A Generation Awakens to Climate Change
Our focus at 22nd Century has primarily been in sharing our personal insights, fears, goals, and feelings on the subject of climate change. We would like to present a collection of eighteen essays ranging in the topics of awakening, consumerism, mental & physical health, and activism. We hope that by reading these essays, you may gain as much as the individuals writing them.
Merrimack River, Haverhill MA
In this post, Aaron discusses the true state of nature, and likens a river to time and consciousness.
It is in nature where I am reminded of the only true authority in this world, which is nature itself. All of our human constructs, of morality, justice, the idea of evil, or even the idea of time itself, all of that is erased when you find yourself awake in nature. One of the reasons the river has been a staple of our stories and lessons throughout history is because it exemplifies this authority. The river is untainted by human consciousness, and because of that, it becomes an objective mirror in which to view our world. The river is always flowing. It ebbs and flows, but always is. The river has no opinion on the trout swimming upstream to spawn and it has no malice as it actively works against the trout. One cannot say of the river that it is evil because a child drowned within its waters, or because it harbored the alligator that torments a village. The river has no sense of time, either. When one is rafting down a river, you cannot plead passionately to the river to get you to your destination faster, the river would just say, “We’ll get there when we get there.” The natural world only is, it does not carry with it all the constructs that human consciousness places on it in order to make sense of the world. The river has in it a paradox that is incompatible with human constructs, in that the river is changing constantly but also never changes. We can point to a specific part of the water, but by the time your hand is raised, that water will be gone, and in its place, different water, but we still know it is the river. It is this paradox, that is not exclusive to the river, that reminds us of God and his mysterious ways, and why so many people have found spiritual awakenings at the river, or in the forest, or at the Grand Canyon, etc. To awaken in nature is to embody this paradox, to realize your personal insignificance in this universe while at the same time realizing that you are one with the very same universe.
Lea’s snowy driveway
In this post, Lea confronts a snowless winter, and what it means to finally see Climate Change after years of only hearing about the transformations to come.
A family photo album triggered the awakening. I was flipping through the pictures, looking at all of the photographs in their semi-orderly position. The photos ranged from my family members to stills of my backyard, cataloging my parents’ development of the fixer upper they took on. After pondering a picture of my older brother before his first day of Kindergarten, I turned the page to see something I have yet to see in my lifetime. A whole two pages in the family photo album are dedicated to snow piled up almost as high as the porch windows, over four feet tall. What struck me was not the backward time jump, from September 1999 to December 1992. However, it dawned on me at that moment that I had never witnessed snow like that in my life. The time in which I was reminiscing on my family’s photos was Christmas 2016 when I was home from my first semester of college. That December, the grass stared back at me, yellowed and exposed to the mild temperature of 36 degrees. Looking out the window, there was nothing more obvious to me than the fact that the times had changed. The climate had changed.
To: Lea
From: Global Warming
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Needless to say, it was not a merry Christmas, nor a happy New Year.
Every second that it did not snow was a second of hopelessness. I had never wanted it to snow more in my life. When my grandparents arrived, I ground my teeth at my family’s gladness that the roads were clean, with no snow out to get them. They didn’t want it to get any colder than it already was. I wanted to snap, “It’s hardly cold out. Just look at the photo album!” I resisted the urge to tell them that if they didn’t like snow, then they should move to someplace where it’s not expected. In New England, no snow is unacceptable in winter. By the time we got to presents, I didn’t care anymore. I thought, Why do I want something that I do not need? I need the Earth in order to live. I need air in order to breathe. I need it to snow. I needed snow to let me know that everything was going to be okay, even if that was not true. No, even though that was not true. At least with snow, I could temporarily pretend that climate change is not real, at least for one day. Every day after Christmas that it did not snow, it was hard for me to not see what I had seen in my family’s photo album. The ghost of a snow fall that will never again be. When it eventually snowed, sometime in January of the next year, we didn’t even get a foot, hardly an inch. A dusting. A warning for some, the awakened. However, an annoyance to those who had yet to awaken to climate change.