services, and key sustainability initiatives have all been linked to the Act.
It's not perfect. Public bodies who don't comply aren't sanctioned or fined, and some decisions have been upturned in court. Some of the language is vague and unhelpfu and engagement and decision-making is patchy. The Act still butts up against conflicting and contradictory pressures around funding and planning. It's a work in progress.
Except now, the terms of the conversation are different. Rather than accepting short-termism as an inevitability, or blaming individual politicians or parties for why things are hard, the focus has shifted to how to shift systems and processes in a way that makes implementation possible.
I am wary of where this argument goes when taken to the extreme. "The system made me do it" is a comfortable place to live and a terrible place to build anything new or important. Plenty of people change plenty of things, and some of them change quite a lot.
But there's a difference between being responsible and bearing the load. You can compost, cycle, buy secondhand, and vote, but if the burden of the fix sits with everyday humans who are struggling to get their bins out on time, we can't expect transformation. Willpower is useful when the system is against you, but it can't be the only option.
Do the thing. Be the best you. Don't give up. Just don't get down on yourself when it's hard.
Til next week,
A x