People say to Levi what they say to all the plaintiffs: “You’re our last hope.” But Levi is eleven. He is only half as old as Kelsey, the oldest plaintiff. And Kelsey is only half as old as me. By the time we reach the IPCC deadline to take action to halt climate change or bust—2030, when unchecked global warming will usher in an era of food shortages, worsening wildfires, mass die-offs of coral reefs, persistent droughts, and rising seas swallowing coasts—Levi will be only twenty-three, barely old enough to drink a legal beer. If he goes to college, he might not have graduated. He may not have a job or housing of his own yet, if ever. What is it that grown-ups think he can do for them? And why haven’t they done it for him? Why are adults so eager to foist this baggage on the young, forfeit action of their own?
I spend a lot of time on these questions. I try not to let them come out of my mouth because, according to Kelsey, this type of guilty navel-gazing is insufferable. But it’s hard to be an adult in this situation, at least one of the older adults, without feeling like you have your fingerprints on the failed climate fight. As insufferable as it apparently makes me, I want to know how we got here.
I put this question to Julia Olson, a fellow Gen Xer and the lead attorney in the case, after the trial is canceled: Why weren’t we in the streets? How did we leave them with this? She says what I remember: “It felt like the threat, when I was growing up, was the Soviet Union, and it was the Cold War, and it was nuclear bombs. That was what my perception of what the threat to the world was until after college.” We are in her office, in what must have been a bedroom once, in a converted bungalow in downtown Eugene, a window looking onto a slim patch of lawn, wood paneling on the walls.
I remember this too. I didn’t grow up with nuclear fallout tunnels in my high school, like Olson did, her home in Colorado Springs somewhat neighbors with the North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD, the place where satellites and radar scanned the skies for incoming projectiles. But I do remember being terrified of nuclear war, that when we were the age the plaintiffs are now, we lived in fear of some unhinged adult pressing The Button and having to dive under our desks before the shockwaves came.
This day in her office, Olson and I talk about what we knew. How we were aware of global warming but had difficulty parsing it from the problem of the hole in the ozone, a problem targeted by an international agreement—the Montreal Protocol—and then solved. As we got older, it seemed like the problem of the atmosphere stayed solved. When Olson learned about climate change in college, it wasn’t taught to her in urgent terms. She became mindful of population growth, became a vegetarian. And that earth-loving ethos carried forward in the form of conscientious consumption, like it did for many people our age. I did what most of my peers did with this: bought recycled toilet paper and reusable coffee mugs and started up with theoretically responsible terms like “replacement population.” I stopped buying things that made the world worse—beef plumped full of hormones, vegetables doused in pesticides—and started fending for my health. But while we got older still, past old enough to drink that legal beer and have housing of our own, it became clear that climate change was a distinct threat, and an important one. What wasn’t clear was that we weren’t doing enough to stop it. That the projections for how much time we had to fix it were all wrong. And that climate change couldn’t be solved with the personal choices we were dutifully making at the cash register and by buying the right kind of car.
Now, Kelsey says that when she speaks in public there is often a kind of challenge that comes. It takes the form of a question, but it doesn’t seek an answer. It’s more like a rant in disguise. A castigation. It is almost always asked by a man, she says, usually a boomer. And whatever the phrasing, the real message is usually one of two things, or sometimes both. First: your hope is your naïveté. And second: if this problem could be fixed, we would have fixed it.
Lately she’s been on a bit of a conference circuit: schools and universities, topical events around food rights and fashion. In these places, sure as she moves her mouth, she is often scolded for it. And she hates this. This work is her heart and she wants to talk about it as much as she can, wants to bring people along with her. But she doesn’t think it’s her job to justify the youth climate movement to older people or to keep explaining why it exists. Unless they are in charge of things or want to stand with her, it hardly matters what they think. They are bystanders now. Most dead and gone by the time the mess they made starts to be her generation’s—Gen Z’s—to clean. If they want to know, want to understand, she thinks they ought to try to educate themselves. She is tired of doing it.
She brings this up one day over lunch. Looks sideways to a corner of her brain where these thoughts have been stewing and tries to articulate what it is that’s been nagging at her. The analogy she uses is this one: it shouldn’t be up to people of color to explain racism, or to women to explain what it means to be sexually harassed. And it shouldn’t be up to the young to explain their call for a livable planet to the people who are on course to leave it in shambles. She says: don’t let your guilt be the center of things when really it is not about you.
Of course, she is right. Isn’t this the root of the blowback question, after all? Guilt? And ego? Both take flight as skepticism, as denial, as if the young are ungrateful for the America that is theirs. Why isn’t it good enough for you, young lady, when it was good enough for us? We were hot too. We bought air conditioners.
Oh, but I see it. The white flag rising. The roll over. The turn away. This surrender, shrouded in its alternating turns of guilt and of denial.
More questions for Kelsey. At yet another podium in yet another auditorium, weeks later, here it comes, the reproach. From the handwritten cards collected from the audience. It happens all the time now. From the microphone, between the extemporaneous soliloquies about how they fought too. Sometimes it happens in the grocery store, in press interviews, on the Internet. People ask her how she feels about a newly conservative Supreme Court. If she really thinks she can win. If her optimism is all that deserved. But sometimes to be successful, she says, you have to accept that success is not a guarantee. Maybe the most important fights don’t come with a roadmap to winning. Isn’t this the core of her case against the government? That there is no path for redress? Civil rights leaders didn’t have a roadmap either. They used the courts because we have a Constitution. It is supposed to be enough.
Kelsey joined this movement as a young person because she was worried about the future. But now that the future is here, she says she sees younger people like Levi join the movement because they are worried about themselves. Already the metric of urgency is recalibrating, decade by decade, even within Gen Z.
Also recalibrating? The guilt. Our guilt is for them. But for Kelsey? “My guilt is a milk latte to go,” she says. Every paper cup, every plastic lid a tiny torture. She knows we need systemic change. Still, her part in being a person hurts. So does this judgment about the ways that she lives with it. Until we understand that, she says, we don’t understand what it’s like to be young in this world, to only ever live amid the threat of ecological collapse. To be young enough to have to care how it turns out.
Those of us who are older, it’s not our fault that our government did not say: we need massive, systemic change, and we have to do this now—or else. Or that our government chose to downplay this inevitability. Those facts are betrayals of all of us, not just of them. But when we don’t listen to the affected generation now, when we don’t acknowledge this neglect of oversight—maybe that is our betrayal of them.
———
All of us now, in America, face a personal reckoning with the compounding environmental debt wrought by this failure. For Olson, this realization landed hard in a movie theater in 2006 when she was watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. She was pregnant with her second child, trying to escape the heat, and, watching the floods and fires and the other perils of climate breakdown foretold on screen, heartsick.
The reaction she would ultimately have—a strategy to seed fifty-one legal actions in a single year—wouldn’t come for a while. First, she had to have that baby and be her best self for that child and the one that came before it, not yet three years old. For her, it was a time of grinding her own grains and making bread and fresh yogurt and doing her best to care for the two young people who were depending on her for love and shelter and sustenance. On the environmental front, she resolved that she would fly less, purge plastic, be a member of her community, and do what she could from home.
But when her youngest was three and a half, successfully weaned, the age of making bread and yogurt began to give way to whatever else could be made from scratch. Now that no one was physically attached to her, didn’t physically always need her, she was thinking about what legal action had been taken on climate change, how inadequate it so far seemed. She envisioned something bigger, more coordinated and global, litigation to spur systemic change, not just react to the latest fad in fossil fuels.
This drive she felt, it was both past and prologue. Olson knew what it was like to struggle as a young person, didn’t wish it on anyone. She was seventeen, sitting in a car in her neighborhood in Colorado Springs, when a mentally ill man with access to guns shot her in the chest one day in 1988, collapsing her lung and sending her hurtling toward emergency surgery and a new life. What followed then was a week in the hospital, a period of disorientation and healing. Eventually, she rose up another person. And in between there was an infuriating letter from the man who shot her—all defense, short on empathy—handed to her in the moments while she waited outside a courtroom, before she would walk in and tell a judge what she wanted the court to do with this man. In between, no one knew how to help her with how this experience felt.
“Nobody understood what that would mean for me, as a seventeen-year-old, going through that. And nobody knew how to help me around that, to integrate that experience and heal from that experience.” We are still in her office, sitting now with knees not far apart in a corner of the room where a couch and a chair are squeezed in the space around her desk.
It was a formative time for many reasons, she says. It was the first time she saw the clout that lawyers and judges could have in a courtroom. Felt the power of being asked how she wanted a bad situation to end. Learned who she would be in the world when she told the judge that what she wanted was for the man who shot her to never own a gun again and to get the help he needed so he could come back to the community without hurting anyone else. Henceforth, hers would be a path of compassionate justice. College. Law school. She grew up fast, had always been growing up fast. She learned to fight, to be independent, to persevere through challenges. Now her favorite thing is climbing mountains, standing on top. Along the way, she learned how empowering it is to speak for yourself, and for the world to make room for you to simply say what you need to.
“I think that is one of the things that’s so important for young people—whether it is climate trauma or gun trauma or violence, it’s allowing them to have a platform and a voice to share their experience and their story and try to educate others and to get other people to try to stand with them. I think a lot about that. I didn’t have that,” she says.
She didn’t know how to give that platform to young people in the climate fight. But she wanted to at least stand with them. So she attended an environmental law conference at the University of Oregon, where she started to get clear on what her vision for litigation looked like. She heard a speech by Mary Christina Wood, the head of the university’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center and a scholar who had already devised a strategy.
———
Wood had the same effect on Olson that she would have on Alex Loznak—an intoxicating one. A woman of unconventional thought with a righteous environmental bent, Wood was a child growing up in the sixties and seventies when she witnessed the plundering of the Columbia River watershed. This after the bridge between Portland and Vancouver was built, paving the way for thousands of acres of farmland to become “wall-to-wall suburbia.” She would later write in her 351-page treatise, Nature’s Trust, about how developers tore up the farms and “bulldozers operated from dawn to dusk, demolishing wetlands, creeks, forests, springs . . .” Trees, soil, riparian land were collateral damage in the remaking of her world. “McMansions sprouted everywhere, as far as the eye could see, separated only by strip malls pimpled with huge box stores and fast food,” she wrote.
Wood declared this era one of legalized plunder. The laws that were supposed to stop it, she later theorized, were a significant part of the problem. Consider Earth Day 1970, when twenty million people took to the streets to protest everything from water pollution to smog and clear-cutting, pressed government to hold industry accountable. What followed was the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act—eighteen such statutes that proponents pronounced a win. But if they could allow the pillaging of entire ecosystems by developers, did they work? Wood did not think so.
“They are the permission slips for unmitigated disaster, as far as I can tell,” she says one day, in a conference room at the law center. It’s on the second floor of the law school at the University of Oregon, a place with an arched entrance, flat carpeting, and a lounge lit by two-story windows for the students who never seem to stop studying there.
By then, Wood had chalked modern environmental law up to “a failed legal experiment.” These laws she refers to, they’re called statutory environmental laws. And it is hard to argue with her when she says that instead of phasing out pollution, as intended, these laws opened the door for governments to permit select abuses of nature, a door Americans are still trying to close. In between, Wood notes, the system became byzantine, with one federal manual topping two thousand pages just to explain it. She calls such tomes the handbooks of lobbyists. And says permits are not unique, instead sanctioning assaults on the environment with a kind of humdrum daily rigor. Chemical plants and clear-cuts. Mountaintop removal mining and the spreading of chemical waste on farms. Sewage and toxins dumped into waterways. All while society is numb to these things, convinced the law is working.
“Statutory law isn’t the only law,” Wood tells me. “There’s another premise, or a more foundational set of laws or body of law called the public trust. And it’s preconstitutional. It’s got constitutional force and it actually should channel the discretion of the executive agencies. They can’t just do what they want.”
What she’s referencing is called the public trust doctrine. And in her scholarly work, Wood has excavated this doctrine from all the rest. That day in the law school, she likens the work to pulling the ivy off the useless other law that covered it. She says its roots date to 535 AD, to the Roman Institutes of Justinian and the Magna Carta of England, to the courts of the United States and beyond. Once, it was a thing that made democracy distinct from oligarchy: to have a government that protected the assets of its people. Some legal thinkers, Wood among them, say this public trust ideology is what America’s founders carried to the New World in their boats. They used words like posterity, which implied they meant for things to be around awhile, sustaining one generation after the next. Thomas Jefferson, for example, described in letters to John Taylor and James Madison how when it comes to nature, each generation has equal right “to the free possessions of the earth . . . for their subsistence, unencumbered by their predecessors who, like them, were but tenants for life.” Or, in other words, as Wood put it, “one generation could not bind another with natural debt.”
She assembled all of this—the letters, the case law. And she found that the American courts had tested some of it. Enough to decide that the federal government ought to maintain the waters of the nation in some sort of navigable state, and that the state of Illinois should not be in the business of handing over the shores of Lake Michigan to a railroad company. And even though the nation has since been mired in statutory law, handing the authority to protect the environment over to the states, who have handed it over to bureaucrats, Wood says reasserting government’s role to protect the wilds is doable. Anywhere circumstances have crossed boundaries, say a river, or where the scale of threat has spanned states, or disputes have arisen over the shared resources of nations, she says the case has been made. Oregon used a similar rationale when its Supreme Court made the state’s beaches public. So have other nations relying on international law, like the Supreme Court of the Philippines when it halted logging for fear of the forests vanishing, and the Supreme Court of India when it asserted trust over natural gas reserves to maintain a supply for the Indian people. Just because the responsibility to protect the environment has been abdicated by Congress, by courts, by a disengaged public, and by executive agencies that have more or less fallen captive to industry, she says, doesn’t mean the law can’t still force it back into place. From her perspective, this means using the public trust to accommodate the things we now know people need to survive: biodiversity, groundwater, forests, healthy soils. And, yes, a stable climate.
To her detractors—and there are plenty—Wood wrote in her book, “No law should be defined by its violation,” and suggested maybe the biggest stumbling blocks to change are activists themselves. She thinks all the people who are calling for change, and have been doing so for years, are “so demoralized by the overwhelming corporate influence on government that they find any transformative approach unimaginable.” She wants to unstick them. Unstick all of it.
Hearing these ideas, Julia Olson was hooked. That Wood was a mother in the same stage of mothering, her and Olson’s children all of an age, made for a certain synergy. Within a few weeks of meeting Wood, Olson was fomenting all of this into action. Her birthday was in April, so she did the thing she always did: took a hike with a group of friends, climbed Spencer Butte south of Eugene and hung out on the rocky summit overlooking the valley until it was dark. At the top of the butte—as she liked to do each year—she set her intentions for the next. That’s when she said it out loud.
“I said, ‘This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to do this big whole thing and we’re going to file cases everywhere around the world,’” Olson says later.
She intended for it to be a pro bono endeavor. A volunteer mission. But it turned out that filing dozens of lawsuits requires at least a small staff. Which requires at least a small budget. Which requires some sort of organization. So Olson founded a nonprofit. She called it Our Children’s Trust, a term culled from Wood’s theories, to underscore the notion that children have a vested interest in nature, and that it’s up to the government to protect it for them. Olson and a core group of female colleagues joined the inaugural board, made it official.
This is how it came to be that this movement of youth lawsuits was founded not by funders or by activists or exclusively by youth. And not—as conspiracy theorists would later charge—liberal ideologues bent on infecting the youth with talk of the climate hoax. But by a handful of super-pissed-off moms and aunties who also happen to be lawyers. That several of these women are Gen X moms whose Gen Z kids will grow up to face the consequences of the climate fight—won or lost—is no coincidence.
———
Filing all the lawsuits took another ten months. Lots of attorneys, all of them pro bono, with Olson minding the deadlines and the consistency of the cases. A series of strategic meetings came next. The first brought roughly thirty attorneys, about a third of them from abroad, to a bland conference room at the Phoenix Inn hotel in Eugene. There they considered whether to sign on as volunteers, sue state and federal governments on behalf of the young. It was mostly Olson’s job to convince them, so she invited two persuasive speakers. One was James Hansen, the renowned former NASA scientist who had testified to Congress in the eighties that climate change is real, man-made, and urgent. The other was Alec Loorz, age sixteen.
Alec, with his mother, was the founder of Kids vs. Global Warming and iMatter. He was not a heavyweight by James Hansen’s standards, but like Xiuhtezcatl he was an early youth advocate in the climate fight, known to a lot of other kids. Plus, he could talk. At sixteen, Alec’s voice was already a commanding one, and he had the poise and conviction of someone who spoke from the heart. His ability to understand what was happening to the environment and to translate it into a message that inspired people was especially unique, both for the person and the era. He was so effective at this that in the six years he was active as a youth advocate, Alec gave more than five hundred talks, had to leave school in the eighth grade just to accommodate all the requests.
He was a prepper, so he had a PowerPoint. And after Hansen explained the science to the roomful of attentive attorneys, Alec walked to the front.
He doesn’t remember the exact words that tumbled out. But he remembers well what was on his mind then. How he was learning, like a lot of other youth, that he was not simply a powerless juvenile with ideas that no one wanted to hear. But rather, precisely because of his age, he was able to claim a moral authority to speak about the future because he was among the young people who would inherit it. As a public speaker, he sometimes felt short on tools—a voice was only that. But he also knew his message was a powerful one. And what was obvious to others was that he was born a person who could wield words like weapons, send tornadoes through people’s minds. When he heard about the lawsuits, they struck him as a way to amplify what it was he and other young activists were trying to say.
“It could have been that I was the one . . . who brought that point in a clear way about our future, that we as youth have a right to a livable planet, and this is a way to actually make our voices heard on a scale that’s larger than we’re able to otherwise,” he tells me one day on the phone, reflecting back on this story now nearly a decade old. “I can definitely remember that feeling, the sense of, ‘Oh sweet, you guys can help. I’ve been trying to do this as a public speaker but if you’re able to do this, if you all are lawyers and you actually have an approach, I know young people who would be plaintiffs.’”
What the lawyers heard was the momentum of his voice, and a request as clear as anything: We need you. Please help.
“All these attorneys sitting there and hearing this young person . . . just blew everybody away,” Olson said.
Every attorney in the room signed on. And Alec became the first plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that challenged government inaction on climate change. He also used his extensive network to help recruit many of the kids that became plaintiffs in state actions, including Xiuhtezcatl. Not all were lawsuits—some were state-level rulemaking efforts, but legal matters all the same. Around Mother’s Day 2011, all of them dropped at once. Fifty-one in America, targeting all fifty states and the federal government.
Alec’s case didn’t last long by legal standards. Two years. And Alec left the movement soon after, grateful for the experience but burned out by seventeen, exhausted by the effort and by the weight of such a heavy psychic burden. He emerged years later, an aspiring artist and filmmaker intent on observing the subtle changes of landscape. With his camera he could illustrate, it seemed, the connection a person could have with a place. He believed this was the piece the movement had missed: that at our core, humans are nature and nature is us. As with Levi and the crane, Alec sensed a conversation brewing that would never be had in words. He turned his focus to expression, to art, and found a new peace in being able to express himself with something other than that incredible voice.
The legal loss was a setback for the attorneys. “The feedback we got back from the courts was you need to challenge something the government is actually doing, not its failure to act,” Olson says.
Undaunted, they integrated that feedback into new strategies, new cases. And started again.
———
The next lawsuit would be brought on behalf of the Juliana twenty-one, a group assembled largely by Kelsey and Xiuhtezcatl, who were already plaintiffs in state lawsuits in Oregon and Colorado. The group also included several youths who’d reached out to Our Children’s Trust on their own or participated in its camps.
Five years earlier, Olson had recruited Phil Gregory to the legal team. A trial lawyer with a history of crafting battle-ready plans for big corporate lawsuits, Gregory organized the attorneys according to the same playbook the government later appeared to have used—the Big Tobacco playbook. He knew tobacco litigation was successful for one reason: because somebody leaked the documents showing that executives knew smoking caused cancer and was addictive. He wanted to do the same thing for the Juliana case: prove the government knew about climate change and knew it posed a threat to its citizenry.
Every plaintiff made their own choice about what roles they wanted to play—talk to the press and the crowds, stand down on the extracurriculars, or roll up their sleeves on research. Alex Loznak, the southern Oregonian whose family farms hazelnuts, would be unique among the plaintiffs in his passion for the legal work. His first year at Columbia behind him, Alex was increasingly drawn to the law, and what he wanted was an internship. To dig deeply into the legal aspects of the case and garner trial-level experience as an undergrad. So he got it.
Along with the lawyers, Alex was among those dispatched on a hunt for evidence. His particular charge was a search of presidential libraries. He scoured letters. Memos. Reports. Index by index. Box by box. Science. Meteorology. His task was to ask two questions: What did the government know? And when did the government know it? He combed the Eisenhower library in Abilene, Kansas, an Old West kind of town where volunteer actors reenact cowboy gunfights. Then the Truman library in Independence, Missouri, where Truman trained his own docents and sometimes liked to answer the phones. Then the Kennedy library in Boston, where he found the letter.
“It’s the first known White House mention of climate change,” Alex says, grinning later at the kitchen table in his childhood home. The letter is from 1961. He calls it “my little footnote in the history book.”
It’s an exceptional footnote. The letter is a response from President Kennedy’s assistant to New Mexico senator Clinton Anderson. Anderson had written to Kennedy the week before, urging him to read an article published in Fortune in 1955, in which a brilliant physicist and mathematician who had worked on the Manhattan Project used computers to model the effects of a warming globe on glaciation, precipitation, sea level rise, hurricanes, and the habitability of the coasts.
“It’s a really broad, sweeping article that talks about just various impacts of technology on human society and it sort of predicts all of these doomsday scenarios,” Alex says. “He talked about automation and how automation was going to eliminate jobs. This is in 1955 and now we’re talking about it, so he had some very good predictions. But one of the things that he predicts is carbon dioxide emissions are going to cause warming and it’s going to cause Greenland and Antarctica to melt and cause 15 feet of sea level rise. This is in 1955. And he also said that the earth had already warmed 1 degree Fahrenheit at that point in 1955 as a result of carbon dioxide emissions.”
This was at a time when policy makers were fleetingly absorbed in the prospect of making rain, the question of whether they could manipulate weather for farming and other purposes. The article posited maybe so, but cautioned that weather was a product of solar energy absorbed by Earth and subject to delicate influences. That to mess with it would affect the whole world, merge interests between nations more than the economy or wars ever had.
Kennedy’s assistant responded with thanks for the letter and article. When Alex found both, he was inside the library. Built on what used to be a garbage dump, it stood on Columbia Point in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, overlooking Dorchester Bay through a 115-foot tower of gray glass. As Alex read these 61-year-old words, words warning that a melting Greenland and Antarctica could cause massive sea level rise, he paused to watch the water lilt not far from where he stood. It provoked “this eerie feeling, looking out across the waters and seeing, well, you know, that may come true.”
This typewritten exchange between Kennedy and Anderson is now enshrined on a timeline of what-the-government-knew-when that rings the walls of Olson’s office. It is handwritten on a massive strip of butcher paper, brainstormed over with Magic Marker, a mural of evidence that starts just to the left of the door and traverses first a plaster wall, then the wood paneling of the next, wrapping around Olson’s desk. On the whole of this banner, probably 25 feet of it, this letter that Alex found represents a single bullet point. One. Tiny. Bullet. Point.
The rest are mind blowing. Svante Arrhenius’s 1890 discovery of the greenhouse effect. His clear warning that the world’s industrial processes emit carbon dioxide that causes global warming. Confirmation of that theory from Guy Callendar in 1938, when Roosevelt was president, and Callendar’s assertion that humans were an agent of change. The first days of government-sponsored carbon monitoring in Hawaii in 1958. The subsequent scientific focus on what all this carbon dioxide would do. The worry that it could cause more than 3 degrees Celsius of warming. The discovery by 1969 that doubling the carbon that had already accumulated would cause 2 degrees Celsius of warming. The understanding that that was bad. A 1965 White House report in the Johnson administration with a whole chapter on atmospheric carbon. A National Academy of Sciences report projecting a 25-percent increase in carbon accumulation by 2000 without change. Nixon’s national Energy Future report, recommending a national shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewables in 1973. Ford’s State of the Union address in 1975 calling for reduction of oil imports, development of alternative energy, and establishment of pollution standards for cars. The start of the ethanol fuels program that followed. Efforts to contain pollution. A 1977 report from the Government Accounting Office that life on Earth would be harmed by 2 degrees Celsius of warming, urging limits on atmospheric carbon over the next one hundred to two hundred years. The 1983 EPA report recommending an end to coal burning by 2000, a ban on oil shale, a 300-percent carbon tax to halt global warming before it reached 2 degrees Celsius by 2040, and up to 11 feet of sea level rise by 2100. Then the retrench. Reagan. A new focus on fossil fuels. A Department of Energy research program on fracking. The ensuing march of more of the same—Bush, Clinton, Bush—until Obama made the United States the number one producer of oil and gas in the world, bragged about it, even as he warned of a changing climate.
The first time I see this, see government knowledge of climate science and understand the depth of the science itself, absorb that the list is so long it wraps around a room, I am thoroughly, incomprehensibly angry. This is not so typical. Despite all charges to the contrary, twenty years in journalism makes it very hard for a person to get worked up. Every day is human foible, and much of it looks like the same kind of foible, over and over again. This, though, this is different. When I see it, I feel hoodwinked, bamboozled. Like I spent years watching the wrong hand of politics while the other was doing magic tricks.
It strikes me then why so many people think climate change is a conspiracy. Because when you have a government in possession of such extensive scientific knowledge, and that government is abdicating responsibility to act while its leaders pander to moneyed special interests, and those interests get ever more moneyed by seeding doubt about the need to ever do anything, that actually is a conspiracy. And it is not a cabal of liberals in cahoots with academics in cahoots with the media, as the worst of conspiracy theorists will tell you, thanks to all that money. It is much simpler than that. It is just rich people helping other rich people get richer by forestalling action on a difficult problem that the government really ought to be solving. The Great Recession should be evidence enough that the American establishment will push its citizenry to the brink of ruin. And also that Americans are quite capable of whistling their way straight off a cliff as long as they are following the money.
I hate to admit my ignorance. I really do, because it makes me feel like a fool. I knew that oil drives wars and elections, drives the politics of the Middle East. I knew that climate change is the result of fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emission. That it is real. That we need to do something about it. But I didn’t know that my government saw climate breakdown as imminent, did not heed dire warnings for decades, meanwhile supported policies and industries that worsened this problem, and also engaged the nation in a debate about whether the problem even exists, eating the clock while it counted down to a crisis that only compounded.
In soccer, this period of endgame dawdling is called garbage time. When I look at these walls, see this enormous banner, I realize I have been living my entire adult, voting life in garbage time.
———
Until this moment in Olson’s office with the timeline, my sense of why Gen X had lost focus on the climate fight had more to do with resignation. I thought that novelist Douglas Coupland had been right about Gen X all along. That we arrived at adulthood thinking we’d already failed and just stayed that way because nothing we were taught to expect about adult life in America was really the way it turned out to be. No laugh track, few self-fulfilling careers. Little financial security, and worse, midcareer when the economy upended, sandwiched between the parents and the kids with a wildcard case of layoffs and furloughs.
Now middle aged, Xers are a generation of cynics. People who struggled to find purpose in the vast landscape of shopping malls and convenience stores of their youth. Caught somewhere between knowing their good fortune relative to the young and feeling screwed all the same, screwed by this culture that commoditized everything or threw it away, by our parents’ generation that held onto power until Xers were simply skipped over; Gen X is a generation that would never execute its vision for leadership so never had one. Maybe Gen X should have inherited more of this nation, assumed the environmental mantle. But what we have instead are halfhearted stabs at Earth Day, recycled toilet paper, the locavore movement, and the mild commercial success of the electric vehicle. These are moderate gains, slight improvements on what came before. But in many ways they are like the clapper, like reality television—relics of a generation raised on suburbs and detention, on sugary cereal, to questionable effect.
Somewhere in between, the Internet came along and X made the world a little smaller—created YouTube and Amazon, Wikipedia and Netflix, Google—as a way out of America’s suffocating cotton-candy culture. But as writer Jeff Gordinier would observe, Gen X figured out how to connect but not how to join, too antiestablishment. Reflecting on Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle, he wrote, “The Beast was inaction. . . . The Beast was the very act of sitting around waiting for something to happen.” And the inaction was us.
We never did what these kids are doing. We didn’t take to the courts to demand something better. We didn’t run for office—not often—and win the grassroots vote. The few Gen Xers who felt the call to urgency, who stormed into action as the Earth Liberation Front, burning ski resorts and research facilities, torching SUVs, they were hunted by the second Bush administration and made examples of, sentenced to federal prison for far longer than a lot of people would have believed. Calling them terrorists in a post-9/11 world was enough to erase what they had to say. To make them enemies of the state and their tactics a thing no one else would try. Maybe the rest of the Xers fell into line with this, realized that resistance was futile, and did what we were trained to do all along: watch, disaffected, change the channel, recede.
Maybe I am insufferable, but all of this bothers me. Don’t believe me? Consider this: 75 percent of people eighteen to thirty-four were worried about global warming in a spring 2018 Gallup poll. That number for Gen Xers was 62 percent. Boomers? 56 percent.
Historian Bill Kovarik puts it into perspective, though. He reminds me that what Olson and I remember from our youths—the panic about nuclear war, the sense of horror at the adults in charge—was society recalibrating the wrong turn the climate fight took, the one we’re not old enough to remember. That climate change was indeed clear to past presidents, and society too. That some effort was made at solving the problem. That the security community drove some of those efforts, aware of the political instability climate change could cause; and that even ordinary Americans got a whiff of this with the oil embargos of the seventies. Some thought the answer was nuclear power, all while renewables were more palatable and not such a bad idea either. There was talk about a country that could be more self-reliant, more energy independent.
“Part of the urgency got sidetracked into the nuclear power debate,” Kovarik says. “People say it’s about capitalism but it’s about a failure of leadership. . . . When young people look up and say, ‘Where the hell did everybody go and what’s going on?’ I don’t blame them.”
Gen Z. Where does that leave them?
I’ll let this chilling paragraph surmise. It’s from a white paper about Gen Z’s flare for ironic humor, a deep dive into things like young women mocking feminism with knee socks and anti-immigration T-shirts on social media: “Underlying the emergence of youth reactionary culture is the glaring failure of neoliberal capitalism to deliver on its promises. Young Americans will face the worst economic odds of any post-war generation. Life expectancy continues to drop (mostly in Red states). Teenagers cannot identify the causes of this general decline but they have already internalized its downward trajectory. Their grandparents’ single-earner income provided for a four-person household. Their parents’ same family unit now struggles to reproduce its standing with two earners in the workforce. Just a few years ahead of them, Millennials with multiple roommates all tweet about the perils of student debt and freelance precarity. These material considerations, combined with the real existential threat of climate change, make Gen Z acutely aware that they are living at the end of an era; that they were born on the other side of the so-called ‘end of history.’”
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It’s all just the system, right? It’s always been the system.
“Gotta have faith in the system!” says Andrea Rodgers. She was among the next attorneys to join the Juliana legal team, and this comment, this is sarcasm. She has the guilt too.
Rodgers has long had faith in the law, though. Legal aptitude runs in her family. Her father, also a lawyer, filed the first petition to ban DDT, sued the chief of police of Seattle, and spent a career fighting the corporate takeover of the American government. He also represented the Puyallup Tribe in the Fish Wars, among the first cases to put Northwest courts at the forefront of exactly the kind of judicial remedies the Juliana plaintiffs are seeking: one in which a judge would put executive agencies under supervision, in that case for failing to enforce treaty rights to fish. So Rodgers grew up understanding that fighting for what’s right is just what you do. And that the environment is almost always in peril, no matter how much you do it. She was taught that courts are for justice. And that when there’s an injustice, the courts are there to fix it.
Still, after the trial is canceled, she worries about how slowly the courts have responded to the youth. “It’s been . . . years since we filed our complaint and they still haven’t gotten to have their case heard at trial, and I’m asking them to believe and have faith in that system. They’ve been plaintiffs, some of them, for a third of their lives,” she says. “I think, for them, that’s hard to do because they have been in the system and have seen what it’s like.”
Olson wants her clients to have the chance to talk about how this weighs, how bruising it all is. Somewhere public. Somewhere that matters. It’s the kind of experience she wanted as a victim of gun violence but never had. “I had a lot of help healing physically. But emotionally, I was not supported. Friends didn’t understand, family, teachers,” she says.
The afternoon light is sliding through the window and she says there was a neighbor—a quiet man, a Vietnam veteran with older children—who seemed the only one to see her then. He had a Purple Heart from the war, and he came to her home and sat with her one afternoon. Gave her the Purple Heart. A powerful moment at a time when it was a struggle to connect.
Now there are support services for such things. More mass shootings, more people who live in communities that deal daily with gun violence, more public awareness, more places for victims to go, for youth victims to stand up, to advocate for safety, to say, This is how this feels.
“God, if my plaintiffs can ever sit on a witness stand and one day do that, that will be huge. Giving that voice to youth and that ability to really participate in these existential issues is so important.”
Olson makes this association between the trauma of gun violence and the trauma of environmental collapse from the unique vantage of having seen both. And because she understands that trauma is just trauma, whether it hits you in the form of a bullet or in some other way.