It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.
—Mary Oliver
When I began this book, William, you were still in your mother’s womb. When I saw you then—your tiny heart thumping in colorless ultrasounds—I was mesmerized by your beauty, your innocence, your potential. I never thought I would have a child, but there you were before my eyes. At this point, I could only make out the vague shape of your body, I didn’t know the color of your hair, I didn’t know your sex, I didn’t know anything about you, except that I had never felt such tenderness.
In November 2015, the Tucson Weekly asked me to write a letter. The idea was for the letter to be to a loved one, and would address the future of the world undergoing climate change. I accepted the invitation and chose to write you a letter meant to be read in the year 2050, the year you will turn 35, an important year, I remember, for climate projections on your great-grandmother’s island in Marinduque.
I was staying in a small apartment in Paris when I began to write to you. It was one week after the city had been traumatized by an attack that had killed 130 people. And it was one week before the most important global climate summit that had been organized up to that point. The purpose of the letter was to predict the summit’s outcome, because there was so much at stake. In many ways this book has been an extension of that letter to you, my child.
On the day I began to write you, things seemed bleak. Outside my small Paris apartment the sky was grey and a cold rain was falling. There had already been 20 previous such summits over 20 years. Despite our growing scientific understanding of its impact, civilization kept pumping billions of metric tons of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere every year. Even after the urgency of the situation became palpable, humans could not seem to rein in the pollution. Eventually some began to say that we were fast approaching—if not already past—the point of no return. Way back then, we had already locked into a trajectory that scientists deemed unsafe and unmanageable for you and your future.
I wrote a lot to you in that first letter, much of which has appeared in the pages in this book. I wrote about all the climate pressures predicted for the area, how they compound each other and cause catastrophe. I wrote about heat waves and dust storms and water shortages and wildfires, all the elements of the southern Arizona where you will grow up, that could force increasing numbers of people to flee.
Predicting 2050, I wrote about homeland security checkpoints deployed on the interstates going in and out of Phoenix and Tucson, and the officials who claimed to erect them as temporary measures for “the protection of the people.” I speculated about a new United States, carved into exclusion zones, with militarized lines of division and new blockades only allowing the passage of people with certain papers. I wrote that the likelihood of the world becoming a militarized surveillance state was probably as predictable as all the other consequences of climate change. And it is true, the dynamics of global warming and militarization may shape the world you inhabit more than any other, my child.
But now I want to describe another moment to you, when I was leaving Marinduque, the island of your great-grandmother.
As the ferry pulled away from the island, kids shrieked in joy as they swam toward our boat. The fresh smell of the sea was exhilarating. As we pulled out, I thought of my grandmother moving away slowly from the same island in the 1930s. The island looked startling, a mist graced the green hills topped with coconut palms that swayed in the wind. Slightly rusted boats rocked back and forth in the harbor. Those were the boats that head out into shifting seas, more moody than ever in the age of climate change.
Then, for a moment, the sky and the sea were the same color, and the division between land and sea was indistinguishable. There was a momentary sense of the possibility that there was a world out there that was miraculous, and that a miracle could indeed happen—a miracle of the spirit, a miracle of politics, a miracle of economics, a miracle of the human imagination—a sense that the ordinary was pregnant with the extraordinary that was always there, just waiting to be called into being.
I hope, my child, that when you read this in 2050, if nothing else, you find that these words help rev your spirit, kindness, and generosity to join with others to transcend boundaries and borders. I want you to visit this island. I want you to see where your great grandmother grew up. I want you to meet the beautiful child I saw in the man’s arm on the beach, his black hair tossing in the wind of that distant typhoon as I watched the foamy waves smash into the shore.
After all, it was there in the land of our ancestral past that I may have found our common future.
I wasn’t sure what I’d find in Marinduque. Yes, I found an island in danger of being engulfed by the sea or destroyed by typhoons, but I also found a deep tenderness. I felt your great-grandmother, whose whispers graced this small island at every corner. I could imagine when she was in her mother’s womb, William, the way you were when I was there.
Feelings of tenderness bring love and power, and I felt all three, William, as I left the island and felt connected to our past and future. Perhaps I was touching what the poet Mary Oliver means when she writes, “Always leave room in your heart for the unimaginable.” It’s a feeling I experienced right when we sailed off from Marinduque, when the color of the sea briefly and magically matched the color of the sky. As we sailed away and I deeply inhaled the intoxicating sea air, William, I knew something was shifting inside. A tenderness had softened my brittle places, and how I envisioned the future—your future.
Every journey is a process of change. You start as one person. You end as another. People still treat you like you are who you were. They may not be able to see the transformation.
Perhaps we who are born in the Anthropocene era are doomed. The rising seas may indeed swallow islands and inundate coastal mega-cities. We may perish from droughts, superstorms, or the bullets of the elite. Civilization is dying. The unsustainable system is collapsing now under its own weight. It may be too late to organize for change. But even so, you should not stop from daring to imagine something new. You should continue to be a counterforce for the common good.
The possibilities are endless. There are hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of groups, individuals, communities, and movements putting themselves on the line, putting themselves in peril, in order to imagine something new. In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit shows that there have been so many events that have happened, even just in the last 30 years—from the fall of the Berlin wall to the advance of LGBT rights—that have significantly altered our world. There have been so many successes of grassroots movements, achievements that have gone by without sufficient recognition. And I imagine that by the time you read this in 2050, there will be many more such victories to celebrate. There has to be hope. Hope with teeth and muscle, like the grit of ordinary people who join together to protest, march, and challenge injustice.
The living world, my child, is calling on us to make bridges, not borders. The world is calling us to build bridge across language barriers, gender barriers, social barriers, racial barriers, generational barriers. I think we can even cross borders of time and speak with the past, as I did with your great-grandmother; and also speak to the future, as I am speaking with you right now. There is a slight chance in this crossing that we can break the notion that we are threats to each other, and that we have to surround ourselves with militarized borders we have created for ourselves in the Anthropocene.
We need each other more than ever, for the living world teaches us that all things are connected. Maybe we will learn to live in harmony with this beautiful planet, and become our own salvation.