One for the Climate Warrior's Toolbox

by Ian Wilker  |  March 7, 2008  |  More By Ian Wilker

Almost every day, I peek at Digg.com's Environment page to see what's caught the fancy of its huge pool of users. It's a young, tech-savvy audience that's neither high-minded nor replete with deep-green environmentalists, and on most days the "top stories" leaderboard is fairly well dominated by the lurid, the lowbrow, and the gadget-geeky. But on occasion the crowd will also surface some unusual treats.

That was the case this morning, when -- mixed in with items such as "California cows start passing gas to the grid" and "Earth Liberation Front hacked by Viagra spammers" -- I found something called "Do Something: Solving Global Warming." It's a mind map of simple, everyday steps one can take to be part of the solution to global warming, from some Australian educators:

I love mind maps. Been using them of late for all sorts of small tasks: making a picture of priority to-do's in a dauntingly busy day; quickly sketching out project requirements, outlining some writing I'm going to do. I used to lump mind mapping with the sort of schemes you'd expect to find in New Age and cult-of-self-improvement literature, of which I have a deep-seated horror. But for me at least, mind mapping has proven to be an effective way of breaking a problem down into its constituent elements -- and these are manageable, where the overall problem can appear overwhelming.

Global warming, of course, is as overwhelming a problem as you'll find. But taking personal responsibility for my carbon footprint sure looks less daunting with a simple, one-page cheat sheet of actions to refer to.

You may quibble with some (or many) of the actions listed on this example. If so, make your own global warming action-plan mindmap, and send it to me at ianw28806 AT gmail DOT com. I'll publish it on this 'ere blog, and do my own to boot.