The action
What you do alone, every day. Useful, measurable, and in its right place: the most visible scale, not the heaviest one.
The Down to Earth Programme
What weighs is not what shows
understanding the environment, acting at your own scale
This programme holds what the association publishes about the environment: understanding what is at stake, telling an order of magnitude from an impression, and seeing where decisions are really taken, from a home to a town council. It sticks to established facts and verifiable actions. No doom and no lecturing: someone who leaves this programme should be better at working out what weighs, not feel guiltier.
Why this field matters
The problem is not a shortage of information, it is a shortage of scales
On the environment, almost everyone has already heard a great deal, and almost nobody can rank it. A highly visible action passes for an important one; an enormous item stays invisible because it never shows up during the day. The result: we argue hard about details, and the decisions that actually weigh get taken without us.
What is missing comes down to one phrase: order of magnitude. Knowing that one thing counts ten times more than another changes behaviour far more than a moral argument does. It is a skill in reading figures and doing rough arithmetic, not an opinion, and it is learned like anything else: by practising on cases where you get it wrong first, then less often.
Finally, the scale of the individual action is not the only one, and that is good news. A home, a school, a town decide things no single resident decides alone: a heating system, a contract, a transport plan, a canteen. Knowing where a decision is taken, and while it is still open, is worth more than sorting your rubbish harder on your own.
Four scales
Where things actually get decided
The home
Heating, insulation, appliances, contracts. One decision a year or a decade, often weighing more than a thousand daily actions.
The institution
A school, a library, an association: purchases, travel, meals, an organization. A collective scale, and one you can actually discuss.
The town
Transport, buildings, waste, planning. Public decisions, with meetings, documents, and deadlines that can be looked up.
The programme’s rule
The programme’s rule
An order of magnitude is not an impression, and an impression is not corrected by another impression.
That is why this programme publishes no figure that cannot be traced to a source you can consult, and never sets two numbers side by side without saying what each one refers to. On this subject more than any other, an approximate figure does more damage than no figure at all: it is remembered, it gets repeated, and it ends up serving as an argument.
What is online
What is online
This shelf of the catalogue exists, it is named, and it carries the subject above. The house rule holds here as everywhere else: a resource joins a programme the day it is online and can be visited, never on an announcement, and it is named here then, with its address and figures anyone can recount.
The resources of this programme are named on this page when they go online.
Two ways to use it
Understand first, then weigh in where you can
For yourself
Being able to rank, compare, and spot when a figure means nothing. That is what lets you choose without being told stories, in either direction.
- Read an order of magnitude and put it back in its place
- Tell what gets decided at home from what gets decided elsewhere
- Recognize an argument that holds only by its tone
In a group
A school, an association, a neighbourhood council all discuss concrete choices. A shared factual base beats seven convictions there: it makes the discussion possible at all.
- Content reusable as it is, in a meeting or a workshop
- An open license that allows adapting to the local context
- Sources you can consult, so nobody has to take our word for it
The shape
What this programme publishes, and how
The field changes from one programme to the next; the shape does not. These construction rules are not promises: they can be checked today, on the 2 resources the association already has online.
The invariants
- Free, no account, no ads, for every audience.
- No data collected: no cookie, no tracker, no request to a third-party server.
- Content under a CC BY 4.0 license: reuse, adapt, translate, republish, with one attribution line.
- Open data as JSON, so anyone can recount every figure stated.
- No figure without its point of comparison and its consultable source.
The last line belongs to this subject, and it costs work: it rules out the shortcuts that make content punchier and less accurate.
Keep going
The shape described above can be checked on the 2 resources the association already has online, and the catalogue shows the 7 programmes side by side.