On December 30, 2021, residents of Curtis Bay, a neighborhood in southern Baltimore, felt a loud boom. The foundation of the row homes and two-story buildings shook as though there had been an earthquake. Instead, a fireball had exploded, engulfing the south service entrance of a tunnel at the CSX coal pier. Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) issued a cease-and-desist to CSX, a multi-billion-dollar rail corporation, due to poor air quality and the damage to the structure. But once MDE agreed that the air quality levels were acceptable, the agency deemed the incident under control, and allowed CSX to continue with business as usual.

The primary cause of the explosion in Curtis Bay was methane gas buildup and coal dust in the coal silo towers. CSX claimed it was an isolated incident. But the massive explosion illustrates the ways that existing state environmental regulatory apparatuses fail to adequately protect community residents from polluting industries, whether out of a lack of political will or of resources to regulate.

In response, Baltimoreans have taken matters into our own hands. Bringing together a coalition of residents and environmental/climate justice movements, we have built a direct action and long-term campaign that highlights the importance of solidarity across Baltimore communities and state lines, and that connects all nodes of the commodity chain. This on-the-ground work can serve as a model for other communities in the worldwide fight to breathe clean air and drink unpolluted water.

The neighborhood of Curtis Bay has long been Baltimore’s “sacrifice zone”—an area whose residents, largely communities of color and poor whites, bear the brunt of the pollution and adverse health effects that stem from industrial development. In the late 1800s, the neighborhood stored guano harvested from nearby islands to fertilize Maryland’s tobacco-farming lands. This evolved into chemical and fertilizer companies, and today we see non-renewable fossil fuel storage and export, the nation’s largest medical waste incinerator, the city’s landfill, and more than 15 other polluting industries. The open-air coal pier is just one more hazard among many. The neighborhood has the highest respiratory illnesses from toxic stationary emissions in the entire U.S.; at this year’s Earth Day celebration in Curtis Bay, one resident noted: “We have seen people spitting up black dust. We wash cars and a quarter inch of dust layers our cars … I pulled 400 pounds of coal dust out of my gutter.”

After the CSX explosion, Curtis Bay residents held two city council hearings to ask for governmental enforcement of environmental and human health regulations. At the first, the representatives from CSX failed to show up. At the second, residents were only given two minutes to speak. The representatives from CSX were given far more time to assure residents that they had increased the tunnel’s airflow, and that no more explosions would take place.

After the meetings, the city council made the decision not to require MDE to impose additional regulations on CSX. This wasn’t surprising, given that the agency was in the process of being defunded by then-governor Larry Hogan to the point where it was incapable of regulating industries and protecting residents from hazards. Beyond just CSX, Maryland residents are seeing an uptick in hazardous chemical leaks and explosions. This May, between 50 and 75 gallons of nitric acid spilled from a vacuum truck owned by W.R. Grace Chemical; despite complaints from residents about foul odors, coal dust, and other toxins, MDE has failed to investigate the incident.

Given this inaction from both MDE and city government, residents of Baltimore have had to take matters into our own hands.

First, we studied other cases. In Richmond, California, city council members held federal railways accountable and moved towards covering coal dust on trains and protecting communities. In November of 2021, the City of Richmond reached a historic agreement with the Levin-Richmond Terminal Corporation to phase out storage of coal and petcoke, a byproduct of oil refining that burns similarly to coal but with even higher carbon emissions, by the end of 2026.

Next, we held two protests at the Curtis Bay CSX Coal Pier to galvanize city-wide support for a broader campaign against the transport and storage of coal in Baltimore. At the second protest, borrowing tactics from the U.K.-headquartered movement Extinction Rebellion, we sang Christmas carols that focused on the fossil fuel industry’s role in exacerbating the climate crisis, and hung a banner on the gate to the coal facility that read “No Coal for Christmas.”

Curtis Bay residents are also filing a class action lawsuit against CSX, seeking damages and accountability following the explosion. The complaint also seeks to create a medical monitoring fund, because residents’ exposure to coal dust, lead, arsenic, silica, and particulate matter creates an increased risk of developing latent illnesses, including cancer.

Finally, the Curtis Bay Community Association and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust (SBCLT) have been working with a team of scientists to collect real-time air pollution and meteorological data from residential and industrial areas of Curtis Bay, and are using trail cameras to capture activities at the CSX Coal Terminal. Their monitors and data have been used to get MDE to do their job: Many of the scientists have been in direct contact with representatives from MDE to illustrate “unsafe” plumes in the air or elevated levels of PM 2.5 and PM 10, and have been encouraging them to declare an air quality emergency. But even with the data, action and regulation have been an uphill battle.

In an era of austerity, in which environmental protection agencies have been gutted, residents and citizen scientists are having to do the work of government agencies. But global supply chains are far bigger than the jurisdiction of a given regulatory apparatus. While these actions within Baltimore are important, it is also essential to build long-term, solidaristic connections with other impacted communities along the CSX coal line and supply chain—to make a movement that links labor exploitation of coal workers and train conductors to residents living in sacrifice zones. Those of us from affected areas must penetrate regional, state, and even international bounds in our resistance. In the upcoming months, we will follow our political commitments along the rail lines, traveling to Appalachia to better understand labor conditions within CSX and in other communities impacted by coal dust. Eventually, we hope to bring about a massive work stoppage or regional strike, and then incorporate the labor struggles of places where our coal travels, like Japan and Brazil.

By building a climate and environmental justice movement at the intersection of extraction zones, labor, and impacted communities, we hope to build worker and community power and capacity to move toward a more sustainable future.

The post The Fireball in Baltimore That Ignited a Climate Justice Movement appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s harder to connect with is what this all means for people in temperate places. While these dispatches from the far-off polar extremes of the Earth may feel removed from our reality, understanding our relationship to these colossal frozen giants is crucial for our own climate awakening. Learning about glacier vulnerability can guide our fight to stop climate change and illuminate ways to change course before it’s too late.

The glaciers around today are leftovers from Earth’s last ice age, which came to an end 12,000 years ago. During that time, all of Canada and a good swath of the northern U.S. was completely covered in ice. New York, at the peak of the last ice age, had a vertical mile of ice towering above its surface. Today, only a small fraction of that ice remains, with glaciers covering about 10 percent of Earth’s land surface. Still, they remain critical players in stabilizing Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Glaciers are white, which helps reflect solar heat back into space, and they are cold—two attributes that help cool our planet. But their most important gift to us might be fresh water. 98 percent of Earth’s water is in the oceans, salty and unusable for our daily needs. A whopping three-fourths of the miniscule amount of fresh water we have on the planet—the water we really need—is stored in Earth’s 200,000-plus glaciers. What’s more, new fresh-water-containing snow that falls on a glacier, thanks to the glacier’s cool microclimate, can survive all year long, providing continual fresh water downstream, while snow that falls elsewhere melts off in the spring and is quickly consumed by the ecosystem. You can think of a glacier as a water faucet, left slightly open for us, enabling us to enjoy water all year long.

Glacier melt is nothing new. In fact, we go in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years or so, as fluctuations in the shape and tilt of Earth’s orbit around the sun position some portions of the Earth farther from the sun, making them colder, and shift other parts of the Earth closer to the sun, warming them up. Water that is sucked out of the oceans through evaporation is converted into snow, which falls on colder regions of the planet and remains frozen as long as cold conditions persist. If the cold climate remains long enough, you get large glaciers—and an ice age that can last 80,000 years. All of this ice-making takes a lot of water out of the ocean, and sea levels fall as a consequence. Then orbital conditions shift again, the ice melts, and glaciers send colossal amounts of water back into the oceans, flooding coastal lands anew. You can see evidence of this cycle in downtown Miami’s financial district, where exposed coral remnants 15 feet above current ground level provide proof that the area once lay at the bottom of the sea, at a prior historical moment of the Earth when glaciers melted much more than they have now—an ominous announcement to us of what is yet to come.

While this pattern happens naturally every 100,000 years, human activity is accelerating glacier melt so fast that glacier collapse—a process that should have had thousands of years left to play out—is occurring in mere decades, or even faster. Much of the damage we’ve already caused will be irreversible for millennia. Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier recently began to crumble, and pieces of it are now floating in the ocean and rapidly melting. Its demise could trigger further destabilization of surrounding glaciers, and raise ocean levels around the world by several meters.

Today, glaciers cover a surface area of roughly 5.8 million square miles. That’s larger than the United States, at 3.8 million square miles. If all that ice were a single country, “Glacierland,” it would be the Earth’s second largest, behind only Russia at 6.6 million square miles. While the biggest glaciers are mostly found in the polar regions or in Greenland, a significant number remain closer to home, in high-altitude environments like the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada in California, Nepal, the Central Andes, the Tian Shan mountains of Asia, and the European Alps. There are even glaciers in Africa, on the equator, and in the South Pacific. There is still plenty of water left to melt in climate-vulnerable glaciers. And the rapid sea level rise they’re causing could result in massive floods over millions of acres of coastal lands, displacing hundreds of millions of people in the coming century. If all remaining glacier ice melts the sea would rise by about 230 feet!

But sea level rise is not the only impact of melting glaciers. Rapid glacier melt creates a feedback loop. As glaciers warm, the climate impact on Earth is magnified, building on itself, accelerating warming and speeding deglaciation. That’s because when white glaciers melt, Earth’s darker surfaces (on land and in oceans) absorb solar heat instead of reflecting it back to space—think of the effect of wearing a dark shirt on a very hot day, but on a planetary scale. This, in turn, makes the glaciers melt even more, and the Earth warm even faster.

Paradoxically, the pace that glaciers are melting at is also reducing our global supply of fresh water. As glaciers shrink, the dependable fresh water they provide for ecosystems, for farming, for industry, and for home use dwindles, too. Smaller glaciers mean there is less ice to melt each year. Melting glaciers, especially those perched on mountains, also pose another kind of danger when they lose their physical integrity. Ice structures weaken when they warm, fracturing and collapsing and rushing down mountainsides, carrying with them rocks and debris that can take out everything in their path. I call these “glacier tsunamis,” and they are becoming more prevalent in places like the Himalayas and the Central Andes, where thousands of people have died in massive land and ice slides in recent years.

Melting glaciers create havoc with the weather, too. Have you ever noticed that most of Europe is at the same latitude as Canada, and yet is not nearly as cold in the winter? It’s because currents in the ocean and the atmosphere move warm water and air from Earth’s equatorial regions through the Arctic and Antarctic, where the air and water cool off before returning to the equator (like an oceanic and atmospheric conveyor belt/AC system). The ocean has a natural churning and circulation effect that is in perfect balance to keep global temperatures stable. If glaciers melt and drop too much fresh water into the salty seas, oceanic water circulation and air currents can stall, leaving cold water and cold air in the polar regions and warm water and warm air near the equator. This breakdown of the ocean’s “conveyer belt,” so to speak, could be tragic for local climate systems all over the planet, sending the tropics into extreme heat and regions like Europe into a deep freeze.

My work exploring the ways glaciers influence our ecosystem has shown me just how significantly these rapidly diminishing sheets of ice impact all of our lives. But it has also made me realize that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to this future. It isn’t too late to slow, stop, and even reverse climate change. We can save glaciers, and avoid a deepening of the climate emergency. I recently returned from the global climate summit in Glasgow, where 108 global leaders pledged to collaborate to reduce methane gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Given that methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, this is a big step to slow warming, save glaciers, and restore our climate.

The COVID lockdown also showed us that we are capable of limiting our use of carbon and other so-called “super pollutants” that are even worse for climate than CO₂, like methane, black carbon, dirty refrigerants, and smog. While before the pandemic, the idea that we’d stop everything to save our climate would have been unthinkable, we in fact did stop everything to tackle COVID. With driving, air travel, and industry at rest, for example, we removed black carbon emissions from the atmosphere. Black carbon, or soot as it is more commonly known, causes severe respiratory disease in humans and is also a scourge on the environment, darkening glaciers and accelerating ice melt. With skies suddenly cleared of this pollutant during COVID, some residents of Nepal and India, who had lived lifetimes under a cloud of smog, saw the snowcapped Himalayas for the first time.

The positive effects of COVID on our environment and on the climate emergency were temporary—and as COVID restrictions eased, we went back to business as usual and the benefits vanished as quickly as they had materialized. Nonetheless, the temporary spike in climate health proved that collective action to give nature a break and to repair our climate is possible. We are all vested players in our global climate and each of us has the individual power, and choice, to make good climate decisions which can have huge collective benefits.

We simply have to realize how urgent our climate emergency really is.

The post You Really Should Be Having a Glacier-Induced Meltdown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One survivor of the destruction living along the border of Honduras and Guatemala told a reporter that most of the rest of the people in his village had headed for the United States. “The sea took them out,” he said. They and thousands of other environmental refugees began trudging north through a gantlet of border patrols, human traffickers, narco-terrorists, and sexual predators in what came to be called the “Caravan of the Damned.”

Meanwhile, roughly 200 miles to the west, in the Dry Corridor that runs through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, rainfall has become unpredictable and sparse. Agriculture as it has been practiced there for hundreds of years—subsistence-level production of beans and maize—is no longer possible. Unlike the shocking blow meted out by a hurricane, the suffering in this zona seca has accumulated gradually, but relentlessly, in an example of what the eco-critic Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 3.5 million people in the region now need humanitarian assistance. And things are almost certain to get worse. The Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in early August, projects that most of Central America will become even hotter and drier in the coming decades.

Central Americans are paying the price for anthropogenic climate change they didn’t cause. Less than 1 percent of historical greenhouse gas emissions have been produced in Central America. But consider this: Since 1750, the U.S. has emitted almost twice as much as the rest of the world combined. Most of us learn as children the lesson that if you break something, you are responsible for fixing it—or, at the very least, for acknowledging what you did. More than any other nation on Earth, the U.S. is responsible for “breaking” the climate that has allowed human civilization as we know it to exist. When it comes to climate refugees—especially those from Central America—we have a special obligation to support and welcome them. Climate chaos has exacerbated the misery U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic policy has inflicted on the region for decades. “Climate change means either too little or too much water,” the author Todd Miller observed in his haunting, deeply reported 2017 book, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, “and we are already experiencing both.” A more stable hemispheric future will depend on a combination of adapting to the reality of too much or too little water where that is possible, and reshaping policies regarding refugees to accommodate those who have to flee the places where it isn’t.

This dynamic of hydrological extremes has set in motion a massive movement of people around the globe. The World Bank estimates that by 2050, unless we take dramatic action to stem greenhouse gas emissions, 143 million people will become internal climate migrants. One and a half million of those each year will hail from the Western Hemisphere, and will surge toward the U.S. border with Mexico.

Central Americans are already fleeing floods and droughts of Biblical proportions, moving first within their own nations but eventually heading north. According to a recent analysis by the advocacy organization Franciscans International, 821 people per day seek the possibility of asylum in the U.S. A recent joint reporting project between ProPublica and the New York Times modeled climate-induced migration in the region. Every single simulation the team generated (supplemented by powerful visualizations to bring the point home) predicted massive, destabilizing internal and external migration.

During my own time researching grassroots climate resilience efforts in the zona seca of northern Nicaragua, I observed how the increasing unpredictability of the climate can thwart even the most determined and imaginative initiatives. The people of Sabana Grande have received international acclaim for their solar energy projects, their agro-ecological restoration efforts, and their experiments in forest farming—and for the ways that these projects have empowered marginalized members of the community, especially women. Yet for all of the economic and social uplift these projects have produced, the climate-induced precarity of subsistence agriculture pushes people away—to cities in Nicaragua, but also to Costa Rica, Spain, and, increasingly, the United States.

Climate-induced migration is a quintessential “wicked problem.” The term, originally coined to convey the complexities of social policy formulation, describes a tangle of interlocking, difficult-to-articulate challenges, which only have solutions that produce additional challenges. The climate itself is a complex system that, in becoming more unpredictable, produces challenges for agriculture, infrastructure, and public health. Each of these areas, in turn, is made more vexing in places like Central America by poor governance, social and economic inequality, and pre-existing environmental degradation.

And there’s another wicked dimension to the climate migration problem: Until very recently, the U.S. federal government has been slow to acknowledge either the existence of, or the need for, aggressive policy to deal with the growing climate emergency.

In July, the Biden administration released a plan to address the Central American migration crisis. Unfortunately, the report reduced the role of climate almost to a footnote, instead emphasizing internal factors such as corruption, gender inequality, and economic development. All of these contribute to migration, but the rapidly changing climate is the context for them all, exacerbating every other problem people in Central America face. By emphasizing internal problems and downplaying the role of climate change in migration, the U.S. attempts to evade responsibility for its outsized role in loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

The U.S. should be supporting Central American governments in decreasing corruption, tackling inequality by promoting economic growth, and reducing violence as a way to help vulnerable people stay in their homes. But the fact remains that millions of people in the coming decades will have to find new places to live. Some will try to come to the United States. Any national strategy addressing the migration crisis should acknowledge that reality by unilaterally designating those fleeing climate disasters as refugees, and by agreeing to become a refuge for some meaningful number of them.

At the moment, people fleeing climate disaster do not qualify for refugee status. The United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, written in the aftermath of World War II and revised in the 1960s, clearly delineates political or social traumas that might compel a person or groups of people to flee their homes—for example, potentially mortal threats due to civil war, religious persecution, or political oppression—but does not mention displacement due to environmental disasters. The rules need an update. As María Cristina García, a historian at Cornell University who has devoted her recent scholarship to the post-war history of refugees, puts it, “People have been displaced by climate for millennia, but we are now at a particular historical moment, facing a new type of environmentally driven migration that will be more fast and furious. It will require incredible adaptability and political will to keep up with the changes that are forecasted to happen.”

Of the many wicked dimensions to the problem of climate refugees is the current paucity of political will to do more than throw up walls—literal and legal—and hope that they keep the challenges at bay. But hope is not a strategy, especially in the face of geophysical reality.

Miller concludes Storming the Wall with an epilogue: excerpts from a letter he’d written in 2015 to his unborn son, to be opened in the year 2050. There are “hundreds of thousands of groups, individuals, communities and movements putting themselves on the line, putting themselves in peril in order to imagine something new,” Miller writes, as an offering of grace to a 35-year-old version of a person he’s not met yet. He’s thinking of people like Martín Zapil, the 20-something K’iche’ farmer who founded Sorel Granjas Ecológicas, a cooperative that supplies vegetables to urban markets, along with thousands of other activists and organizations that promote more widespread land ownership to keep Central Americans in their homes. But such resilience initiatives and reforms can only partially stem the tide of people being irrevocably pushed away from home by anthropogenic climate change. For those who cannot stay, the United States has an obligation to become home for as many as we can accommodate.

The post What Does the U.S. Owe Climate Refugees? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But my experience of this generation, as a college professor of environmental studies, centers on another salient quality: Young people aren’t just motivated by climate change, they are downright traumatized by it. They are freaked out about the future of our planet, with a sense of urgency most of the rest of us haven’t been able to muster. This has profound political implications: Young people like my students are committed to making our world a better place. It’s my job, I’ve begun to think, to make sure that people in this “climate generation” don’t get swallowed up in an ocean of despair along the way.

The Gen Z students I am teaching now are different from those I’ve taught for 12 years. The students who used to choose environmental studies as a major, even as recently as five years ago, were often white outdoorsy types, idealistic, and eager to righteously educate the masses about how to recycle better, ride bikes more, eat locally, and reduce the impact of their lifestyles on the planet. They wanted to get away from the messiness of society and saw “humanity” as destroying nature.

By contrast, my Generation Z students care a lot more about humans. They flock to environmental studies out of a desire to reconcile humanity’s relationship with nature, an awareness that humanity and nature are deeply interconnected, and a genuine love for both. They are increasingly first-generation, non-white, and motivated to solve their communities’ problems by addressing the unequal distribution of environmental costs and benefits to people of color. They work with the Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous sovereignty groups fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and organizations that dismantle barriers to green space, such as Latino Outdoors. Unlike my students from earlier days of teaching, this generation isn’t choosing environmental studies to escape humanity; on the contrary, they get that the key to saving the environment is humanity.

It’s a vision of wholeness and hope—but it comes with a dark side. Digging into environmental studies introduces young people to the myriad ways that our interconnectedness in the world leads to all kinds of problems. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports predict that climate change and habitat destruction will increase the spread of infectious disease; climate also exacerbates health disparities between white and African American people in the U.S., including Black women’s pregnancy risks. Studying these sources makes it clear that the devastations of climate change will be borne unequally.

Some of my students become so overwhelmed with despair and grief about it all that they shut down. Youth have historically been the least likely to vote; but I’ve also seen many stop coming to lectures and seminars. They send depressed, despairing emails. They lose their bearings, question their relationships and education, and get so overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness that they barely pass their classes. One of my students became so self-loathing that she came to think the only way to serve the planet was to stop consuming entirely: reducing her environmental impact meant starving herself. Most young people I know have already decided not to have children, because they don’t want their kids growing up on a doomed planet. They barely want to be alive themselves. They often seem on the brink of nihilism before we even cover the syllabus.

The young people I am teaching say they will bear the worst consequences of processes they did not initiate, and over which they have little or no control. They speak of an apocalypse on the horizon. My students say they do not expect to enjoy the experiences older adults take for granted—having children, planning a career, retiring. For many youth, climate disruption isn’t a hypothetical future possibility; it is already here. They read the long predicted increases in extreme weather events, wildfires, sea level rise, habitat destruction, worsening health outcomes related to pollution, and infectious disease as clear signs that their worst fears will be realized not just in their lifetime, but right now.

This sense of doom is more widely felt, beyond college classrooms. Psychologists and environmental scholars are coming up with a whole new vocabulary to describe these feelings of despair, including solastalgia, climate anxiety, eco-grief, pre-traumatic stress, and psychoterratic illness.

Whatever one calls it, all of this uncertainty can immobilize young people when they feel they can do nothing to fix it. Their sense of powerlessness, whether real or imagined, is at the root of their despair. I have found that many young people have limited notions of how power works. My students associate “power” with really bad things, like fascism, authoritarianism, or force; or slightly less bad things like celebrity, political power, or wealth. They have little imagination about how to engage in social change, and even less imagination about the alternative world they would build if they could.

Without a sense of efficacy—the feeling of having control over the conditions of their lives—I fear some may give up on the difficult process of making change without even trying. Psychologists call this misleading feeling of helplessness the “pseudoinefficacy effect,” and it has a political dimension that may keep individuals from working to help others. This feeling may also sync up with Americans’ recent cultural and economic history of seeing ourselves as consumers. Some scholars have argued that limiting our ability to imagine ourselves as having agency beyond being consumers has resulted in the “privatization of the imagination.” The combination of the feeling of misplaced despair and the feeling that they can only make changes through lifestyle choices creates a sort of ideological box that blocks real democratic political change.

Meanwhile, there is very little in the mass media to suggest that young people have real power over changes in the climate at large—or even our political system. The 24/7 news cycle thrives when it portrays a world on fire. And mainstream media offers few stories about solutions or models for alternative, regenerative economies. The stories that are covered often only tackle technological or market solutions that have yet to be invented or produced. By portraying climate change as a problem that is too big to fix, and suggesting that the contributions of any single individual are too small to make a difference, these messages leave young people with little sense of what can be done. Amid the clamor of apocalyptic coverage, few are talking about what it would take to thrive in, instead of fear, a climate-changed future.

We cannot afford for the next generation of climate justice leaders’ dread to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their psychological resources of resilience, imagination, efficacy, and, against all odds, their fierce capacity for joy, are just as necessary for the future of a viable planet as natural resources like clean air and water. Activists and teachers of my generation must help Gen Z learn to push on the levers of technical, political, cultural, and economic change, and to draw on existential tools or “deep adaptation” in times of crisis.

There’s hope in the images on the streets and on social media: Today’s protests against police brutality are a testament to young people’s power and evidence of their commitment to their future. It isn’t an especially large leap from fighting a racist justice system to improving the planet; indeed, many in this generation see them as inextricably connected—that’s the point. And the rapid and radical changes that society has undertaken in response to COVID-19 is further evidence that change is possible. Humans can sacrifice and make collective changes to protect others—hopefully, in these difficult weeks, my students will be able to see that.

The trauma of being young in this historical moment will shape this generation in many ways. The rest of us have a lot to learn from them. And we would do well to help them see that their grief and despair are the other side of love and connection, and help them to channel that toward effective action. For their sake and that of the planet, we need them to feel empowered to shape and desire their future. They have superpowers unique to their generation. They are my antidote to despair.

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