Inheritors of a global mess are rising up

“It’s guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably f****d up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did.”

The words are uttered by the protagonist of John Lanchester’s novel ‘The Wall’. They could have been spoken by any of the tens of thousands of schoolchildren across the globe who, for a while now, have been ‘striking’ on Fridays to protest climate change. During school hours, they hold placards and raise slogans in town squares seeking definite measures from their governments to address the crisis.

Earlier this month, 21 children in the US filed a lawsuit against the US government for “knowingly” failing to protect them from the catastrophe.

The wave of awareness started gaining momentum much earlier and approached a crest when Swede Greta Thunberg, all of 16, began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. Her remonstrations served to rouse her peers, from the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic Circle, into conducting weekly protests demanding urgent action.

In videos addressed to heads of states, including our Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she has bluntly cautioned them against inaction. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told global leaders at the World Economic Forum at Davos.

But how many of us grown-ups are panicking?

The planet has warmed by “only” about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) since the pre-industrial era. But the frightful effects are all too apparent.

A third of the pristine Himalayan glaciers, for instance, will turn to water as the century draws to a close, stripping away water sources for 1.9 billion people across eight countries, warns a study on the Hindu Kush Himalayas.

There is no ambiguity here. The glaciers will melt, even if current efforts to cut carbon emissions succeed. If the efforts fail, the impact could dissolve two-thirds of the region’s glaciers.

It’s a lose-lose.

And in any case, it does not look like we are succeeding. The world is well on its way to heat up by over 3 degrees by 2100. Like never before, the globe is ravaged by wildfires and violent hurricanes, floods and untimely precipitation.

It won’t wash to tell the aghast children, ‘Look what we have done for social justice, life expectancy and space flight’ when the Earth is on its death bed. Advances in humanities and science will have come to nought from the viewpoint of historians chronicling this period, because we couldn’t help our addiction to cars, or widely adopt non-polluting fuel.

As journalist David Wallace-Wells writes, “Destroying the environmental conditions that gave rise to the human species “has been the work of a single generation.” And its children will pay.