Twenty-Something Year Old Journalist

I had an entirely different article I was planning on publishing this week, but how could I when the place I call home is being ravaged by historical and devastatingly destructive fires? 

It’s easy to find sympathy and compassion when others suffer through a climate crisis, but when the climate crisis is at your front door, affecting people you know and communities you are fond of, there’s a different kind of anguish and grief you experience. 

You find yourself scrolling on social media, getting breaking news notifications from various news sites when tragedy and disaster occurs. You feel pain and sadness, but yet there is still this baseless, deep-rooted belief in you that tragedy would never happen to you 一 until it does. 

It’s one of the more ironic features of global warming. As the country becomes more divided, as wealth disparities continue to grow, as differences are pointed out more than similarities, and as the wealthy time and time again let us know that there is truly an ‘us’ and ‘them,’ global warming swoops in as the nonconformist and let’s us know that in the eye of the storm, we are all equal. 

Wealth, for the most part, cannot save you in the face of a climate crisis. It surely does and can affect the rebuilding period after a climate crisis, but the climate will do what the climate wishes to do, no matter who is in its path. 

And that is one of the most alarming things about this climate crisis. 

We’ve all been told it’s coming. The scientists have sounded the alarms long ago, temperature records are being shattered every year, the Institute for Economics and Peace predicts 1.2 billion people will become climate refugees by 2050 一 that’s over 3x more than the current United States population.

And climate change doesn’t discriminate. Although racial, economic, and locational attributes can affect the ability to recover from a climate crisis, whether you are in a mega mansion or in an RV in a parking lot, climate change is coming to you. 

And as a reminder, this isn’t breaking news. There have been five major extinctions during Earth’s life. Five major extinctions that blindsided the organisms living on it, completely wiping out at least 80% of all life. What is different about the sixth major extinction, however, is that we know it’s coming and that it’s happening right now. 

Every species that roamed this Earth long before us, every mystical looking dinosaur, every pesky little microorganism, had no way of knowing or preventing the extinctions that led to their demise. We do. We know it’s coming. We know what contributes to the release of greenhouse gases and we know it is killing our Earth. We know what we should be doing to prevent this, or at least to give us some more time here on Earth, but we’re simply just not doing it. 

That fact that global warming is going to and has affected all of us, wealthy or not, yet the one-percenters continue to turn a blind eye to it, continue to allow their monopolistic companies to release toxins in our air and trash in our oceans, and the government somehow continues to award these companies with tax breaks and award these selfish billionaires with cabinet positions, makes the path forward to a cleaner and safer world that much more difficult. 

But global warming is here. LA is on fire. The Pacific Palisades are gone. People’s local grocery stores, local coffee shops, the sidewalks they take walks on, the pictures that hang on their walls, people’s own homes, are gone. And there’s a good chance any one of us could be next. 

This is not the time for debates on whether certain people deserve more empathy than others, it is not the time to loot the homes whose people’s memories and heartfelt valuables populate, it’s not the time to find a way to make a climate disaster and thousands now with no place to call home political.

Now is the time to band together and lean on and support your community. Help one another, be kind to one another, offer empathy to anyone and everyone who needs it. Check in on your neighbors, donate those clothes you know you will never wear, volunteer, educate yourself on the climate crisis, and hold your local government accountable for better environmental practices. 

As sadistic as it is, global warming is the one thing that can and should bring us together. Mother nature doesn’t care if you are a democrat or republican, if you are black or white, Jewish or Islamic, located on the sunny Malibu beaches or on the Small Island Developing States, have an eight figure salary, or are living paycheck to paycheck. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t think global warming is ‘real’ or not, or if you think it’s actually Jewish space lasers doing the damage. Regardless, global warming is coming for you.