Why I want to help address the climate crisis

A wonderful colleague at my first job who was in the habit of asking, ‘what burns you?’ He ran a programme that encouraged and supported young people to take initiative towards solving a problem they cared about. He would ask this question when he was reaching out. He wanted to invoke the feeling of extreme discomfort that rouses someone to action.

I never had a good answer for him. There was a lot that bothered me about the world — enough to want to dedicate my career working on solving social problems. But there was nothing that caused me, a highly privileged person, enough injury to start something of my own. I was happy to support others who knew what they were doing.

Now the world is on fire. And I can’t help but feel like I am burning along with it.

In some sense, the climate crisis, is the culmination of everything about the world that did bother me — an economic system that is driven by an irrational commitment to continuous unregulated growth. When one starts unravelling the underlying forces behind this system, patriarchy, imperialism and class, race and economic inequality rear their heads.

These are the dominant narratives of societal organisation that large numbers of people have collectively co-signed. But other narratives exist and there isn’t anything besides our imaginations keeping us from creating new ones.

Now that I have my personal answer to my colleague’s question, I’d like to do work towards clearly defining the various causes and underlying interlinked societal patterns that have brought us to this juncture. More importantly, I want to look at what people are doing to solve the crisis directly while also exploring the alternate stories — of societies which have a more symbiotic relationship with the natural world.

It was the images of the Amazon fires in 2019 that sent me down an existential rabbit hole. It has taken some time to understand and articulate the fact that my own mental and physical wellbeing relies on the survival and flourishing of a beautiful natural world. So as the forest burns, so do I and I don’t have a choice but to do something about it.