I need some advice.

I’m one of the more, ahem, influential media types I know. I’ve won a host of awards. I grew Elephant faster than Huffington Post until organic reach came along. I was named #1 in the US for #green content on twitter, twice. Elephant reached 23 million readers/month. We’ve grown our Instagram to 650K on four accounts in only a year. We have 5 million fans (you good folks, maybe) on Facebook–that’s 3x bigger than, say, MSNBC. All from an independent, unfunded media outfit.

But for the life of me I can not figure this out. I feel like a failure.

I care about plastic. Single-use plastic is not a good thing–for us, or our environment. Many of us know this. But still we drink hot fluids out of paper, plastic-lined coffee cups every day. Or we drink cold drinks out of plastic cups, every day. We don’t care. So if we know, but we don’t care…even with all the climate change news…how are we going to be able to save ourselves?

See, giving up isn’t gonna cut it. Being cynical ain’t good enough for the billions of young people who’ll have to deal with the results of our lack of caring.