Who Will Be Left to Fight For You?

My friend and I were sitting on the dock by a lake in New Hampshire, watching a neon-crimson sun set and tone the silvery waves pink. Faced with the vista of the place where I've spent a good piece of every summer of my life, I was ranting about climate change with a catch in my voice, with everything right before my eyes reminding me of what I myself may stand to lose thanks to governments' inaction on climate change. Lately I'm especially scornful of the part where world leaders have resolved to become totally fossil-fuel-free by the year 2100, while scientists are informing us that we have 15-17 years in which to curb those emissions--essentially, we must cut off our fossil-fuel addiction by 2030. Beyond that window of time, our planetary survival chances plummet as irreversible tipping points are triggered and runaway global warming takes off.

That gives us approximately a 70-year difference between world leaders' projections and our planet's requirements. A 70-year margin of error is ludicrously large odds to play with, with stakes so high.

In 2030, I will be about 31 years old. Were I to pursue the American dream, I might be settled down with a career and spouse, perhaps thinking about or expecting children. In a world where we have failed to reach our carbon-emissions reduction targets, how many of my generation would dare send forth young lives, would want to bear children on the cusp of a world that is effectively doomed? Will my friends and peers parent a generation that will grow up in a world that their ancestors failed to save, where they will never have even the illusion of a chance? Even now, if I were thirty and considering starting a family, I would be wary of bringing children into a world with so uncertain a future--or of even the chance of one.

Oh certainly, the earth will go on, and as I am middle-class and live fairly comfortably, I could conceivably raise children with a decent modicum of safety, even in 2030. We could huddle in our gated communities and watch the Global South burn and flood, watch the oceans encroach on our shores, watch temperatures and death tolls rise. We could wait in the first world while Bangladesh sees fertile soil impregnated with salt water, while Kiribati and Tuvalu and Nauru sink under the waves, while ever-stronger storms ravage our coasts and droughts desiccate our grasslands. I could watch from my armchair as climate refugees spill over every border, as wars break out over the last dregs of natural resources. I and my futureless children might be okay, for a little while.

But it will catch up with us. If I chose, my thirty-year-old self could battle for a facsimile of normal life, remembering the days when food was easy and plentiful and we did not curse the sun and rain. If I chose, I could get away with denial even as we fail our climate commitments and cross those final tipping points, as we release colossal methane deposits when the tundra melts, as Arctic sheet ice disappears for good, as species vanish like clockwork, every hour a death knell for untold wonders of the natural world.

One day it will be in my backyard. It will be my life in the balance. Perhaps the day when a storm rips through my manicured suburban home, or the day I cannot get the medical supplies I need to treat the chronic illnesses I have. Perhaps climate wars will reach my doorstep, or perhaps food will be too scarce to rely on even in the comfortable padding of the first world.

Perhaps their lives have no bearing on ours now. Perhaps it really doesn't matter to us whether they live and die. But if we do not fight for them now, who will be left to fight for us? Who will be left to fight for you?

That famous poem could now be repurposed, that one that begins, "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." Could we not rewrite Martin Niemoller's lines: "First it came for the islanders. Then it came for the global poor. Then it came for the coastal dwellers. And then it came for me..." Like the scourge of Nazism, climate change is a threat that slowly grows to encompass not only the groups that are distant and immaterial to our minds but finally us as well, going unnoticed and unprotested by the majority until we too realized we are in its crosshairs. Though it can be argued that the Nazi ideology was also a human creation, born of the terrific mishandling of post-World War I Europe, but climate change is even more so a direct product of our actions. Yet in the same way, it is an insidious beast, its progression easily masked, not obvious to those not watching.

In fifth grade my interest was snared by the Titanic, and I can tell you how the ship sank because the White Star Line cut corners and how the so-called watertight compartments weren't watertight because the rivets that held the metal sheets together were cooked until they were too hot and turned brittle. The captain ignored warnings from ships who'd already run into trouble, kept the engines at full throttle, and when the Titanic's lookouts finally saw the iceberg and called the alarm, they were too late because no one had even bothered to supply them with binoculars. Now, though the icebergs are still warning us of impending disaster, we'll have melted them all by the time our final undoing comes, so what kill us will be something only the ignored and maligned Cassandras truly foresaw in its entirety. And we're lacking cultural binoculars for the big picture, making it harder to sell the urgency of fighting to a pack of rabid skeptics who won't believe the icebergs are worth their worry until their living rooms are flooded and they can feel the floor of this sinking ship tilting underneath their feet.

This mentality--your problem's not my problem until it's my problem--is another that can be attributed to the dominance of the capitalist ideology. If individual benefit always trumps the collective good and if self-interest is the only motivator that matters, then the idea that our lives are all linked, that what befalls a person in Burkina Faso or Fiji should matter to a person in the United States, is anathema. Protecting the global commons has been made to seem a less logical proposition than exploiting them.

An observation by Rebecca Solnit that struck me was that for a generation raised on TV and a fear of the "wild"--the unclean, the unpackageable, the uncontainable and untamable--environmentalism can hardly be a cause close to our hearts when we have never learned the value of the earth we are losing piece by piece. Our parents tell stories of the way they would play outside for hours as children, would wander in the woods and explore creeks and mountains. But lacking that connection, do we even know what we have at stake? Does my generation have the investment in a land and a world many of us never connected with or learned to appreciate? Sure, that river or that mountain range is beautiful, but it's just a pretty picture. It'll still exist on Google Images and in travel books' glossy photographs. For those of us who didn't grow up with houses by the lake or forest, who didn't have "outside" as the playground that shaped our childhoods, "nature" may just be another cyberscape navigable by proxy if ever we wanted to experience it.

And someday, failing a turnaround of drastic proportions, that virtual-reality proxy of the natural world may indeed be all we have left--for the lucky ones.