What the climate crisis asks of us is that we save the world as we know it.

An appropriate response would be, “I agree, but you’ve got the wrong guy. I am just a person. I feel cripplingly depressed when I wake up at 4 a.m. to pee (for the third time). I can barely get out of the house in the morning. I find it hard enough just to engage people at the supermarket, let alone save the world. I’m not Jackie Robinson, Susan B. Anthony, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Franklin D. Roosevelt. I’m just a person who half the time doesn’t even know where the car keys are.”

And in response to that, I’d say that history is full of people without power driving enormous change. An example of one such person is Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian vegetable vendor who, frustrated with his treatment by the police, set himself on fire and triggered the Arab Spring. We do not know how the revolution he gave his life for will play out, even if hopes have now dimmed. But the change he created is undeniable. And Bouazizi was perhaps the least powerful person in the world at the time.

I am not saying you should set yourself on fire. But I am saying you should be on fire for the fix, burning, as Allen Ginsberg put it, “for the ancient heavenly connection” to what matters as a human being.