Why Young Environmentalists Still Have Hope
Ten years ago, I was between my sophomore and junior years at Yale, and on a journey that would profoundly alter the course of my life. I was spending the summer in India, and had decided to hike to the Gaumukh glacier, the source of the Ganges River that rests at the far end of a massive ice sheet deep that extends into the Himalayas.
On the way up, my guide, Anand, and I encountered a barefoot man in an orange robe—a reminder of the fact that we were headed to the holiest place in India. The Ganges accommodates some 450 million people who come to its banks to drink, eat, farm, bathe, and worship. For thousands of years, the great river has been at the center of Indian political, economic, and spiritual life.
Closer to the glacier, we encountered a different kind of sight: a white plastic tent with a satellite dish beside it. Nearby, we found a scientist sitting on a boulder. A quarter century earlier, he told us, we would have been standing on the glacier. It had been retreating for years. As soon as 2030, he said, Gaumukh could disappear altogether.
That fall, I took a leave from college, determined to do something about the insanity of global warming. I would never return, choosing instead to co-found the Energy Action Coalition and grow it into the world’s largest youth advocacy organization working on the climate crisis. As we won thousands of small victories, getting cities, college campuses, and companies to begin reducing their carbon footprints, I and those around me felt empowered — confident that we would prevail in the greatest challenge of our generation.
Then came 2008. After the election, we saw an opportunity to win both federal climate legislation and to secure an international climate deal in Copenhagen. When both went down in flames, many climate activists (myself included) fell into a kind of depression.
Fast forward to 2012. We’re living through the warmest year in American history. Wildfires and droughts are plaguing the West, prompting experts to warn of a looming food crisis, and Bill McKibben’s tour-de-force Rolling Stone piece “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” has been viewed 1.2 million times in two weeks. The listervs I’m on are filling up with huge threads with subject lines like, “I’m scared.”
What happened? What do we do now? I and many other members of the millennial generation have spent the past few years developing answers to these questions. The good news is that we now know a great deal about what works, and we know what we need to do.
First, it’s important to recognize that this not only a dangerous time, but also a time of immense opportunity. We are living in a world of dueling exponential curves. On one hand, there are the hockey stick slopes, the terrifying and skyrocketing lines of environmental degradation and carbon. But not far behind is another wave of fast-growing curves representing a solution set that could sustainably feed, shelter, and power the planet.