There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.
In an effort to be a bit more well-versed in the ideas floating around and the concise communicating people tended to depict while speaking about them, I’d signed up to receive weekly TED Talks three weeks ago.
At the top of my first email was Greta Thunberg—a 16 year old climate activist in a bright purple jacket and braids.
There’s something to be said for looking at life through the eyes and mind of a young person. Things appear simple, black and white, straightforward—if there’s a problem, fix it, if you don’t like something, change it. I spent 11 minutes listening to Greta talk about this problem that we created with our way of living, then proceeded to simply talk and complain about at intervals. Why were we continuing as we were and adding to the problem, why weren’t we changing something?
Admittedly this isn’t a simple fix, and no one person’s responsibility. There’s even been an uptick in the news about global warming lately. But even that news is still trying to hit home to half the population that there’s a problem in the first place, that climate change is real. Sometimes I wonder why we continue to be desensitized or turn a blind eye until every media outlet or person of authority is talking about it—why we don’t ask ourselves or those around us to think and do something. I question if it’s because, though we’re aware that underdeveloped countries face some of the greatest consequences from this, unless it’s happening to us as individuals here, affecting our daily lives here in America, we won’t consider it our problem. It saddens me to realize we could’ve began affecting change years ago had we woken up and recognized that we didn’t have to wait until the last minute, until we were already feeling the effects, to start doing something. Animals are going extinct, temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting, cities are flooding, forests are burning.
But Greta makes a valid point. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. Pep talks will only get you so far. If a solution’s been found, but doesn’t please you or your way of life, it doesn’t mean the solution doesn’t exist or shouldn’t be acted upon starting immediately. We have the facts, research, some solutions, but no agreement or unity to take the first step. So with every word that Greta spoke, I wonder how anyone could step away from that room or their screen and not realize we needed to wake up and do something about climate change yesterday.