An Inconvenient Truth by Vice President Al Gore, 2006
I don’t know about you but Climate Anxiety has been a fixture of my life since I was about 11 years old. Ever since Earth Science in Middle School and then Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. For decades, I was told to not worry about it. That our leaders would handle things. That the Earth will figure it out on its own. That there are more important things to worry about. That there isn’t anything I can do about it so why stress? These statements have not changed while the Environment has only sustained more and more damaged.
I always felt that if we didn’t have a home planet, we wouldn’t have all the other issues we struggle with as a society. I eventually learned that Activism is often treated like you can only support one cause at a time. But people are capable of holding beliefs and support for multiple causes while actively working on one cause at a time. It’s taken me my whole lifetime to develop a process for learning new information, integrating it into my beliefs, then following through on lending support when I’m asked even on the most basic levels. And as I continue to age, this process will most likely continue to shift as well.
And yet, Earth, conservation, and reacting to Climate Change have pressed on me the most in my life. It has only been recently that I have been able to research various projects that have been successful or on-going while understanding better what I may do to help or offset damage on an individual level. But I wouldn’t be a Millennial without also acknowledging that widespread change cannot happen without systemic/policy change.
Over the last decade, we have had a perfect storm of Environmental Events and Global Catastrophes to remind us not just of how precarious our position is on Earth but also how much more connected we actually are. Even when we were told to stay indoors during the early days of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the most successful countries at reducing the rate of infection were those that prioritized individual mitigation efforts to benefit the collective. We even saw a few environmental improvements in those first two years. I know that the sky somehow looked more blue to me when I would venture outside to go food shopping, although that could have also been a result of just staying inside more. Imagine how much more we could do for the planet and all of us if we managed to shift our values to be less individualistic and more focused on benefiting our community.
Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerilla Games 2018
As a result of the increasing frequency of traumatic events, I really took to the Horizon game series from Guerrilla Games. The amount of optimism the game has for people to come together for the sake of preserving humanity is heartwarming and did so much for reigniting my own hope for us to do better in the real world. So when I moved back to New York City, I knew I wanted to take the opportunity to make real change in my habits: to embody the kind of person that is part of real change in this world; to use my time, effort, and privilege to really dig in and live differently than I have.
I am posting about this here because my Climate Anxiety is not separate from my artistic endeavors. Nor are Climate Justice and Environmentalism truly separate from other social causes. These different facets of my journey are all connected even if they seem to others to be disjointed or unrelated. I invite you to join me as I work through all of these ideas.