Imagine a Different Future
If the world wasn’t on fire, I would write sci-fi fantasy novels. If I wasn’t born into a colonized, workforce-oriented, capitalist regime, I would spend my days resting in fields, writing poetry, exploring the imagination, placing wonder and awe in each sonnet. I would plop myself down in front of an east facing, farm style window with a view of azure sky and see which world my mind could take me to. This is what I dreamt of as a child. However, I was born post-industrial revolution, amidst late-stage capitalism and climate change. As a child I didn’t understand this. It wasn’t until around the age of thirteen, my eyes opened to what the world really is. Now as an adult I reflect on how a child-like sense of imagination and fantasy still serve a purpose in this time of climate and biodiversity crisis.
My earliest memories are of composing worlds with my imagination. Sometimes I think I have more imagined memories than real, more memories of ethereal worlds than of earth. However, I am keen on which one is which. This is what separates artists from crazy. Yet for some artists, the line gets blurry. Class, gender, networking, societal acceptance, culture, location, and religion play a role in deciding where society draws that line. The line between real and imagined. A peculiar part of my life has been growing up in a world in which ‘the real’ seems as if it should be imagined. I feel this way when I read the news...
March of 2023, the IPCC, the International Party of Climate Change issued a final warning for keeping our climates temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid worldwide climate disaster. If this warning is ignored, then we’re all staring down a treacherous tunnel shaped in the form of the 21st century in which we’re propelling ourselves towards hell on earth.
Rose colored glasses towards planetary safety are a symptom of most childhoods. There is no expectation for children to learn about the doom. Children have ‘rose tinted eyes’ and thoughts of ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine.’ As a child, I saw the doom in the eyes of adults and wondered which world they were living in. However, the doom was not explained to me. It was not age appropriate. Instead, I inserted an unexplained confusion regarding the unregulated nervous systems around me. Like most children, I played pretend, my imagination ran rampant, and I thought the world was a bliss-filled Eden. However, now I have become the adult whom kids might look at and question the doom filled corneas of.
Over 3 billion people already live amidst vulnerable climate conditions due to human caused climate change. The IPCC’s final warning touched on the fact that even if we raise clean energy policy budgets immediately, we will struggle to find technological solutions and adaptations for climate refugees in many third world countries.
I’ve turned into an adult who doesn’t need to make other worlds in order to spark my curiosity. Simply planting my feet into the ground of earth feels fanatical enough. I can’t get myself to write fantasy anymore. As my keys type words of fictional species, my mind draws back to the news I read that morning. As I travel to mysterious worlds of my own creation, my brain army-crawls back to the land I’m on, again and again. So, now I write a different kind of story, a drama that seems as if it shouldn’t be real, yet it is, and it's called present day- earth.
It’s ambitious, the IPCC exclaimed, but with urgent and intense policy change, we still stand a chance at keeping our climate under 1.5 degrees Celsius warming.
Writing fantasy began to feel like a disservice to reality. We all need to take breaks and escape to worlds unknown.Sci-fi fantasy novels definitely serve their purpose, providing respite, shade and imagination to our earthly forms. Yet, maybe my fingers are better serviced to type out the reality that seems as if it should be imagined.
Becoming an adult and opening my eyes to a world that adults once tried to hide, taught these squinted eyes that I don’t need to go far and wide to find a world to write. When I was around the age of thirteen, my eyes opened, and continued to open, as the years went on, to the world outside of my urban window with a view of streets and man-made structures.
At the age of thirteen, my love for reading was born. Up until that age, I hadn’t been interested in books. I was the athletic, too-cool-for-school type. However, that changed exponentially when I met my eighth-grade English teacher, Ms. Mattson. We had to read one book a week, and that was the only criteria for her class. It was essentially an honesty policy. We could read any book we wanted.
We spent almost every class period, either reading or exploring the library together. Ms. Mattson treated us like mature, autonomous human beings. Her teaching style coincided with her class structure immaculately and created the perfect environment for any thirteen-year-old to discover the immense world of literature. With that said, one horror landed in my lap like a sick cat that semester. My genre of choice was non-fiction. My favorite topics were the holocaust and memoirs. I read 15 or so books that ripped my world open, suddenly this was not the same planet I thought it was.
Adults should be putting all our effort into creating a world that children can grow up within and be welcomed into a functioning society in which they are safe, both in their bodies and in their environments. We have normalized, allowing history to repeat itself. We have normalized raising children in an environment in which many of their age-related milestones involve discovering intolerable tragedies. As children enter their teens, with each coming year, they continue to learn about various catastrophes. By the time individuals read the news each day, they’re immersed in the understanding that our planet’s future is in question.
However, this is where I retract to my roots, imagination created the foundation from which I grew. Perhaps, healing our planet calls for a different view on these disasters. A myopic, tunnel vision sense of planetary distress, rightfully, creates anxiety. However, widening our gaze and bringing imagination into the field of awareness allows an individual to envision a new future for us to dwell in. The myopic view of the news in front of our face is one perspective of this planet. Yet, how can we heal and move forward until we lift our gaze?
What if we stopped normalizing a world where children must face danger, shambles, and planetary collapse? Can we envision a future in which a thirteen-year-old's rose-colored glasses, in fact, had been seeing the reality they’re living in? Until we envision that future, we will not bring it into our world. Until we can imagine the same reality that we are pretending exists for our children, we will not create it.
References
Harvey, F. (2023, March 20). Scientists deliver “final warning” on climate crisis: Act now or it’s too late. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-climate-crisis-report-delivers-final-warning-on-15c
Sixth assessment report. IPCC. (n.d.). https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/