Words by: Nate LeBoeuf
Graphic by: Nash Pena
Graphic by: Nash Pena
In February, I took a sun-soaked walk through a local park in the thick of winter. It was 60 degrees and bursting with children playing, old couples walking, and college kids basking in the Vitamin D they lost when they threw up the night before. I sat by the pond and ate a grapefruit in a baggy t-shirt, and the breeze caressed my arms as it passed by. Even though it was snowing two days ago, the warmth prevailed today, and an idyllic paradise emerged. It was odd, but the grins on faces made it apparent that nobody seemed to mind that in one of the coldest parts of the US, summer came 4 months early, leaving its infamous winter dead in the water.
I go to school in Syracuse, New York. My first year here (only 2 years ago), our February was plagued by an oppressively constant snowfall and cold temperatures that made walking to class a nightmare. This power walk raised questions- Should I feel guilty for finding bliss in this warm weather, knowing its catastrophic effects on the nature around us? Why are we not concerned about winter ending so early?
Gen Z has colored emotions about being born on an Earth that our ancestors have exploited and abused. And with the world at our fingertips, we are constantly reminded of how inevitably fucked we are. The “climate clock” in New York triumphantly displays our expiration date in front of people just walking to work. Just because I recently took an ecological footprint quiz that was eager to humble me- “if everyone lived like you, all of the Earth’s energy would be used up by March 27. Asshole.”
Part of this climate change guilt we feel also comes from knowing that in America, we are the lucky ones. Climate disparity is real- while we throw on SPF 50 in April, people in Bangladesh are losing entire villages to floods linked to global warming. We read about disasters like this, put our phones down, and head outside to get a tan in with friends.
Our planet is unmooring and simultaneously leaves its people unmoored. Gen Z emerged as these revelations happened, and we are now the ones with the burden of undoing the shitstorm our parents and grandparents created. We have been smothered with information about how grim our future is. And while we are terrified of this obligation to fix it, we also have an obligation to enjoy our youth and not go down an anxiety-ridden spiral whenever we see a scary news headline on our phones. So in the meantime, we cope by enjoying the short-term effects- in this case, good weather for daytime drinking and walks.
We are a generation born into the apocalypse. The Earth is falling apart, and we small, sensitive humans are dancing in the flames that have been burning for centuries. If the world were to end suddenly, I’m sure you’d find us spending our last hours ringing it in on the beach, drinking tequila, and soaking in the 1000 UV rays.