Paul J. Vanderwood - Juan Soldado : rapist, murderer, martyr, saint

Imagine yourself thriving in a climate-changed world. What does your life look like? What needs to happen to you, and what needs to happen around you, to make you feel you have been successful in your efforts to flourish and to improve the lives of others? Imagine ten years from now, being thanked by the next generation for your role in achieving this vision. What exactly are they thanking you for?

Recently, I used these questions in an exercise with my environmental studies college juniors to help them plan their next steps in working toward climate justice. was inspired by community organizer, activist, and professional facilitators Abigail Reyes and adrienne maree brown. I thought my students would love the exercises concreteness, its centering of their desires and hopes, and its action-oriented, DIY, problem-solving spirit. They often express frustration that their courses are full of information about how bad things are, without giving them ways to tackle those issues. I hoped this exercise would lead them to define the problems themselves and to articulate their own action plans.

In order to figure out what our next steps would be, we needed to imagine the endgame, the ideal state. I asked students to visualize what it would feel and look like to live in a climate-changed future in which all the positive results of all their collective efforts had come to pass. After this visualization exercise, I explained, they would break down the big changes they wanted into doable parts and start strategizing next steps.

This exercise was supposed to be empowering, to free them from the immobilization we all feel in the face of a problem as enormous and intractable as climate change. But it bombed, and in a way I hadnt anticipated. The students could not visualize a future. When I asked them about their ideal future state, I heard crickets. When I pushed them to answer, they confessed that they couldnt even form a mental image of the path ahead, much less a future that they could thrive in.

At first, I was confused and even angry with them, mistaking their reaction as short-sightedness or weakness, or an unwillingness to work hard, or a desire to bury their heads in their iPhones. I worried that they were surrendering their agency and using the mounting evidence of apocalypse as an excuse to not roll up their sleeves.

But I soon discovered I was off the mark, and that those who think that kids these days are coddled, entitled, and have no gritthat they are are simply wrong. The generation growing up in this age of global warming is not lazy or feigning powerlessness. Instead, they are asking why they should work hard, and to what end. The bigger problem comes back to their being so frozen by their fears that they are unable to desireor, yes, even imaginethe future.

and Im addressing you not only because you are uniquely affected by global warming, but also because, more importantly, it is you who are poised to organize and bring about real change.

Your cohort is larger than the Baby Boomers or Generation X. You exist at a time of improved global health, longer lifespans, fewer wars, and greater access to education. But you face a bleaker forecast about the viability of life on this planet than the generations before you. Members of your generation share a mounting awareness that the effects of climate change are not abstract or predicted in some distant future, but are already being felt. The problems on the quickly advancing horizon will diminish the quality of life for everybody.

Your generation shares many characteristics:

You care greatly about climate change and social justice, and you see a link between the two.

You feel financially insecure. If you are in college, .

Youre troubled by the increasing disparity between rich and poor.

You were raised with smart phones, social media, and unprecedented internet access to global networks and information. Although you are more connected, you are also than previous generations.

have experienced some form of trauma, including sexual assault, violence, loss of a loved one, or bullying.

Your generation is the most ethnically diverse generation in US history.

You are the most stressed but also the .

Understanding these distinct qualities of your demographic will better enable you to understand why youre feeling the way youre feeling and how to navigate these turbulent waters.

year round. As climate change becomes felt by more people, the boundary between those who worry about a future apocalypse and those who are experiencing that apocalypse right now will further blur. The climate generation is at the cusp of that story.

You are resentful that you are inheriting the problems of previous generations, who have seemingly doomed you to this fate. Earlier generations have reaped the benefits of an extractive, fossil fuelbased economy; they may talk about a looming crisis, but they likely think that serious disruptions will not happen in their own lifetimes. Meanwhile, they may find it difficult to acknowledge their failure to do anything effective about a problem they have seen coming for decades.

Your generation is demanding that climate advocacy attend to social justice as part of any plan for ecological health. Your environmental politics are also eminently cultural; unlike your predecessors, you see how important culture and society, not just science and technology, are when it comes to addressing environmental problems.

Yours is the most ethnically diverse generation in US history. For indigenous youth, the issue of climate change has always been connected with colonialism and your own peoples stories of genocide and environmental disruption. Many of the rest of you have become politicized around issues such as ocean health, climate refugees, disaster preparation, environmental racism, and the mourning, fear, and overwhelm are giving rise to a new vocabulary, including such terms as climate anxiety, vicarious trauma, solastalgia, pre-traumatic stress, and secondary grief, which are discussed in the next chapter.