I remember having my first climate-related existential crisis at the age of five.
My dad had just bought me a huge stack of encyclopedias –– taller than I was at the time –– and I voraciously made my way through all of them, delighting at the illustrations of snakes and butterflies and ants… until I got to one about the universe and the planet.
It said that life on Earth will end someday. This is because the sun will swallow up Earth in a few billion years, but even before that, global warming will cause extreme heat, sea level rise and climate catastrophe all over the globe, killing the beautiful biodiversity I had just read about.
My first thought: “What will happen to my parents?” My second: “What about all the beautiful things that I see every day when I wake up in the morning?”
Since then, I have taken all the opportunities I could to beat my climate distress. I went to school to study environmental science and geology and then ended up becoming a climate journalist and communicator, so I could tell climate stories from around the world.
Like all of you, I don’t want our civilization to end. I don’t want to wake up in the morning and not hear birds chirp outside my window or not see the leaves of trees rustle as the breeze passes through.
But I will also be one of the first people to admit that it is quite difficult to stay motivated and optimistic when every single day, you hear about yet another coral bleaching event, or a natural wonderland going silent, or people making reproductive choices out of despair for the future. It makes the work I do feel futile. Like others, sometimes I, too, lack the motivation to get out of bed and do what I do, because “what is the point?”
But the point is, it is not just you or me. All climate distressed individuals around the world together form a community that is concerned, anxious, grieving. While it is pretty easy to feel distressed when you think of yourself as fighting an arduous battle against massive systemic forces, we are not alone. Together, we can channel our concern into action.