Xiuhtezcatl Martinez - Imaginary Borders

When adults make blatant generalizations about our generation, our disinterest in politics, and our disengagement from the real world, theyre not seeing the whole picture. They dont see that the older generations whove shaped our society have done a really shitty job of creating a world that we feel inspired to engage with. Were not passive because were ignorant and dont understand the challenges our world faces. We get that the changing climate is threatening our future. We can see the corruption of big-industry money in politics. We see the injustice and hatred: from unchecked police brutality, to families being separated at the US-Mexico border, to militarized police using extreme force against Water Protectors at Standing Rock. It is literally being live-streamed and documented in a way that has never been seen before.

Our generation has the tools to understand whats going on better than any before us, through social media and technology. But we often remain silent because these stories of crisis are never met with stories of solution. Its hard to find hope in the ocean of negative, depressing, fear-based media. So a lot of us check out. To cope with the broken world we live in, we distract ourselves with social media, drugs, partying, and an endless black hole of viral dance videos, leaned-out trap rappers, and Fortnite memes.

Ive been involved in the climate movement since I was six years old: standing to protect sacred land from pipelines, suing the US federal government for knowingly contributing to the climate crisis, demanding binding policy change and a Just Transition from fossil fuels, and eventually becoming the Youth Director of the global organization Earth Guardians. Equally important to my climate activism has been my journey to deconstruct the broken story around our future and reinvent what our collective movement can look like. We are the most diverse and most connected generation in history. We need the story of our movements to reflect that, so we can better understand the power we have to shape our world in the face of the crisis at hand.

We all have a responsibility to be a part of this redefinition of movement culture. Its time to reclaim our space in these movements. Until every Friday night is an after-party for the FridaysForFuture school walkout yall did earlier that day. Till our movements speak a language of culture and power, drippin in art, color, and diversity. Till fighting for what we believe in is something that becomes a part of us, not an external cause or use of energy.

This book isnt about changing the worldits about building it together. Whether the content of these pages helps you find it or not, you have a part to play. Because the future is as much yours as it is mine. And thats a beautiful thing.

Even if you dont have a drivers license, Id say that most people know that driving in LA can suuuck. Luckily, I left my meeting just in time to beat the 5:00 p.m. traffic on my way to San Diego. As I was leaving, I turned on a podcast that was recommended to me by a student I had met at a college speaking gig a few days before. The podcast was called The Joe Rogan Experience. In this particular episode, comedian Joe Rogan was in conversation with David Wallace-Wells, a journalist and author of TheUninhabitable Earth, which, as you can probably imagine, is about the end of the world.

Wellss end of the world didnt have to do with the Sun swallowing Earth, an alien invasion, or super-fast zombies. It had to do with something much more real. In case you havent heard, human beings are warming the planet. The burning of fossil fuels has caused the atmosphere to fill with greenhouse gases, which trap heat. Since the Industrial Revolution, heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) have risen by nearly 50 percent because of us. More than half of that CO2 is just from the last thirty years. All the extra greenhouse gases have led to an increase in global temperatures of 1.1 degree Celsius.

That may not sound like a lot, but it has caused the last five years to be the hottest in recorded history. Rising temperatures have led to more frequent and extreme heat waves, floods, droughts, and hurricanes, because a warmer world also means a wetter one (hence the flooding and storms). In 2018, extreme-weather events, proven to be worsened by climate change, cost taxpayers $91 billion in cleanup, prevention, and restoration in the United States. That doesnt even count the human cost, as hundreds lost their lives to these natural disasters.