In 1902, Puck magazine noted that “Things move along so rapidly nowadays that people saying: ‘It can’t be done,’ are always being interrupted by somebody doing it.” This has certainly been my experience working in the practical sustainability field for the past 30 years.

Last week, a business partner and I visited the Clay Brook high-performance home in New Hampshire that was recently built to the Phius single-family new construction standard. If you’re not familiar with Phius, it’s one of the leading “passive building” certification standards in North America. The basic idea is to use modern materials and smart techniques to build structures in any climate zone that don’t require conventional heating and air conditioning. Instead, these super-efficient buildings use sunlight, ground temperature, and natural breezes (“passive” heating and cooling) to do the heavy lifting to maintain comfortable indoor conditions all year.

Talking with the people involved with that project to understand what worked well and what could be improved so we can apply lessons learned to the commercial and residential energy-efficient construction work my company does is so much more fun for me than going to a climate rally. Those rallies were fun back in the 1990s. But nowadays, practical sustainability feels much more hopeful and personally rewarding than activist sustainability. We’re making rapid progress with practical sustainability, while progress is hard to discern in the activist arena.

The big difference between practical sustainability and activist sustainability, of course, is that practical sustainability is about what you can do. Activist sustainability is about what everyone else could do. Our planet has only one you and 8 billion “not you’s,” so it’s not unreasonable to conclude that what you do doesn’t really matter, right? Simple math proves that everyone else on the planet becoming just one-billionth more sustainable would have eight times the impact of you becoming twice as sustainable. This is why activists could rationally calculate that their time is better spent telling others what to do.

But here’s one thing to keep in mind when considering where to put your focus: Practical actions have ripple effects. We don’t have to burn fossil fuel to heat our homes — we just think we do. If a neighbor builds a new passive house or electrifies an existing house, that makes it much more likely that someone else in the neighborhood will, too.

Another thing — which many political campaigns learn to their dismay — is that it’s easy to pass a law but hard to enforce it. I love that Vermont’s ban on throwing organic waste in the trash lets everyone know what they should be doing. But studying trash samples last year showed that 46.3% of food waste is still going to landfills, despite the law. To actually compost food waste, we don’t need more laws, we need more practical ways to compost.

The rapid advance of technology — from passive houses to electric vehicles to kitchen composting appliances — opens up many more practical ways to be sustainable. For our passive house tours, we drove from Maine to New Hampshire in an all-electric Ford pickup truck, something that simply wasn’t possible to do even a few years ago. I’ve remained connected to the environmental activist community, so I understand the deep skepticism around technology as a solution to global challenges like climate change. But in today’s world we can now charge up batteries from sunlight and drive across the country!

While activist sustainability is bogged down in the muck of partisan political gridlock, practical sustainability is accelerating to achieve outcomes few thought possible. The price of solar has plummeted to make it the most affordable way to generate electricity around much of the world, and the price of batteries is following a similar projection.

We’re far from solving our environmental problems. Protests and rallies might make a difference and certainly let frustrated people blow off steam. But I hope that if we find ourselves stuck in traffic heading to a demonstration, we’ll keep a lane clear for the workers on their way to job sites to build the sustainable future we all want.

Fred Horch is principal adviser for Sustainable Practice. To learn how you can help your community achieve energy independence and other sustainable goals, visit SustainablePractice.Life and subscribe to “One Step This Week.”