Helping the world and helping myself

Words by Gemma Steenholdt

Gemma Steenholdt is a young woman, primary school teacher and environmental warrior. She is doing her best to change our future through changing her own habits, and working to encourage others to do the same. Giving her passion, purpose and a sense of wellbeing, we can all do a little bit more to help the world and feel better about our little place in it.

Being raised in the Victorian Otways, I’ve always been aware of my relationship and impact on the environment. It’s been in the last 12 months that I’ve really dived deeper into educating myself on the damage to the earth and the actions humanity can take to stop any more damage taking place.

Since researching into environmental destruction, I’ve found myself becoming overwhelmed with the knowledge and feeling helpless that any positive change will take place.

I began with making environmentally conscious changes to my own life. Switching to bio-degradable products instead of plastic, buying second-hand and ethically made clothes, composting my food and reducing my overall waste. I’ve been a vegetarian for many years, which turned more plant based since further education.

I realised that with many hands becomes light work, so I started using my Instagram as a tool to educate my followers on simple switches that I had made. For example, changing to a bamboo toothbrush, shampoo bar, growing my own veggies. The response was awesome! People really engaged with my videos which then led me to conducting an 8 week ‘eco challenge’.

Each week looked at changing one specific thing in their life to attempt leading a more environmentally conscious lifestyle. I had so many people share the challenge, what they were doing and had an increase of followers who wanted to do the challenge.

From this, sparked so much hope that with education - and not necessary a negatively generated film on the world falling to pieces, but rather using social media, something we are all so connected to, as an educative tool, could be the solution to encouraging positive environmental change.

What if famous influences promoted what’s happening in the environment, and the steps we can make to stop it? I believe that I’m not the only person who has ‘climate change anxiety’. It’s a topic of conversation throughout many of my friends and even amongst the young children I teach.

But instead of surrendering to inevitable destruction, we need to come together, educate one another and accept the changes we make do have a huge impact.

I look it as; we change some habits that are so familiar to ourselves, like eating less meat and using less plastic; but we gain a future where the world thrives.