Social change, too, advances by steady increments. Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement began in 1977 with women planting seedlings; decades later, that simple act scaled to tens of millions of trees across Kenya, transforming soils, livelihoods, and civic agency (Maathai, Unbowed, 2006). Likewise, the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56) relied on thousands of daily walks and carpools—ordinary steps repeated until a legal canyon appeared where once there was granite resistance. Such stories reveal a structural truth: when small acts align across people and time, they aggregate into forces capable of reshaping the public landscape. [...]
