As the lecture drawls on, a sinking feeling enters my chest. Our class is evaluating the IPCC AR6 report that was released last March. The line, “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence),” plays over in my head. I feel heavy, and with each breath, I will my body to take this feeling away. This feeling of sadness, frustration, confusion, helplessness, even anger. They swirl around in me, making me feel like an anchor sitting in the deepest depth of the sea. I open Instagram on my laptop. I reply to a message from a friend asking to grab coffee tomorrow. I watch a few stories. I like a video of someone making bread in a picture-perfect kitchen, and then I see a photo of a baby monkey making a funny face. Now I’m floating on the surface, the sun shining on my face. The feeling of sinking is gone before I have time to say bye. The teacher asks the class a question, and I’m pulled back to the room. He’s looking at us expectantly; no one says anything. I look around at my classmates; they all resemble a blank wall. Not even a look of confusion lingers along their features. Were we all dissociating? I wonder. Is this how we’ve learned to respond to a crisis? He gives a disappointed sigh and asks the question again, this time louder and with more force. “Can someone give me an example of a greenhouse gas?” I say carbon dioxide out loud. He nods his head in approval. “Yes, good, anyone else?” Some of my classmates throw out some names. The teacher carries on, “Ok, so what happens is…” And he continues explaining to us what these gases are doing. I’ve probably been told, read, and thought about this hundreds of times. Global warming. Climate change. Greenhouse gases. I wish I could
remember the moment I was told about all this. I wish I could remember the initial feeling of being told that humanity was nearing an almost inevitable doom if we continued doing what we were doing.
By now, it feels like I’ve been told so many times that the shock has turned into numbness. I’ve been told through lectures, graphs, statistics, reports, analysis, books, poems, podcasts, and friends. Sometimes, it feels like this dark cloud looming over my head. This inevitable end of doom and death. Other times, it feels like this open field of opportunity, a place that calls my name in passionate anticipation. It can feel both so minuscule and too massive, like it doesn’t really matter. That whatever I contribute to this field of environment sustainability, in the grand scheme, doesn’t truly matter. This makes me feel both relaxed and incredibly selfish. A tipping scale between the grandness of the Earth and the tininess of humanity vs the day-to-day present suffering caused by something that could have been prevented.
My mind wanders to when I was 8, and I fell from the top of a cedar tree. I grew up on Vancouver Island, among evergreen forests and subtle mountain scopes. The cold and assuring Pacific Ocean surrounded our little island. And so, I spent my childhood on the most exciting playground. A large part of that fun came with climbing trees. I remember climbing this adolescent cedar tree, and I was at the top, the very top, swaying back and forth (stupidly), yelling in pure glee. My two best friends were on the ground, watching me. Then I heard a snap, my friends screamed, and suddenly I was falling through the air. I can still remember the branches flying past me as I fell, and strangely feeling calm about the situation. Those two seconds seemed to last an eternity that ended abruptly when I safely hit something soft. I had fallen into a decomposing stump, soft with thick moss and mushy wood. My friends rushed over, and I smiled up at them, sitting on this stump as if I had meant to fall and land there all along.
Not even a scratch, except for a small bruise on my tailbone. That tree still stands in my backyard. The top of it is broken off. The stump that saved me from a broken bone or worse, sitting right beside.
I often wonder why I am doing this. Why I decided to use four years of my life to study environmental sustainability. I have always been torn between passions of all sizes and shapes. The world often feels full of this magical hum of possibility and beauty. It did when I was 8, and it still does at 22. I’ve been given the most precious gift of choice in my life. And I chose this. It makes more sense for me to think of one path filled with thousands of different paths engraved throughout it because although choosing what to study was a significant decision, it never felt like a make-it-or-break-it moment. Every day, maybe even every moment, I feel faced with a choice. Is one choice made in one moment, in one day, more significant, more important than the next? I’m not sure. But when deciding what I wanted to study, I think in my naïve and optimistic mind, I thought back to what it felt like to be caught by a cedar tree. Like a soft cupped hand, turned towards the sky, catching me from the air. And this responsibility. To show that same sacrifice and responsibility to save the small cedar tree in my backyard.
My professor is still talking about greenhouse gases. He’s explaining, in excruciating detail, short-wave and long-wave radiation conversion. I try to stay fully engaged. I really do. But I find it difficult to learn something I know I will forget. I don’t want to be a climate scientist, so why am I sitting here, nodding along, pretending. Then what do you want to be, Robin? Hm. Good question.
I start thinking about my Existentialism class. How I was hanging onto every word the professor spoke. How liberating and beautiful to learn that a Danish philosopher born hundreds of years ago can make a young woman feel less alone. I think about the infinite and finite. The
balance between living in the clouds and being a robot to the daily tasks to complete. Where do I lie in that balance? Where does the girl sitting beside me or my teacher in front of me stand? Realizing that no human is ever in complete balance with these realities is a comfort to me. We’re all just confused and wandering little beings, trying to figure it out.
I often feel a lot of anger towards those in power who are swimming in an inexcusable amount of wealth from the poverty and destruction of humans and nature. I think about the manipulation, the tricks, the distractions that we are riddled with every day, to keep us dormant, to keep us numb, to keep us overwhelmed and helpless and therefore sucked into a vacuum of despair. And yet I feel maybe even more anger towards myself, towards my hypocrisy, towards my leniency of meaningless distractions. Towards not doing enough, of doing things for fun and for my own pleasure when I know, deep down, that someone or something has suffered for it. Perhaps what I feel most guilty about is my lack of guilt. Does that make sense? Yes, I feel guilty. But most of the time, I am busy with the joy I can find in a day, with the people I love, the sun shining through the trees, the books I want to read, or the coffee shops I want to visit. Does this make me a terrible person? I feel so conflicted about it, but confliction can only take up so much space in a person’s life.
“And how do you think we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions to stay within the 1.5- degree limit?” Immediately, half the hands in the classroom go up. Solutions and reasons are brought up, ones that I’ve heard many times. The teacher writes the answers on the whiteboard. I look at them, words in blue just sitting on a whiteboard in a little classroom in downtown Toronto. It makes me giggle at the absurdity of it all. These words that could hold the future of humanity within them. Thinking about how many other classrooms are doing this, how many lectures, the sheer magnitude of the amount of solutions that have been spoken about, thought
about, wrote about. Then how, I repeat, how, are we still in this limbo? It’s always brought up in my classes that we have the solutions, the technology, the intelligence and foresight. We know what we need to do. But something is missing. Everyone feels it. Will climate change and global warming forever be this impossible problem? One that fills us with this awful feeling of helplessness and doom when we think about it? Is this how we want to live? Not knowing if our grandkids will ever feel the freedom of climbing a tree or the assurance that the earth is on our side and not an enemy? How crazy that an environment so ideal for life and human beings is being irreversibly altered against the prosperity of all for thousands of years. All because one species in this moment of time is under the impression that they are infinite. But we are a blip! I want to shout from the rooftops. We are a letter in a 300,000-word novel. Earth will recover, but humanity will not. How can you not see this? It is ourselves that we are destroying. But perhaps this is just what will be. Perhaps life will play out, as it always does, and the repercussions will speak for themselves. That makes me sad. But maybe that is just what it is.
Despite it all, I find myself so in love with life. Every day is filled with moments that astound me. I believe, almost more than anything, that humans were made to love. To love people, beautiful days, music, the moon, and laughter. I believe that we are both good and bad, a hero and villain, darkness and light. That although I am confused and frustrated and angry, I am also in awe of it all and enthralled with the simple beauty and pain of living. Maybe that frustration and anger is another form of love, one that doesn’t feel as good but is just as important. What astounds me is the balance we all hold within us, every moment. If we all believe, even a little bit more, that to simply exist is the miracle of life, that to love fills us with more peace and happiness then greed or hate ever will. But maybe it is easier said than done. Or maybe to look inward is too frightening because so many of us don’t even know who we are?
I am startled back into the classroom by chairs scrapping on the ground and people zipping their jackets up and walking out. The teacher puts his papers back into his briefcase. His face looks tired, if not a little annoyed. His eyebrows are furrowed, and I can tell he is in the middle of some serious internal monologue. I wonder to myself what he’s thinking. I pack my stuff up. One last look at the classroom, and I’m on to my next task.