Growing into Adulthood Under the Climate Crisis
Dear friends and readers,
The other night I spotted a dark lump on the balcony. I thought it was a rat at first. But, no. There are no rats in the mountains of Rizal. I looked closer and realized it was a bird whose neck had been twisted on some kind of impact. Ants trailed from its body.
I looked back out into the patchy forest beside my parent’s home, listened to an owl hoot lowly. The sound of rain pattering on leaves was calming just moments ago; now it was wrong. I couldn’t enjoy the forest having been reminded that I was intruding here, not intruding by being a human but intruding because my home was harmful to other beings. And that I could do nothing about it at this present moment.
Then a strange aircraft flew overhead. Shaped like a triangle, it couldn’t have been an airplane. Its lights blinked. I wondered if it was military owned and if it was connected to the bombings in the countryside.
We live in a dystopia where animals and whole ecosystems die in our wake and we wonder what kind of violence the government has recently committed. Old or young, we know this is far from a free world, but there’s a unique kind of grief for those of us entering adulthood in the climate crisis. It’s a sharp, dense thing lying just underneath our skin as we compartmentalize and reduce the crisis in our minds. The grief emerges when we’re forced to face the specifics of our destruction.
What sort of joy and creation is enough to push back against this abounding death? Am I just deluding myself when I hold onto normalcy? I am in love – with every small creature and every mountain that watches over me – but how do you hold onto love and grief at the same time? Is it a dance or is it more like stumbling?
I want to enjoy the life that is here but cannot, not fully. I want to root myself to a place but cannot, not yet. My ecological home, the place my ancestors stewarded, the mountains and the oceans of this archipelago, has endured centuries of subjugation. Now it is a dark tangle of corruption and impunity that has turned the soil dry and compacted.
This is what it’s like to grow up under the climate crisis. I have only just understood the world, and now I understand that it’s dying. I have only just learned how to love, and now I grieve all that I love.
It is a tricky thing. And I know this grief is valuable for what it points to. We need the rebirth of old and dormant ways of life. We need creation, alchemy, magic. And we need community. I ask myself, who will compost the dead things with me and fight for life, without ideology or online performance? Who will be a good friend as much as a good activist?