Save the Planet in Your Spare Time: A Climate Protection Handbook for the Busy Person - Paperback

by Joyce Mercado (Author)

You Don't Have to Be a Full-Time Activist to Make a Difference

You care about climate change. You want to help. But you're busy.

You have a job, a family, a home, friends, community commitments-and you may wonder how you could possibly find time to become involved in protecting the climate. Joyce Mercado knows exactly what that feels like.

For most of her career, Joyce worked full-time as a technical sales manager at IBM while raising two children. Yet over more than two decades, she became a climate protection leader in her community of Alameda, California.

In Save the Planet in Your Spare Time, Joyce shares the lessons she learned along the way and shows how ordinary people with busy lives can become effective climate leaders.

This is not a book about becoming a climate expert. It's a practical handbook about what you can actually do with the time, skills and resources you already have.

You'll learn how to:

-Reduce your own greenhouse-gas emissions

-Find practical climate actions that fit your lifestyle

-Create and share a climate protection checklist in your community

-Work with other organizations and community leaders

-Write for the local press and communicate effectively about climate change

-Turn everyday opportunities into opportunities for climate action

-Build climate leadership into your daily life

-Speak to groups about climate protection

-Take civic and political action

-Stay optimistic and effective when the climate crisis feels overwhelming

But the book goes beyond individual actions.

Joyce's experience taught her that one of the most powerful things a person can do is help other people take action, too.

Imagine thousands of people in communities across the country-and around the world-using their spare time to become climate leaders.

That is the idea behind this book.

You don't have to do everything. You don't have to be perfect.

And you don't have to devote your life to activism.

Start with what you can do. Use the time you have. Bring other people along.

Together, ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things for our climate.

Save the Planet in Your Spare Time is for anyone who has ever asked:

"What can one person really do about climate change?"

The answer may be much more than you think.