by Kaelin Ferland ’23
When you watch climate change in the news, it’s easy to feel hopeless and discouraged. It’s impossible, especially lately, to open your phone without seeing headlines on social media about how the climate crisis has already begun to devastate communities around the world. From natural disasters like Hurricane Ian, which was named the second deadliest hurricane to hit Florida since 1935, to large-scale flooding in Pakistan that displaced more than 30 million people, it might seem like we we are already too late.
It’s easy to feel helpless in the fight against climate change, and when you keep seeing people with plastic water bottles in their backpacks as you try to carry your reusable bottle every day, you may feel like your actions are pointless. When you and only a handful of other students attend ECOPC meetings on a campus of over 4,000 students, it’s just as easy to assume you’re the only one who cares.
Climate optimism does not mean ignoring the news and reality of climate change or not advocating for sustainability because everything will be fine. It is certainly not a form of denial, naivety or ignorance. On the contrary, climate optimism compels us to do the opposite and be aware of what is happening. We need to recognize what humans have already done to mitigate climate change. It is a form of hope for our future.
Many steps have already been taken to help slow the effects of climate change, all of which should inspire climate optimism. The Governor of New York recently announced that the state will ban gas-powered cars by 2035. This means that all new cars in the state will have to be zero-emission vehicles. Other states, including California, Massachusetts and Washington, have set similar goals. In other news, the Patagonia founder recently decided to donate his company and donate all proceeds to help fight climate change. Additionally, the Biden administration has announced plans to plant one billion trees in an effort to combat deforestation. At the end of September, researchers reported that due to conservation projects, populations of grizzly bears, white-tailed eagles and gray wolves in Europe had increased by 44%, 445% and 1800% respectively.
As a generation that will be tasked with dealing with the climate crisis and its aftermath, this can feel overwhelming, especially for young people. Sometimes it feels like the fate of the world is in our hands. While that’s true, it doesn’t have to be intimidating. We still have some time to fix the problem, but having a constant doomsday mindset will get us nowhere or help us find solutions. If we continue to be pessimistic about our future and pretend that humans are too late to reverse what we started, we cannot expect the problem to be solved. Optimism is what will ultimately inspire, change and save our planet.
