The Teenagers At The End Of The World - NYT On Zero Hour Activists
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Young people have been frustrated about the world’s inaction on climate change long enough for there to be former “youth climate activists” with gray hair and children of their own. In the last couple of years, however, in part because of the sudden celebrity of Thunberg, the role has become something of an archetype, a phenomenon underscored by the arrival of the 19-year-old German climate-change denier Naomi Seibt, who was pitched by the conservative Heartland Institute as an anti-Greta — a comic-book counterpoint, like Captain Pollution or Superman’s nemesis Bizarro. (Seibt reportedly left the institute in April.) The contours of the backlash, too, have become familiar: Critics argue that young people are manipulated by adults; that they put on a nice show but have accomplished very little; that their fears are hysterical and their demands extreme. Last winter, when Thunberg was selected as Time magazine’s “person of the year,” President Trump responded to her message of urgency with smug dismissal. “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem,” he wrote on Twitter, “then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”
Margolin’s answer to this sort of criticism is that she would love, very much, to chill; there are any number of things she would rather be doing, if only adults would make that possible by running the world more responsibly. And isn’t it a bit rich to criticize a bunch of teenagers for what they’ve accomplished, when they’re going up against a well-funded fossil-fuel industry from their bedrooms and homerooms, all before being old enough to vote? And wouldn’t you be angry, too, if the generations before you built and benefited from an unjust and unsustainable system and then left you to deal with the mess when it started to break down? Wouldn’t you, like Thunberg, want to stand up before the people who were supposed to be looking out for you and the world you’d someday inherit and demand to know, with fire in your eyes, How dare you?
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In 2017, a report from the American Psychological Association included a new word, “ecoanxiety,” which the A.P.A. defined as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” It was only the latest in an emerging lexicon of life in the age of planetary disruption. The most famous of these neologisms is probably “solastalgia,” a word invented by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the homesickness you feel for a place that you have not left but that has transformed beyond recognition around you. There’s also “shadowtime,” which “manifests as a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.” That one was created by the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a California-based conceptual-art project that works with the public to coin words for our disorienting new experiences. They also came up with “blissonance” (what you might feel while enjoying a pleasantly warm day in winter but wondering what unpleasant things it bodes about the future) and “jestope” (an attitude of hope mixed with cleareyed honesty about difficult realities).
To be a teenager in this moment is, to put it teenagerly, a lot. You’re supposed to be planning for your future at a time when it’s scary to imagine what that future will be. Models that predict world-changing sea-level rise and droughts and wildfires and ocean acidification tend to use dates that feel very real to you: 2030, when you might be starting to have children; 2050, when you might be reaching middle age. Other generations, like those practicing duck-and-cover under their desks or facing a wartime draft, had plenty to worry about, too, of course. But it’s a unique experience to know that every day the world is generating the emissions that will disrupt the basic workings of your only home, and that many of the things that adults treat as normal are actually making things ever more precarious. It makes you feel negative and resentful and angry, Margolin told me. It also makes you feel scared and uncertain in a time that, adults keep telling you, should be about dreams and goals. A 2018 paper in the journal Nature Climate Change warned that the grief associated with “anticipated ecological losses” may be especially acute for children and youth. “It is likely to be particularly difficult to articulate a sense of grief felt over the loss of the future,” the authors wrote. But Gottlieb told me that he hears his peers articulate precisely that grief all the time. “That fear’s always in the back of our minds,” he said. “I won’t have a future. It’s this constant anxiety, this thing at the back of your head.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/21/magazine/teenage-activist-climate-change.html
