Are We Screwed? by Geoff Dembicki

Author:Geoff Dembicki
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632864826
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

Erlend Knudsen and Daniel Price weren’t the only Millennials to make epically long trips to the Paris climate talks. An American, Morgan Curtis, could also lay claim to the title. The inspiration for her 6,200-mile bike trip from Vermont to Paris came to her one night while she was knitting. She had recently graduated with a degree in engineering from Dartmouth College. She was living in a small cabin on the coast of Maine. During the day she taught environmental issues to high school students. At night beside her woodstove, the twenty-three-year-old often reflected on the future—and on climate change’s role in shaping it. While at Dartmouth, she had led a campaign like the one we saw in Chapter 5 to divest the school from fossil fuel stocks. She saw climate change as the defining challenge of her Millennial generation. “The two words for me elicit a physical reaction,” she would later write. “My heart aches, the pain of the injustice of continued fossil fuel extraction [is] almost overwhelming at times. Yet my soul soars, buoyed by the inspiration, optimism and joy [of] imagining a better future.”4

Morgan believes that a safer and more stable future requires a radical shift in worldview—one that is already firmly entrenched within her generation. We have to construct “a different story of humanity,” she explained, in which people stopped seeing themselves as “separate individuals floating through the earth competing for these scarce resources.”5 Instead we have to conceive of ourselves as small parts of a global whole. Doing so requires us to see past the national borders constraining our identities. Only by expanding our sense of self can we achieve the collective global action necessary to keep Earth from burning up.

At home one night in her cabin, Morgan mulled over all this as she knitted beside her woodstove. Her thoughts turned toward the COP21 talks happening later that year. “I knew that the world’s eyes would be turning towards Paris,” she said. “This presented a huge opportunity.”6

By attending the climate talks, Morgan could join people her age from all over the globe to demand that their survival be taken seriously. Together they’d show world leaders that the last century’s paradigm of national self-interest had no place in the current one. But if Morgan was going to argue in front of the world that humankind wasn’t merely a collection of selfish and competing nations, she wanted to have some evidence. So she decided to get to Paris by biking. She asked a friend her age, Garrett Blad, to join her. They’d follow a six-month route through Canada, Iceland, the U.K., Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Germany—and meet people fighting for a better future along the way. “I hope to come away from this trip with a better sense of my own place in this world,” she said.7

Morgan and Garrett also hoped “to bring the stories and lessons from the trip into the [COP21] conference space.” She knew it wouldn’t be easy. Once she got to Paris, she’d have accreditation to enter the conference as a member of the youth activist group SustainUS.

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