22nd Century: A Generation Awakens to Climate Change Essay Collection

Our focus at 22nd Century has primarily been in sharing our personal insights, fears, goals, and feelings on the subject of climate change. We would like to present a collection of eighteen essays ranging in the topics of awakening, consumerism, mental & physical health, and activism. We hope that by reading these essays, you may gain as much as the individuals writing them.

22ndCentury: A Generation Awakens to Climate Change

 

Should We Piss People Off?

Extinction Rebellion-12

Extinction Rebellion. Banner “Rebel for life”.

Maia Brams writes about about a recent protest by the climate rebellion group, Extinction Rebellion, and whether pissing people off is the right course of action in times of great difficulty.

For a movement to move we have to piss people off. People are always going to be inconvenienced by movements but in order to achieve the goal of success this will inevitably happen. The question I am considering as I write this post however, is whether we are at liberty right now to piss people off. In a recent attempt to raise awareness for the current climate crisis, groups of protestors from Extinction Rebellion stood on the roofs of London underground trains during rush hour. They held up signs that stated, “business as usual = death,” and protested on trains, located centrally or going toward London’s Financial district, in an attempt to convey their message that humanity is crucifying themselves for the sake of economic growth. (read more)

What about Covid-19?

How is COVID-19 changing the way we think about climate change, and vice versa? We have collected thought’s during this strange time.

A Moment To Breathe

I feel that this COVID-19 quarantine is exactly what the earth has needed, to be honest. A break from humans is giving the planet a moment to breathe. I read an article that talks about the lack of air pollution in China, a girl in London could see the Eiffel Tower from her apartment because the air was clear, the water in Venice, Italy has fish and dolphins swimming through it now that the boats have stopped running, and goats in Whales has climbed down the mountain to take over the empty roads of a small town. I understand the tragedy that society is currently facing with people losing their jobs/incomes, as well as some people losing their lives and/or the lives of their loved ones, but I do feel that the amount of people staying inside around the world is doing a lot of good for nature. (read more)

A World Worth Saving – Ryan Duggan

Ask me about Love,
I’ll tell you about my beehive
Ask me about Responsibility,
I’ll tell you about my blueberry bushes;
the ones I got as a graduation present
Ask me about Relaxing,
and I’ll tell you about work in the garden

There are some things in this life that make you realize,
green is worth more than green
and that many materials lead to marginal meanings

Ask about Bliss
I’ll tell you of midsummer’s blooming butterfly bush
Comfort,
of crisp leaves and a cinnamon breeze

Do not get too distracted
Do not tarnish your beautifully braided bondage bestowed at birth

the only good tarnish is a grass stain
or a scrape from climbing “too high”

Ask me about Resilience,
and I’ll tell you about the trees that welcome me home with open arms

The world may not give degrees,
but surely has much to learn

Letter from Massachusetts: A Winter Without Snow – Julia Evans

Bare Mountain, Amherst MA

In this essay, Julia struggles with the facts of changing winter.

It’s the first snowfall of the year. The regional schools in the Pioneer Valley are cancelled, and the community embraces winter’s kingdom by scraping ice from windshields and contributing life to the sound of passing tires and greying snow. In the following days, the surrounding towns play make believe. The parking lots of Amethyst Brook and the Holyoke Range State Park brim with townsmen eager to add their footprints to the packed-down trails. Driving down Northeast street, passerby encounter a snowman of eight foot stature, whose maple branch arms wave to them between Amherst Glass and Cumberland Farms. Mainstreet hums with early Christmas carols, and boughs of douglas fir and white pine hang wrapped in red ribbon and coated in white shimmer.

     By the end of the week, an influx of freezing rain has melted wonderland. The world returns to grey, and winter boots track mud and road salt into every building; there is nothing for show but puddles on the floor. Cross country skis rest in backseats for weeks, frozen water bottles lay dormant in passenger seat cup holders. What remains of enchantment is bitter cold and downcasted heads at bus stops. The few inches of snow that fall in January and February are gone before anyone remembers them. 

By the first week of March, the weather pushes upwards of seventy degrees. It is a lovely early spring, with open windows and abridged seasonal depression. On the front lawns of Pelham Road, students play guitar in thin sweatshirts, sitting on chairs that sink into a ground that hasn’t been frozen for weeks. The dogs are happy. Jean shorts are pulled from the back of the closet. The Saturday before spring break, several hundred college students wear short-sleeve green shirts for a made-up, pre-Saint Patrick’s Day celebration, basking in the warm sun as they down a bottle and a half of six dollar Chardonnay before noon. Yet as they soak in the sun’s vitamin D, they realize that what they seek respite from never came. It has been a two-storm winter, the latter melting even more quickly than the first.

The community nonetheless celebrates the unseasonable coming of spring. After all, there is perhaps nothing that distinguishes a New Englander quite like his desperate yearning for the winter to pass. We refuse to be soured by the weather’s implications because the sunshine on our skin feels far too good; we revel in our Northeastern climate denial because we want to hear the birds sing, even if their song is one of warning. 

Even so, as coats are cautiously stored away and books are opened on the lawn, it is difficult not to wonder: will my home ever see winter again? A version of this question is surely being asked in every corner of the world. Is heat death in August what now constitutes normal? Will the trees here burn indefinitely?  In comparison, pondering whether the future of winter in Western Massachusetts will come packaged in grey or white seems of little importance. The bean state, with its relative prosperity and temperate latitude, will not sink like the Maldives or disappear under the smog of Shouguang. The changes here will be less devastating, but then, the uniting element of the twenty-first century is that environmental changes, mostly negative, will occur everywhere. There are things we are about to lose forever, and the disappearing Massachusetts winter strikes within us something new: the realization that we are living through an end.

 Massachusetts, like the Northeast in its entirety, will react to climate warming with an increase in precipitation, though less of it will fall as snow as the winters become increasingly warm. We will quickly adjust to wearing shorts in March, but the trees and bees and black bears will have to try their hand at it as well. Deciduous oak and ash trees will begin the slow migration northwards, and frogs will have nowhere to lay their eggs as seasonal vernal pools dry before spring. Without the insulation of snow, plants will freeze to death with increased abundance, and the snow that used to melt slowly will inundate the rivers in the spring, leaving them dry by the end of summer. The heat in our warmest months will rise above 90? on more days than we care to imagine, and, ironically, in addition to more precipitation, we will also have more drought. By the end of the century, Massachusetts is predicted to finally obtain the weather of our sunny west coast enemy, California. 

As we slip into leather sandals and celebrate the mild winter, perhaps enacting the nonchalance of our western counterparts, we can’t forget the ways in which the cold is essential to New England’s character. Staying in to read by the fire, waking to spirals of frost on the windows, the irony of drinking iced coffee as we walk to the car in sub-zero temperatures?like coats in the spring the North East’s personality threatens to come unbuttoned as the winter loses its precious chill.

 Those who grew up in New England are likely familiar with one of the region’s treasured  picture books, Nancy Dinman Watson’s Sugar on Snow. I imagine there’s a whole cohort of young people who can recall their mother sitting on the edge of their twin bed, reading aloud the 1966 edition, worn at the seams from her own childhood. The story tells of tapping maple trees and impatiently waiting for the sap to boil and thicken. It illustrates the classic and idyllic image of childhood in rural New England; the anticipation of snowfall, the care and craft of using a metal spigot to draw sugar from trees, the salt and sweet and cold of “pickles and doughnuts and sugar on snow”. 

Even in our ever urbanizing world, the spirit of this story lives on. The feeling of New England reverberates when children walk to school after a fresh snowfall, engaging in impromptu snowball fights that result in red cheeks and wet ankles. It’s present in the snow forts whose basic infrastructure begins in December, but whose architecture is not complete until February, after the driveway has been coated and plowed a half dozen times. Winter allows a certain connection to the past, the memory of generations trapped in the idiosyncrasies of New England snow.

And yet, there are details that disappear every day, memories that nine year olds in Massachusetts may never make. Chickadees singing in the quiet of a new snowfall, the sky clear and blue overhead. The relentless danger of black ice and falling icicles, laughing about stupid purple bruises and sore wrists. Things lost in autumn that only appear waterlogged in April. The justified arrogance that stems from confidently driving through the snow, the special feel of skidding on the slippery, tractionless roads. All of this is as essential to New England as the red leaves that flutter in the fall. 

Yet as we sit outside in the soft breeze in March, we cherish the absence of cold and envision warmer futures. We will ourselves to forget that perhaps our nostalgia for childhood is indebted not only to the impossibility of returning to youth, but to the season that may never again return. And all we can think to do is wear thin cotton, and try to forget what we’ve already lost. 

Realizations In Nature – Aaron Kotulek

Merrimack River, Haverhill MA

In this post, Aaron discusses the true state of nature, and likens a river to time and consciousness.

It is in nature where I am reminded of the only true authority in this world, which is nature itself. All of our human constructs, of morality, justice, the idea of evil, or even the idea of time itself, all of that is erased when you find yourself awake in nature. One of the reasons the river has been a staple of our stories and lessons throughout history is because it exemplifies this authority. The river is untainted by human consciousness, and because of that, it becomes an objective mirror in which to view our world. The river is always flowing. It ebbs and flows, but always is. The river has no opinion on the trout swimming upstream to spawn and it has no malice as it actively works against the trout. One cannot say of the river that it is evil because a child drowned within its waters, or because it harbored the alligator that torments a village. The river has no sense of time, either. When one is rafting down a river, you cannot plead passionately to the river to get you to your destination faster, the river would just say, “We’ll get there when we get there.” The natural world only is, it does not carry with it all the constructs that human consciousness places on it in order to make sense of the world. The river has in it a paradox that is incompatible with human constructs, in that the river is changing constantly but also never changes. We can point to a specific part of the water, but by the time your hand is raised, that water will be gone, and in its place, different water, but we still know it is the river. It is this paradox, that is not exclusive to the river, that reminds us of God and his mysterious ways, and why so many people have found spiritual awakenings at the river, or in the forest, or at the Grand Canyon, etc. To awaken in nature is to embody this paradox, to realize your personal insignificance in this universe while at the same time realizing that you are one with the very same universe.

The Changes That We Can See – Lea Hamel

Lea’s snowy driveway

In this post, Lea confronts a snowless winter, and what it means to finally see Climate Change after years of only hearing about the transformations to come.

A family photo album triggered the awakening. I was flipping through the pictures, looking at all of the photographs in their semi-orderly position. The photos ranged from my family members to stills of my backyard, cataloging my parents’ development of the fixer upper they took on. After pondering  a picture of my older brother before his first day of Kindergarten, I turned the page to see something I have yet to see in my lifetime. A whole two pages in the family photo album are dedicated to snow piled up almost as high as the porch windows, over four feet tall. What struck me was not the backward time jump, from September 1999 to December 1992. However, it dawned on me at that moment that I had never witnessed snow like that in my life. The time in which I was reminiscing on my family’s photos was Christmas 2016 when I was home from my first semester of college. That December, the grass stared back at me, yellowed and exposed to the mild temperature of 36 degrees. Looking out the window, there was nothing more obvious to me than the fact that the times had changed. The climate had changed. 

To: Lea

From: Global Warming

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Needless to say, it was not a merry Christmas, nor a happy New Year. 

Every second that it did not snow was a second of hopelessness. I had never wanted it to snow more in my life. When my grandparents arrived, I ground my teeth at my family’s gladness that the roads were clean, with no snow out to get them. They didn’t want it to get any colder than it already was. I wanted to snap, “It’s hardly cold out. Just look at the photo album!” I resisted the urge to tell them that if they didn’t like snow, then they should move to someplace where it’s not expected. In New England, no snow is unacceptable in winter. By the time we got to presents, I didn’t care anymore. I thought, Why do I want something that I do not need? I need the Earth in order to live. I need air in order to breathe. I need it to snow. I needed snow to let me know that everything was going to be okay, even if that was not true. No, even though that was not true. At least with snow, I could temporarily pretend that climate change is not real, at least for one day. Every day after Christmas that it did not snow, it was hard for me to not see what I had seen in my family’s photo album. The ghost of a snow fall that will never again be. When it eventually snowed, sometime in January of the next year, we didn’t even get a foot, hardly an inch. A dusting. A warning for some, the awakened. However, an annoyance to those who had yet to awaken to climate change.