With U.S. election day on the horizon Tuesday, many of us are hyper-aware of how voting impacts outcomes. At the individual level, we know our vote is our pathway to influence results. At the collective level, our votes together have significant consequences.

Similarly, our actions at different levels — from individual to collective — shape sustainability, climate and environmental outcomes, patterns and trends.

Leading up to the 1988 U.S. election, George H.W. Bush asserted, “Some say these problems are too big, that it’s impossible for an individual, or even a nation as great as ours, to solve the problem of global warming … (but) it can be done, and we must do it.” While his statement shows how much the politics of climate change has shifted over the past 36 years, he rightly acknowledged that human-caused climate change triggers intersecting sets of challenges that require significant and committed responses on multiple scales.

When we think about how to address big issues like climate change, sustainability and environmental challenges, many of us reasonably consider actions like eating less meat, composting and recycling, buying an electric car, supporting conservation practices and cutting energy consumption. That’s logically where we have the most control and consequently where we can most readily make changes. We might also hope that by modeling environmentally-friendly behaviors we may also inspire those behaviors in others.

For example, efforts to reduce our “carbon footprint” is a seductive and tangible way to consider what we each can do to reduce harmful contributions to climate change. But hyper-focus at the individual level can subsume scrutiny of larger-scale institutional, organizational collective carbon practices in the private as well as public sectors. Effectively, individual consumption debates — shaming and blaming each other for environmentally unfriendly activities — can become toxic traps that constrain rather than compel significant action. Moreover, when we get caught up in spats like these, we distract and divide, and we reproduce rather than change existing power relations that have perpetuated human-caused climate change challenges.

On top of all this, “carbon footprint” measures of personal impact were actually coined by Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising firm, in work for fossil fuel company British Petroleum. BP sought to displace attention and absolve the core responsibilities of oil giants from decarbonization pressures, instead spotlighting each of us individuals as guilty climate change influencers. When climate change action focuses more on the responsibility of us as individuals — riding the bus, buying local vegetables and putting solar panels on our rooftops (if we own our home) — instead of large fossil fuel companies or decision-makers or regulators who shape climate policies, responses remains weak in the face of the scale of the challenges.

Even with this insidious “carbon footprint” origin story in mind, it does not mean that individual actions do not matter for climate change, sustainability and environmental action, nor that they’re a bad thing. At all scales, everything counts. Individual decisions add up. But, when individual actions remain merely a collection of individual actions, they amount to feeble responses in the face of the scale of the collective challenges. Therefore, we must connect up and scale up our individual actions with collective and larger-scale actions.

Back to that upcoming Tuesday election, while individual election votes aggregate to the sum total, the voting analogy with climate change, sustainability and environmental action comes up a bit short. Instead, climate change, sustainability and environmental challenges may more effectively be compared to campaign contributions influencing election outcomes where some individuals, organizations and super-PACs have much more sway than five- and ten-dollar donors (while everything still also does count).

Besides a clear need for campaign finance reform to address undue influence in elections, we must work more effectively across scales of engagement to productively grapple with climate change.

Meeting the scale of climate, environment and sustainability challenges means recognition of our connectedness to social, political and economic systems, and mindfulness that we are more than consumers: We’re citizens on planet Earth, stewards and potential contributors to large-scale positive change.

Max Boykoff is a faculty member at CU Boulder, though the views expressed here are his own. Email: mboykoff@gmail.com.