As the lecture drawls on, a sinking feeling enters my chest. Our class evaluates the IPCC AR6 report that was released last March. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence),” our teacher repeats from the slide deck, his voice monotone. The extremely terrifying (almost laughable) sentence plays over in my head. I feel heavy, and with each breath, I sink further into my desk. Sadness, frustration, confusion, helplessness, anger. They all swirl around in me, making me feel like an anchor dropping into the ocean’s depths. I switch from my paper of unhelpful class notes and strange doodles and open Instagram. Immediately, shots of dopamine enter my system. Yes! I’m being lifted from the murky and scary depths of darkness! The sun is shining on my face. Everything is going to be alright. I get a notification on my apple news. We’ve missed another deadline, we’ve passed another threshold, there’s been another natural disaster, we’ve fucked it all up, again. Its all completely overwhelming. The gripping fear switches a light off in my brain.
The teacher asks the class a question, and I’m pulled back to the room. He looks 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 global 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 raise my hand. A little embarrassed at the simplicity of the question and answer. I say the famous one we all know. “Carbon dioxide.” He nods his head in approval. “Yes, good, anyone else?” Some of my classmates throw out names. The teacher carries on, “Ok, so what happens is…” He continues to explain to us what these gases are doing. 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.
I’ve probably been told, read, and thought about this hundreds of times. Global warming. Climate change. Greenhouse gases. How the consequences of extraction will affect everything alive and yet to be born. By now, I’ve been told so many times that the shock has turned into numbness. Sometimes, it feels like this dark and depressing cloud looming over my head. This inevitable end of doom and death. Other times, it feels like this open field of opportunity and passion, a bright place that calls my name in need and anticipation. It can all feel so minuscule and too massive, like nothing really matters. That whatever I contribute to this field of “environmental sustainability,” in the grand scheme, makes no difference. This makes me feel both relaxed and incredibly selfish. A tipping scale between the grandness of the universe and the tininess of humanity vs the day-to-day present suffering caused by something that could have been prevented.
My professor talks on, “In fact, trees absorb about one-third of the carbon dioxide released by human activities”. My mind wanders to my childhood, one spent in the most marvelous ancient playground. A playground filled with trees who have always felt like tall guardians watching over me. Years of running wild among evergreen forests and soft mountain scopes on the west coast of the country. The jarring and dazzling Pacific Ocean surrounding our little island. Maples and cedars and arbutus and pine and spruce and oak. My greatest joy as a kid was climbing my magnificent friends as high as possible. Many parents have yelled up to me and my friends to “get down immediately” in very stressed tones. But why would we ever come down if we could see the whole world from up there?
Once, I remember climbing an adolescent cedar tree, swaying back and forth (stupidly) at the very top of the tree, yelling in absolute 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, remains there beside.
I often wonder why I am doing this. Why did I decide to use four years of my life to study environmental sustainability? I have always been torn between passions of many sizes and shapes. The world often feels full of this magical hum of possibility and beauty. It did when I was ten, and it still does at twenty-two. I’ve been given the most precious gift of choice in my life. And I chose this for the time being. Decisions and choices do not stand in black and white for me, though. I imagine one path (life) filled with thousands of different paths engraved throughout it. Every day, maybe even every moment, I face one choice or another. 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. All these names and labels and degrees and connections when all I’ve ever been, all I will ever be, is a little girl, in love with her trees and her sea and her mountains.
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 class from the morning, Existentialism. How I was hanging onto every word the professor spoke. How liberating and beautiful it was to learn that a Danish philosopher born hundreds of years ago can make a confused young woman feel less alone. I think about the infinite and finite. The balance between living in the clouds and being a robot to daily tasks. Where do I lie in that balance? Where do I lie in any balance? How about the girl sitting beside me or my teacher in front of me? Coming to the realization that no human is ever completely balanced with these realities is a comfort to me. We’re all just confused and wandering little beings, trying to figure it out. Finding a balance, losing it, and finding it again.
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. Yes, I feel guilty. But most of the time, I am busy with the small beautiful things that lie around me. 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 very 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 “answers” that could hold the future of humanity within them. I think about how many other classrooms are doing this, how many lectures, how many books and articles and professionals far more intelligent than me. Then how! How are we still in this paralyzed 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. Something must be missing. Will the desire for human growth be the end of us? I guess everything that grows must die. I guess it may just be inevitable that human-led climate change will forever be this impossible problem. One that fills most of us with this awful feeling of helplessness and doom when we think about it. But is this how I want to live? Not knowing if my grandkids will ever feel the freedom of climbing a tree or the assurance that the earth is on their side and not an enemy? How wild 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 library full of books. Earth will recover, but humanity will not. How can we all not see this? It is ourselves that we are destroying. But perhaps this is just what will be. Perhaps life will play out, as always, and the repercussions will speak for themselves. Maybe greed and fear will finally conquer the human race. Maybe that is for the best. Maybe then we can all rest.
Despite it all, I find myself so in love with life. Every day is filled with quiet and loud 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. But with love comes pain. Why does it feel like it’s the pain that is winning? I don’t know. But I do know we are all good and evil, a hero and villain, darkness and light. And that although I am confused, frustrated, and angry, I am, more than anything, in awe of it all and enthralled with the simple beauty and pain of living. It’s the great balance we all hold within us, every moment. If we all believe, even a little bit more, that simply existing is the miracle of life, that to love fills us with more peace and happiness than greed or hate ever will. But perhaps that is all foolish and eye-roll-worthy. Then let it be so! Roll your eyes as I relish in the sunlight and fall into soft stumps, laughing. Freer than your wildest dreams.
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.