When little-by-little becomes a lot

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The summer after my freshman year in college, I worked for an environmental organization in Connecticut. The job was not glamorous; indeed, it was the opposite. I was a full-time canvasser. This means I went door-to-door, clipboard in hand, asking people to support our campaign by making a financial contribution. There was a quota — a minimum — I was expected to raise each night (I believe it was $85), and failing to raise that amount for more than a couple of days in a row would get you fired. High stakes work for 18-year-old me.

This was in the days before iPhones, let alone Google Maps. So in addition to persuading strangers to give me money (whilst standing on their doorsteps, petting their dogs and interrupting their dinners), I became fairly proficient at reading a map. Even more important, it was my first real taste of politics. I learned that summer how recruiting like-minded people, one person at a time, can add up to something meaningful. I saw how a little-by-little becomes a lot.

Plenty of people will tell you the U.S. has a “collective action” problem. For years, many scholars and pundits have noted that Americans are either too divided, isolated or demoralized about the state of our democracy, the climate, health care, income inequality, wars abroad — pick your issue, really — to take the action required to achieve meaningful change. We’re too busy being undone to make progress together.

It’s hard to argue with them.

But the optimist in me — the same kid who spent that summer collecting small donations, spinning a clipboard on my finger like a basketball in between door knocks — keeps looking for signs of hope. I see them here and there.

I saw it at an event in Cambridge the other night. Panelists from city and state governments, and the environmental community, addressed 40 or so attendees, gathered in the sanctuary of a Unitarian meeting house to talk about local progress made on climate change. There were questions about heat pumps and wind energy projects; a petition to stop a local field from being covered with artificial turf; lots of conversation about hope as an essential commodity.

My colleague Bianca Garcia reported this week on a new 10-ton floating wetland in Fort Point Channel. The hope is for the project to bring back “edge habitat” — the landscape between water and land — that disappeared after developers used sea walls and landfills to reshape Boston’s shoreline.

A friend told me about a project that uses the Charles River to generate energy. In the simplest of terms: through an underground pump system, the heat from the river water is used to create steam to heat buildings. The water is then returned to the Charles at a cooler temperature (which is good for the ecosystem of the river).

And in an essay Cog published this week, Rob Moir tells the tale of a new “pocket” forest in Attleboro, and all the people who worked together to plant it. What’s a pocket forest, you ask? I didn’t know either. It’s a dense and fast-growing collection of native shrubs and trees that can hold water, clean the air and cool the surrounding area. One 2,000-square-foot pocket forest won’t save the planet, or at least not by itself.

When I was an 18-year-old canvasser, I believed my work was helping to make the world a better place. Surely this is simplified and naive, but I don’t think that matters. Decades later, I can’t recall the specifics of that summer-long campaign, but I know the job — the hours bent over an atlas, the hundreds of awkward conversations, the miles logged in my family’s station wagon — got me to believe in something I couldn’t quite see.

All this reminds me (perhaps strangely, I’ll admit) of the Sagrada Familia, the basilica-in-progress in Barcelona. Construction began on Antonio Gaudi’s masterpiece in 1882, but his full vision won’t be realized until 2033 or 2034. Thousands of people spent their entire careers working on a project they never saw completed. But they must have bought into the idea that they were contributing to something bigger than themselves — that a little-by-little becomes a lot.

Forgive me, reader: I feel like I’m writing a Hallmark movie. But it’s 2026, and the world feels awfully dark, and we can all choose to remember what makes us keep going. Indeed, that’s what Stephen Colbert did this week. His run on “Late Night” ended Thursday with the entire show (and theater) being sucked into a giant wormhole. Standing before the pulsing, chartreuse special effect, his old pal Jon Stewart told him: "The only choice you have is how to walk through it. You can go in kicking and screaming. Or … you stare it down and you can laugh."

Choose the laugh.

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