Social & Environmental Impact

Reclaiming the Power of Small Changes

In a world obsessed with scale, it’s easy to forget that transformation begins at the smallest level. Sustainability isn’t about saving the world in one sweeping motion, but about finding meaning—and momentum—in the modest, everyday steps that quietly reshape it.

By John Broadway | Published 1 week ago | About a 5 minute read

Image: Rudi Maes from Pixabay

In sustainability, progress is a difficult thing to talk about.

Any practitioner will have heard endless variations of the same question: “Does it matter if I…?” Whether it’s recycling, vegetarianism, living car-free or turning off the lights, the question speaks to a fundamental uncertainty about how individual contributions translate into appreciable progress.

At Yogi Tea, we have the same problem. Reporting season is nearly upon us, so we’re about to join countless other companies in tallying up what we accomplished this year. We’ve shared how many farmers we’ve involved in our sustainability work (4073), how many acres of farmland we’ve improved (5312), or how much of our annual carbon emissions we’ve reduced (approx. 3,850 tCO2e from 2022 to 2024). We’ve purchased hundreds of thousands of lemongrass splits for tea farmers in Rwanda, built a soil microbiology lab in Sri Lanka, funded kitchen gardens for Nepalese ginger farmers and reforested land from Guatemala to Madagascar. To us, these are big accomplishments – the culminations of significant investments of time and money.

But you don’t have to look too far for those numbers to seem like a drop in an ocean. There’s a 4 trillion dollar shortfall in meeting the UN’s SDGs. A recent study showed the near-inevitable demise of warm water coral reefs. In 2022, only 2% of the world’s agricultural land was managed organically. The problems that our sustainability work addresses – climate change, topsoil degradation, farmer poverty, plastic and agrochemical pollution – are still dire and will remain so, whatever happens in our supply chain.

In this context, it feels as if nobody, especially not a company our size, can say anything about progress. We’re too small, and the problems too big, for our work to feel impactful. It’s the same “does it matter” question on a larger scale.

The struggle with sustainability progress is that its manifestations lack the visceral impact of the problems they address. No individual, and very few companies, can singlehandedly make progress that feels commensurate to these crises. Yogi’s work planting lemongrass on tea plantations in Rwanda sounds hopelessly niche, but that’s exactly the kind of work that addresses the UN’s dire reporting on global topsoil health. It’s simply far more impactful to report on the erosion of 50 billion tons of topsoil than it is for us to talk about our own incremental improvements in topsoil resilience. The headlines are problems in sum; our stories are the solutions in part.

The real task of communicating sustainability progress, then, is to reclaim the power of small changes.

The big changes we dream about are simply the sum of small ones we choose to make. Recently, the UN announced that 90% of renewable power projects are now cheaper than fossil fuels. That milestone is the culmination of years of small changes spread over a global effort, not one sudden shift. Incrementalism is a controversial model, but absent a global political consensus we must make the most out of the tools at our disposal – they can create real change, too.

We know small steps matter in our own lives. Addictions are overcome one day at a time. Fitness is achieved choice by choice over years of sustained effort. Healthy relationships are the result of sustained care over years.

Every step down the path of progress is worth celebrating, and yet many are still reticent. This has consequences: when progress is invisible, hopelessness takes root. To be hopeless is to foreclose the possibility of change. Hopelessness works in the best interests of the powerful, whose domination of the status quo means they profit from inaction.

But the reality is, to borrow an old chestnut, that “the only constant is change.”

If we go back in history, capitalism emerged from what feudalism neglected – trade and money. Today, capitalism ignores the natural limits of the planet, which are now pushing back with devastating effect. What a system overlooks destabilizes the present and becomes the foundation of the future.

A change is coming, and the sum of our sustainability decisions will determine whether it arrives by design or by force.

Reclaiming the power of small changes means celebrating every step down the path of systemic change, knowing that each step isn’t a solution but rather a constituent part of a necessary, evolving whole. We should never lose sight of the macro-changes true sustainability entails. And we should never forget that leaders from politics to business continue to blindly prioritize profit at the cost of incalculable suffering. The preservation of life itself should not be the uphill struggle that it is. But at the same time, the interconnectedness that makes us vulnerable to the dangerous whims of the few is also a powerful mechanism for collective change by the many.

None of us will be able to solve everything all at once. But we shouldn’t let that stop us from doing what we can. The problems are plain to see, and we can all address them in some small way. When we do, and we share our work, we create change. That change allows further change, and onward we go. Celebrating our small triumphs continually reshapes our view of what is possible.

Philosopher Alain Bourdieu urges us, simply, to “keep going.” In the end, for individuals and companies, “does it matter if I…?” Simply: yes. It all matters. Keep going and keep sharing; none of us strive alone.