Sometimes an issue comes up that really motivates people to act; they mobilise campaign groups, print leaflets, get press, radio and TV coverage and often get the support of politicians and business people. The campaign runs its course and in some cases the result is what the people want – great news!

In almost all cases these are local issues that for the most part have no long term or wide ranging impact on anything else, be they the threat of a new airport runway, a new supermarket, a gas storage terminal or almost any other thing that angers a few people who can convince other people that this is the issue to get cross about.

Local issues are important, don’t get me wrong, they can bring communities together where none exist, they can highlight other issues which may have been ignored before, and they may even give some individuals the motivation to get more involved in other types of campaigning. In rare cases they can trigger wider action, involving larger groups of people, usually through mass media coverage, which may have a positive impact on a wider scale.

But local action really only gets support because it is local.

Earlier, I wrote about the near impossibility of getting the public in general to care about environmental issues, and this stands true. In the vase majority of cases, local action does not take place because of the wider issues, it is because the people who are involved see themselves as being directly impacted by whatever they are opposing. Sometimes this works in favour of a wider issue – opposing an airport runway will help to reduce the growth of air travel, at least from one airport – even though the campaign may have been triggered by concerns about noise and reduced property values.

Sometimes this works in completely the opposite way. A campaign against a wind farm is likely to have been triggered by concerns over the visual landscape (something which, quite frankly, nature is not the slightest bit interested in), or potential bird death or noise. In this case, the environmental benefits of the wind farm are ignored because of local factors.

In the case of the runway, those campaigners who continue to fly to their holiday destinations will be involved in a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) campaign. In the case of the wind farm, most of those campaigners will obtain their electricity from fossil fuels. Whilst not hypocritical, this shows that the campaigners are again only concerned in the local issue - the wider issue of climate change is not relevant.

Local campaigns can be won, but in most cases this will just shift the problem elsewhere or to some time in the future; the issue itself hasn't been defeated, just the object of the campaigners' objections. Only when a campaign is orchestrated at a national or even global scale will those responsible for what is objectionable realise that maybe what they are doing is not such a good idea after all.

But the sad thing for the Earth is that far more people want to fly than are prepared to stand up for renewable energy.