An Open Letter to Greta Thunberg from a Gen-X Investment Banker (and a Plea for Working Together)

Dear Greta,

I have been trying (and failing) to write this letter to you for the last three months. But I keep getting stuck after the first two to three sentences. Then I sit for hours staring at the skyline outside my office window, trying to figure out how I could ever articulate the praise you deserve.

I have been following your environmental activism and how you’ve inspired millions of young people around the world to raise their voices and demand for action on the most immediate threat to our future: global warming.

There are days when I walk down the streets of Stockholm and feel ashamed — of myself, of my generation, and of the work I do. My guilt is not an attempt to excuse or rationalise my generation’s inaction on the global warming issue. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of the poor decisions we continue to make and the complex narratives we’ve developed to justify our lack of courage.

Read the story from Medium by Sasja Beslik - “An Open Letter to Greta Thunberg from a Gen-X Investment Banker (and a Plea for Working Together).”

Climate Change’s Hidden Victim: Your Mental Health

In  December 2017, Jennifer Atkinson flew from Washington to Santa Barbara, California, where her family lives, to celebrate Christmas. The 42-year-old is a senior lecturer in environmental humanities at the University of Washington Bothell, about an hour from Seattle, but she grew up in rural central California, outside the town of Templeton. She remembers cattle ranches and vineyards and fields of oak trees stretching toward the sun. She spent her summers playing in a creek with her dogs. Some nights, she’d sleep outside on lawn furniture and stare at the stars twinkling overhead.

Few appreciate the challenges climate change presents to our mental health.

On this trip, though, in the middle of winter, smoke darkened the skyline in Santa Barbara. By December 14, flames had scorched more than 242,000 acres in Southern California, making it the state’s fourth-largest wildfire to date and the only December-occurring wildfire on the list of California’s 20 largest wildfires, according to a post on what was then the government’s climate website.

During her visit, Atkinson watched her nieces and nephew hook masks over their ears before they could play outside after school. After pulling on dresses and nice shoes to attend a performance of the Nutcracker, they walked back to their cars wearing the masks to filter out the smoke. Atkinson had been getting evacuation alerts on her phone for nearby neighborhoods all evening, and the smoke had become so oppressive that she and her family decided to leave too. She was devastated by the destruction around them, the danger, the loss.

Read the Medium story by Ciara O’Rouke - “Climate Change’s Hidden Victim: Your Mental Health.”