Caring Capacity

Written: 09.29.2025

“With our thoughts we create the world,” says Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican native and major player in the development of the Paris Agreement. While a majority of climate activists argue that the only thing we need to change is how we are doing things, Figueres thinks that it not only matters that we change the system, but it also matters how we do it. It is crucial that the system is changed a) in the right way, and b) in a way that promotes sustainability, in a way where we can keep it up. The biggest way to do that is to change our mindset, which changes our narrative, which changes our actions.

Figueres proposes the concept that environmental change is spiritual. Actually, she proposes the idea that every single thing we do is spiritual, it’s just about how we approach it. Everything we do on Earth has the potential to be mundane, but it also holds the same potential to be incredibly eye opening. Figueres uses grocery shopping as an example. Most of us approach the grocery store as a get-in-and-get-out situation. Grab your produce and go. But Figueres sees this as an opportunity to deepen herself spiritually. Sure, you could grab your produce and go, or you could look at the tomatoes and onions and broccoli you’re grabbing and see the farmer that made this his livelihood to not only better his family but also you and me. You could go to the cashier and see a woman who simply owns a grocery store, or you could see a woman who is banded together with her sisters to make her father proud and to provide for her community. Essentially, Figueres says that environmental change starts with our thoughts. It is not us being surrounded by nature, or being in nature, it's about us being from nature. We were once wild before we decided we were civil.

From listening to this podcast, I learned that my greatest fear, along with many other environmental scientists, is indifference. It’s how there are people out there, people in my community, people I know, that simply do not care. It’s not like they don’t know what’s going on around us, because in this day and age it’s impossible to not know. But we can know all we want; it doesn’t change our actions until we care. And that’s why systemic change is deeply personal. That’s why it starts with our thoughts, and how our thoughts create our worlds. Systemic change can’t come without a reframe. It has to start with letting go of the world we know in order to make space for the world we need. Because of this, I believe that law and policy are so incredibly difficult to write and implement. We can write all the correct things, backed with the most thorough research, but it’s never going to change anything until the general population carries the correct caring capacity.

However, something we most certainly can do is make our laws a bit more impermanent. I know that sounds crazy but stay with me here. We have gotten lost in Darwin’s survival of the fittest concept. We have turned it into a “I win, and you lose” game, a game in which you just have to be fitter than the person next to you. But the concept isn’t survival of the fittest, it is survival of the fit. Remember how I mentioned that we are from nature? That’s such a beautiful thing because it means that we are impermanent enough to adapt with our environment. I wonder what would happen if we wrote laws with that same impermanence. If our laws were able to naturally adapt, broad enough to give space for us to grow and learn and flex, but also implemented strictly enough to actually create change. I admit, I’m not exactly sure how we would achieve this. It feels pretty impossible. But we have achieved so many other things that were once deemed impossible, so that gives me hope.

I don’t know much about how we would do this, but I do know this: it starts with a system change that is rooted deeply in spirituality. Whether you are searching for a higher being, a God of some kind, intrapersonal zen, whatever your spirituality of choice may be, it is essential to moving us forward. Change is in seeing the beauty of the “mundane” tasks. We possess enormous scientific knowledge and many of the technological and institutional tools necessary to make meaningful progress, but knowledge and tools alone aren't sufficient without the cultural and moral will to use them. It starts with not trying to increase the Earth’s carrying capacity, but rather our caring capacity.