No more filters

As wildfires are ravaging Europe again this summer, our cofounder Raphael Güller speaks out about letting go of our filters to unleash collective climate action.

There is no filter on the image accompanying this article.

Smoke particles deflect shorter wavelengths of light, such as green and blue, but let the longer red ones pass right through. It makes for dramatic sunsets. And Instagram posts.

It also signals dramatic losses.

Wildfires are back across Europe and beyond. They’re terrifying. I experienced that first-hand last year, when the fires in France’s Var region took the lives of two people and blazed over hectare after hectare of nature reserve, home to some of the last remaining native tortoises in Europe.

I mention that because one of these rare Hermann’s tortoises had suddenly turned up in our French summer home’s garden just before the fires started. To the excitement of the whole family. We fed it a bit of salad before it slowly teetered off.

We were lucky enough to be staying across the hill, where the fire never reached us. All we had to deal with was ash falling like snow, as if we were on a ski slope rather than in the French Riviera, and all our clothes smelling of fire for the rest of the holidays.

And I got to post a shockingly beautiful picture on Instagram that garnered a lot of likes. No filters.

There are other filters we need to stop using. Because the real thing that holding us back is our own filters. Yours and mine.

We know that it’s real. And even more of us have suffered through heat and floods and fires that were all-too-real. Still, we don’t act.

We tell ourselves that we’re too small to make a difference.

We look the other way, because we’re afraid.

Or we never start because we think it’s too hard and that we will fail.

None of these filters serve us.

Our climate action doesn’t need to be perfect like a painstakingly curated Instagram feed. We can start small, try something out, fail, and try again.

The tortoise that visited us last year seemed really slow, shakily putting one stumpy leg in front of the other. But when we didn’t pay attention for a moment, suddenly it had made it all the way down the hill.

I think it escaped the big fire. If we start removing our filters, I think we will too.