A breakthrough moment: where's it all gone?

[Boyd Roberts]

A breakthrough moment

I remember a personal breakthrough moment in my awareness as a global citizen when I was filling up my car with petrol some years ago. The process of filling up a car is designed to ensure that we don’t get covered in petrol or diesel as we do it. So the nozzle of the petrol pump goes straight into the fuel tank, and we only get to actually SEE the fuel if there is a spillage. Otherwise, we depress the lever, the pump monitors our usage as the fuel enters the car, and we replace the fuel cap.

Usually a more or less unthinking, automatic process, I actually registered that 40 litres of fuel – really quite a large volume, when I came to think about it - had gone into my tank, and that in a week or two, it would be gone. It struck me that all of that fuel would have been burned into gases which would have entered the atmosphere. And what I was doing was being done millions of times all over the planet. The irreplaceable fuel, made from the fossil remains of animals and plants deposited millions of years ago, was being burnt and the resulting gases added to the atmosphere. I knew all of this – as a fact – but the actual scale of it, and the volume of fuel that I was responsible for consuming personally – came as a moment of enlightening awareness.

I still drive a car, although I choose the model carefully and drive much less frequently and for fewer miles, but I retain that awareness that came to me that my personal action is directly leading to changes in the world’s atmosphere.

The important thing was that an everyday action was transformed by a moment of thought and reflection into a memorable event that changed the way I saw and thought about things.

In working with young people in the IGCA we can try to encourage, stimulate and provide opportunities for such “learnable moments”.