We’ve arrived at the fifth and final piece in our series on personal action! Over the past month, we’ve explored how individuals are pushing toward a clean, green, just future in their personal lives, in the courts, at work, and within their communities. Today’s story focuses on a vehicle for systemic change that at first glance may not seem like a space for personal action: policy.

Most Americans agree that the U.S. should be enacting more ambitious climate policies, but influencing that as an individual may feel out of reach. In this piece, experts explain why they see elections as the most important space for individuals to get involved — and how focusing on this type of action can even help us leave behind guilt over personal carbon footprints.

When Molly Kawahata worked as a climate adviser to the Obama White House, she remembers interns being horrified that they had no recycling bins in their office. How could the team be working toward sustainability in their jobs but ignoring something as basic as recycling? In fact, she says, the building has a trash-sorting system on the back end that offers greater efficiency — something she routinely explained to the shocked interns. But it got her thinking: “Even if we were throwing recyclables into the garbage, the impact we would be having on policy that we were pushing would be so much more significant,” she says. “I mean, it blows that out of the water.”

This idea that there could be some sort of hypocrisy in caring about or fighting for the climate while leading a less-than-perfectly-sustainable life rankled Kawahata. “You’re taking a system based in fossil fuels and apportioning blame onto the end user who’s forced to use it,” she says, an effort that seeks to discredit the voices of people attempting to change that system.

Today, Kawahata focuses on psychology as a tool to push the climate movement toward hope and systemic change, and travels as a speaker and consultant. She says that the number one question she hears from the people she talks to is what they can do to help combat climate change. “They usually think I’m going to tell them to go vegan,” she says. “They don’t expect me to say elections are the answer.”

Read the full article about the Environmental Voter Project by Claire Elise Thompson at Grist.