You don’t get to the top of the mountain in one go, you take it one step at a time.

No one ever scaled an entire mountain in one giant leap except for maybe superman and I’m sure he laddered his tights while he was doing it!

We often say what’s the point of trying to change the environment or influence governments, my one inconsequential voice won’t make any difference, I’m an insignificant drop in the ocean. But each apparently inconsequential action, when multiplied by millions, can become an enormous force. If each one of those millions of people were to say there’s just no point, most of the most significant moments in history would never have happened.

It only took one tired African American woman, Rosa Parks, to finally say ‘enough is enough’ after being asked to get up from her seat at the end of a long hard day and move to the back of the bus, so a white person could sit down This one small refusal by someone who had had enough, set in motion one of the biggest changes in civil rights in America, since American history began.

When you consider how many millions of people there are just in this tiny country alone 60,000,000? Many seemingly unremarkable daily actions by us could, when extrapolated, in fact make an enormous difference to our impact on the world.

Today I noticed a small light had been accidently left on in my living room and had in fact probably been on all morning, it was a bright sunny Saturday so it had been unnoticed for a while, and even after I did notice it I had to make an effort to remember to turn it off. My first default thought was, one little low watt light isn’t such a big deal, but then it suddenly occurred to me that if even a 10% of the population had forgotten to turn off their little 25 watt light that same morning, that would amount to approx six million lights being left on in this country alone and in this world of finite resources, it would use up at least 150 million wattage of valuable energy. if only 10% of us did that even just for just one day a week over let’s say 10 weeks, it would amount to a staggering 10, billion, 500 million watts. I’m sure you could probably keep several developing countries around the world in vital supplies of electricity ie: lights and life saving hospital equipment for a great quantity of time with such a huge amount of spare power.

The same line of thought could be made for plastic bags, let’s say at a low estimate probably 30 million of us in the UK go shopping at least once a day and roughly each time we shop we accept a plastic bag, well if on only one day, on one shopping trip alone, all of us chose not to accept a plastic bag we could prevent 30 million more plastic bags being sent adrift into landfill sites eventually ending up floating around the ocean with all the billions of others.

We don’t each have to start a revolution, but one small action alone, by every single one of us, cumulatively could potentially change huge things in this world, without us even having to break out into a sweat.