Written by Joseph Malekzadeh

Our generation of humanity, those of us living right now, have a heavy cross to bear. Day to day, the fight against climate change is put in terms of ten, fifty, or hundreds of years, if not much more.

So we- we whom were the first to watch Captain Planet and The Smoggies on TV, and enjoy Earth Day activities in school...even those of us old enough to remember the chord struck by Rachel Carson’s landmark book Silent Spring-who have been privileged enough to witness the initial wave of environmental awareness in modern humanity will be the furthest along when the seeds of our activist labours finally bear fruit. And that’s a little heavy, people.

In a world that teaches us vigilance in sniffing out diminishing returns, it can be trying to appraise the value of what we are constantly told our efforts to fight the climate-change fight will yield:

Avoiding unspecific ecological disaster(s), some vaguely large amount of time into the future.

But of course, we’ll do it all for the kids. Which is a good enough reason, considering the fact that by the time the news comes that this huge issue has been resolved we’ll probably need someone younger, stronger, and with fully functioning ears and eyes at our side to tell it to us. Or, frankly...sadly, we’ll just be dead.

Yet, somewhere out there in the hinterland of the environmental movement, not too far from us, grows fruit that we have yet to become fully aware of.

For one, it won’t take a hundred years of clean-energy use to look at snow differently. Think of that for a moment. What are the psychological consequences for us when we can’t look at some innocent, gray slush, seemingly innocuous, without wondering what toxin lies inside those threads of black?

Or, what poison lives inside that unnaturally purple glint of oil on water?

Yet, when the day comes that fossil fuels are no longer coughing out the back of anything in our towns, cities, and countrysides...I’ll look at snow differently the very next day.

When a passing vehicle no longer has the ability to fill one’s personal space with the foul odor of a combustion-engine cocktail, we’ll all notice how much better it feels.

It also seems likely that we’ll enjoy romantically the vision of an archaic smokestack in that twilight period between the day its’ billowing had ceased, and when it was finally torn down, given to memory and the ages.

I suspect that when it no longer hurts your head to think of all the synthetics, plastics, fumes, and smoke that brought you your apple or banana, or made your niece’s Barbie and hair clips, you’ll feel a little more free.

What other fruits will we discover?

Saving the seas and the sky in some brave and distant future means cleaning up our mess today...that some of us are trying to do just that can only mean that these victories...of apples, bananas, toys, and snow...will come tomorrow, the next day, or sometime shortly thereafter.

Image courtesy of Creative Commons.

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