A letter to Greta Thunberg

[Originally published/Sent Jan 23rd]

Dear Greta Thunberg,

I need your help. But first, I need to explain it to you. You can skip to my point (marked with an arrow, à ), but I implore you to listen to my story and what I have to say. I believe it could be greatly beneficial, maybe even vital, in the collective fight against Climate Change. 

First things first; My name is Bryce Wagner (a.k.a Ben Brycko). I’m a 20-year-old American-Swiss student currently studying at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. The sad truth is that I’m only a mild activist (I showed up and gave a speech for the March For Our Lives in Geneva, Switzerland in 2018, but that’s about it) and that I’m hardly the greatest example when it comes to advocating for action against Climate Change (so far I’ve missed all of the Climate Strikes, not by choice but by circumstance). But I did grow up exposed to nature more than the average kid, hiking, skiing, camping in the mountains and valleys of my beautiful home country of Switzerland. I grew up between worlds, at the globally conscious International School of Geneva and the expat community surrounding the UN headquarters in Geneva, and as a lifelong Scout in the Boy Scouts of America Transatlantic Council, so I’m sensitive and aware of global politics too.

In more recent years, I’ve become more and more consumed by the issues that have existed throughout my lifetime. I remember interviewing engineers at the Geneva Auto Show in 2009 about their electric cars for a school project on Zero Carbon emissions. 10 years later, I’m frankly bewildered at how little progress we’ve made switching to electric vehicles. In the meantime, over the course of my short life I’ve noticed the glaciers of the Swiss Alps recede from giant rivers and waterfalls of ice into clumps of dirty snow on the sides of the mountains, many currently in danger of completely disappearing forever. I’ve seen the bees in my backyard, once bustling in clouds, return less and less every year, and now the country will vote on a referendum to ban all synthetic pesticides in 2020, without support from the government. The crops turn increasingly out of season and are shredded by unprecedented hailstorms, devastating farmers as weather patterns grow even more erratic. Meanwhile, last year, in America, the Philmont Scout ranch, a sort of holy gathering place for the BSA almost completely burned to the ground due to unprecedented wildfires. This is only the local impact that I’m aware of in the very sheltered western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic society I live in, and I recognize how relatively untouched I am by changes in the climate and its ripple effect on other societal issues compared to the other areas and demographics of the world. Nevertheless, every day through news, videos and media, I learn more about a part of the world being irrevocably damaged, of people’s progress in life meeting another, potentially fatal hurdle due to Climate Change.

Since coming to the States for my studies, I’ve only continued to experience firsthand the unshakable impact of the world’s changing climate. As part of an informatics class, I’ve actually worked with and “wrangled” the data on global temperature and CO2 emissions, all the more proving to me how irrefutable the mainstream scientific conclusions are. In an International Studies class, I learned how the world order is set up to prioritize profit margins, GDP and population growth over a balance with nature and natural processes. This summer, I attended the World Conference of Science Journalists in Lausanne, where I witnessed science journalists racking their brains over how to communicate the urgency of the Climate and Biodiversity Crises, all while facing intimidation from authoritarian leaders and fake news. I also interned at the Luc Hoffman Institute at the World Wildlife Fund headquarters, where I got an inside look at the fight to conserve animals and land.

I’ve come to realize that these issues of international politics and nature preservation, which, make no mistake, are intertwined as one, have been consuming me for the past couple of years, and I can no longer in good conscious continue living my life, business as usual, in a world that appears to be committing suicide. 

In America, the cars and buses are larger, louder, noisier and dirtier, the portions (especially of meat) greater, while public transport, solar panels and low-energy consumption buildings are scarce. Even in Washington State, arguably the most environmentally progressive states with one of the best public transit systems, electric vehicles are shockingly rare in the face of gas guzzling cars and buses. Unregulated industries continue to run rampant, and people go on to study bioengineering and environmental science and puzzle about how to engineer a solution to the problems they are already a part of, that their habits perpetuate. In America, caring for the environment is more of a luxury than a duty, as a problem with the environment and not the people that live in it, and it scares me, especially due to its (dwindling) role as a “leader” and “example” to the world.

I do my best to eat low meat and ensure whatever I do eat is sustainably sourced, but in America it’s difficult when the portions only come in one size and you can’t control where the cafeteria sources it’s food from. There’s no question that the greatest changes are systematic and need to come from the top, but as we’ve seen, a large majority of people are not ready to surrender their luxuries, and most leaders are not ready to lead the changes that need to be made, even when it is already too late, even when action is being demanded and required. It has never been an issue of technology, or information, only motivation. 

Before I go any further: thank you. Thank you for standing up for and on behalf of humanity when nobody else will, and having the drive, the grit, and as we like to say in the States, “the balls” to do what needs to be done, and demand action from those who are failing to act. It’s something I wish I had the courage (and the balls) to do myself, but ultimately, I’m glad that you were the one to stand up on the podium. I don’t think anyone could have done it better, but I’m also sorry you had to stand up when nobody else would. Ironically, history teaches us that the leaders of the greatest changes were ordinary people who stood up for what’s right when nobody else would, even (and perhaps especially) when they didn’t want to.

As someone who has both studied, experienced and taught leadership and who has been a leader, what makes someone a leader isn’t power, influence or money; these are just side effects. No, it is truth, it is direction and, most vitally, it is vision.

I watched your speech at the UN Climate Summit, and it shakes me every time, how, instead of being frozen by the weight of your words they applaud and clap halfheartedly and interruptingly and ignorantly, how they whoop childishly as they are scolded for destroying the future, how they disregard your authority and how brave were to go up and speak the clear and simple truth. But maybe they do all that because they see you as a threat, because they are scared of you and what you represent; a movement of people that will shape society.

This brings me to the question that’s been consuming me: Why has it been so difficult for people to act around Climate Action?  Part of it is due to the influence of money, the oil and gas monopolies and whatever is dependent on their survival, and wherever else the money reaches, particularly powerful lobbyist groups sowing criminally effective disinformation campaigns. Part of it is the way our current version of capitalism is set up, though we may be seeing the landscape beginning to shift.

The other half, I believe, however, is fundamentally to do with communication, and before we can tackle any of the above, we have to be able to communicate the problem. The science itself is clear and has been clear for years, if anything it’s clearer now than ever before. But the communication problem has multiple factors.

1)          The cornerstone of the communication problem is that, even when people trust and listen to the science, they still struggle to engage with it, to understand how the seemingly removed and abstract effects of Climate Change could affect their day-to-day lives. Truly engaging with Climate Change on an emotional level relies on having a working knowledge of science and the scientific process, which, frankly, not everyone does. The Climate Crisis is a culmination of all human activity and problems and processes over decades, and so to have an accurate understanding of the problem and every angle of it you have to be fairly well-educated, not just in one discipline but across the board.

2)          It’s not easy to explain how Climate Change and the Biodiversity Crisis will impact people on a more personal level, (where people best understand it) because it varies completely from person to person; how an Indonesian fisherman will be impacted is hugely different to a tech entrepreneur in New York City or a National Park Ranger in Montana. Even with a working knowledge of science, explaining exactly how people’s everyday lives could be impacted is impossible, because of how large and interconnected the issues are.

3)          The response is, in turn, for the media not to focus on reporting on specific dimensions of the Climate Crisis on a deeper, more material level, but rather continuously referring to Climate Change as some large, existential, yet seemingly distant, immaterial threat. We focus on breadth, not depth, when talking about Climate Change, which makes it difficult for regular people who aren’t well read into the issue to feel as if it is any more real and present than God or Aliens or Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear program in the 2^nd Gulf War, especially in contrast to other issues that have been easier to sensationalize.

That in turn makes it hard for people to feel threatened by Climate Change and take it seriously as a real issue. To be clear, the problem is no longer whether people believe in the science or not, but whether they are engaged with it. How engaged they are with the science will determine how action happens.

Then question evolves to how do we get people engaged? This is and has always been the hurdle to Climate Action, and if we want action, everyone needs to be engaged in the issue, for the fact that we’ve become so out of tune with our balance with nature is an issue fundamental to our modern industrialized society. If we truly not only want people to act on Climate Change, but to rethink our society’s relationship with nature for a more sustainable future, we need to penetrate deeper into our social fabric with more effective methods of communicating crisis. 

It isn’t just that Climate Change seems superficial, but it’s easy for people to get distracted from it. In an era of post-truth, where the truth is scary and inconvenient, fake news, real fantasies and instant gratifications blind and distract us from thinking about Climate Change, with people preferring to bury their heads in the stimulating worlds of the internet, TV and fantasy novels, realms where Climate Change, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist. It’s easy to click away from your problems, to choose whether to see the crushing issues of our times or not, and when you have the power to choose what you see, to hide or ignore the pain of the world, how can you tell that it’s even there? Just in the writing of this letter, I’ve struggled to finish it, distracted with my day-to-day life and the internet and it’s dopamine generating clicks, only getting a burst of motivation every time I see an article about the impact of Climate Change and another milestone in our self-destruction. Call that a personal failing, but this is a bizarre, technological sort of drug that a large portion of our educated society is hooked on. If not on the internet, then it’s on TV and film where money and deregulation has allowed news outlets and Hollywood executives to spin whatever narrative they want with no moral responsibility to society, so long as it nets a profit. Almost everyone who isn’t on the frontlines of the Climate Crisis experiences this cyclical disconnect and re-engagement, due to Climate Change’s lack of pervasiveness in the permanent conscious of the world. This in particular has been an obstacle to Climate Action.

Conversely, the truth, or more how we present it, has become boring; The History Channel no longer plays documentaries about the Aztecs or the Incas, but conspiracy theories about how the Pyramids of Giza were actually alien spaceships. There was once a time when science communicators like Carl Sagan and Bill Nye made science interesting, novel and could engage people of all creeds and backgrounds, infusing a sense of moral duty to understand and follow the guidance of science. But today discussing and reflecting on Climate Change just isn’t emotionally stimulating for most people. Instead of living in a time where people take the time to digest meaningful and thought-provoking content, to engage the critical mind, we hop from between shallow, easily digestible content produced for the purpose of being sensational, catchy or entertaining, and it’s this kind of content that algorithms prefer to churn up on our social media feeds. So the line between what is true and matters and what isn’t blurs because we engage with fake information with the same or greater emotional weight as the truth.

But perhaps what truly disengages people from the issue is the mind-crushing cynicism of the Climate Change narrative, especially now, in our most desperate days of campaigning. I understand how hard it is to be optimistic about the future, but we live in pessimistic times, where we talk disproportionately in terms of problems instead of solutions, in terms of fixing old things instead of building new ones. A pile of cynically presented issues, from abortion rights to gun violence, Black Lives Matter to income inequality, fake news to student loan debt, housing prices to data privacy and ownership, the rise of authoritarianism to #MeToo, the prison-industrial complex to the US-China trade war, violence in the Middle East to the Opioid crisis, to protests in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile and around the world, issues that have more immediately comprehensible impacts overshadow the seemingly distant, intangible, “out there” threat of Climate Change, even though many of these problems are interrelated and stem from the same source. When everything is cynical and the effects are immediate and shocking, it’s hard to get our (frankly difficult to make) priorities straight.

In the meantime, the story that we’ve been telling over the years is that the Earth is dying and that we are killing our planet. We’re asking people to imagine the worst-case scenario and then telling them that our foremost experts say that we’re heading towards it. It’s true, but it isn’t inspiring, it’s the final nail in the nihilistic coffin. This is the problem. When we keep asking them to visualize an apocalyptic future and then telling them to change for the better, it is that vivid apocalyptic image that sticks in their minds. So instead of being motivated to change, and when surrounded and overwhelmed by a plethora of other issues, people (especially the older generations) are infected with this sort of “new nihilism” (as Michiko Kakutani coins in his excellent book The Death of Truth) about the future. In a bizarre sort of human glitch, they believe they’ve been shown the future, not simply a possible one. I find it particularly interesting because often when I discuss or overhear older generations talking about Climate Change, they often use the term “apocalypse”, while younger generations generally avoid it. So, overwhelmed, and with a historical cynicism, worldly fatigue, a lack of scientific literacy and intimacy with the natural world, satisfaction with their comfortable lifestyles, with nothing much to gain and everything to lose, no worthy purpose to rally towards, they continue their destructive ways.

The older generations can’t see a world that doesn’t run on the coal, oil or natural gas that has powered their heaters, stoves, cars, boats, planes, trains, furnaces and factories, smelteries and power plants, the oil used in permanent plastic and tarmac and the whole fabric of their industrial society. Moreover, they can’t even begin to comprehend a future that doesn’t rely on the fire that’s been with us for thousands of years, while the greater natural systems that created and sustained humans and life in the first place are upended. Our inability to see past the fire that dominated our development as a species has rendered us unable to fathom a move to the future without it, even when we’re ready. So our obsession with fire threatens to burn us alive.

In a time of post-truth and moral deficiency, the moral imperative of Climate Change is distracted by and lessened by other moral crises, such as Donald Trump, whose lower moral standards have not only allowed authoritarian regimes harmful to the environment to spring up and go wild but allowed people around him to decline in moral responsibility too. This moral regression imbues the previous generations with a 2^nd dose of fatalism and negativity that discourages them from seeking after high moral standards and causes as their own faith in humanity takes a hit.  

The truth is that the apocalyptic narrative about not just Climate Change but the general future has been pervasive in our culture for years. One doesn’t have to look much further than our current popular culture landscape to see that. Today the stories we tell, the music, the film, art, books, magazines, TV shows, video games, and whatever else are dominated by cynical views of the future and romanticized views of an imperfect past or escapist present, craved for through remakes, reborn Hollywood franchises, television fantasies and books set in alternate settings, times and realities in which the issue of Climate Change, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, nostalgia is not only more profitable but more reliable than innovation, which encourages the repeating of their outdated narratives that reinforces their faith in the world they grew up in, the very world we know is unsustainable, turning the moral clock backwards.  

Fake News organizations use the very skepticism and criticality of a more educated, self-aware, self-reflective West against us, making that critical voice in our head louder by inundating us with untrue articles that support these assumptions, and media companies divulging in absurd counter-narratives to produce “controversy” that is profitable. But all this does is make us morally confused and questioning to the point where we don’t know the way forward.

In the meantime, the vision of the future that has been communicated to us, through years of dire campaigning, is more one of inevitable destruction and despair than of hope and optimism. The imaginations of the older generations are saturated by pessimistic visions of the future, post-apocalypses and authoritarian dystopias such as Blade Runner, Mad Max, The Matrix, Terminator, (take your pick): hollowed-out worlds. The future is never presented as being better, but inherently worse than the one we envision, a world that has either self-destructed or suffered a severe moral decline. Our current visions of the future are based on a society reliant and formed by our reliance coal, oil, and the systems that arose from it, and so our predictions for it are too. People don’t believe there is any alternative.

We haven’t been shown a realistic future worth fighting for, so instead of rising to our generation’s challenges, they accept their fate, becoming near-sighted, making decisions not based on visions of a better tomorrow but “living in the moment” in fear of the future they believe is coming, decisions that are not uninformed by disinformed by fake news and unbalanced narratives. This becomes an issue when the older generations are largely the ones voting and when a large part of the young generation isn’t yet eligible to vote.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; if we believe that the world is going to end, that it is beyond saving, or that we need to “revert” to a better version of it, then we start to act, think and vote that way too. Before we know it, the pessimistic future starts to become real with the election of figures like Trump and Johnson, and 2019, they say, starts to look more and more like George Orwell’s 1984. When that happens, they either dig deeper into their belief in the old system, viewing the real 1984 through rose-tinted glasses, or maybe they try to take a step back and look around at what’s really going on. But without the energy, imagination and an objective vision of a world without coal, oil and gas, they fail to see the path towards a better future, instead placing their burden on the shoulders of the relatively poor young generation. In the meantime, they repeat their outdated stories to our generation, quickly washing out our enthusiasm and turning it into complacency.

And what do these stories tell us? That the world we live in now is in its best version, that the work done for the systems underlying our society has mostly been completed. These stories and narratives act as shields that defend both the good and the bad of our society. But young people know that it could be better, that these systems need to be refurbished to match the technological and moral requirements of our time.

This is what I am afraid of; that the stories we’re being told about our future are and will discourage the vast majority of people from acting until it is too late, that our visions are far too pessimistic, and that to cope with it we distract ourselves from reality with the “attention economy” of instant gratifications and fantasies of alternate universes, that financial hardship forces us to live day-to-day without saving for the future, that algorithms keep us trapped in prisons of information that reinforce our pre-existing worldview, the pessimistic worldview, instead of challenging it, that we will get trapped in our cycles of self-destruction until we cease to exist at all. I’m afraid that our generation is already becoming as short-sighted as our elders, even when we know the science, even when we know those stories are false and outdated, even though we know that somewhere, in the back of our minds, there is still a better version of the world worth building.

To be clear, the villain here isn’t any one person or industry, it’s the stagnation of our evolution; the creature comforts of neoliberal capitalism and the US world order have made humans lazy, by making consumers ignorant to an oncoming train while sleeping on the tracks, while the competition that is supposed to lead to innovation is swallowed by yesterday’s all-powerful winners.

Our stagnation has allowed the very sins that democracy seeks to defend against to sink its tendrils into the very vertebrae of our culture; greed, gluttony, wrath, envy, pride, lust and sloth, in a variety of ways. The corruption in our industries, such as oil, consumerism, social media, fake news, have become societal drug that has altered the structure of our society in a way not dissimilar to how the brain structure of a long-term heroin addict changes.

Here’s the thing.

We know the solution to curing a heroin addict is not to punishment throwing them in jail or rejecting them in the streets (which will only push them to reject reality and further into the drug), and it certainly isn’t ignoring it, as we are doing with our metaphorical addiction. We know that solutions to heroin addiction and overdose related deaths is safe injection sites, it’s regulating access, it’s mental health treatment, giving the patience a chance at redemption and encouraging them to imagine; what could you do if you weren’t addicted? How much more could you do without it? Do you really need the drug, or is there more to life, to the world? 

 The apocalyptic narrative of Climate Change is out of date, and out of balance. While currently we have the right and the imperative to be cynical and panicking more than ever, the vision of the apocalypse won’t motivate particularly the older generations to make the smart long-term decisions and necessary sacrifices to safeguard our future. It isn’t just the cynicism, it’s the accuracy; the vision of the world we want to build to combat further Climate Changes and defend against its already present effects is rather obscure, at best. There is no mainstream example or demonstration of the society we can and should build for this, but there are little, isolated glimpses of it, here and there, from independent technological innovations, glints of hope.

As an example, the University of Washington has almost completely switched to compostable food containers; forks, knives, spoons, straws, cups, everything, entirely indistinguishable from actual plastic, and heavily encourages the use of reusable cups. 20 years ago, electric cars were a joke. Renewable sources of energy were in their infancy. Today, Solar Panels are now the cheapest source of energy, countries have had days where they were powered by 100% renewable energy (Portugal and Germany), and Teslas have made electric cars mainstream, cool and attractive, proving them to be a viable alternative, and the future, of automobiles. Our electronics have become more power efficient and power saving, our buildings better at managing heat efficiently, reducing waste and lowering consumption. But we don’t celebrate these innovations enough, so people aren’t convinced that they’re really worth investing in.

The truth, as we know, is that many of the alternatives are still expensive and large investments that discourage the vast majority of people who can’t afford it from switching. Gas cars are still cheaper than electric and installing the infrastructure to support it is a large investment. People aren’t willing to switch because they see electric vehicles as a novelty instead of a necessity. And, of course, that doesn’t account for two vital modes of trade and transportation; ships and airplanes. In the meantime, oil companies still receive incentives and tax cuts that make it challenging for sustainable substitutes to compete and grow and disincentivize automobile companies from making electric vehicles. These are the systematic changes that are required.

From the largest to the smallest scale, the technology is here and ready for mass adoption, we just have to be convinced to adopt it and to value it. However, our lack of a clear, coherent, united vision has allowed the oil industries to masquerade under a false mask the Green Future, by falsely marketing that they’re making a transition to “renewables” and “green fuels”, that they’re “investing in the future” while placing responsibility squarely on consumers shoulders (in a very neoliberalist fashion), while using their wealth to buy out startups and competitors that challenge their dominance of the market before shelving them permanently. Playing not just the market but the people has allowed them to stifle the progress of human evolution and make them short-sighted.

Moreover, as mentioned above, fake news and false narratives sow doubt into consumers’ minds about whether these solutions are worthwhile, keeping that critical voice louder than it really should be at the back of their heads, to keep these smaller successes out of our news feeds and to keep Climate solutions seeming farther and fewer between. To battle this, we need to drown out the fake news with a powerful counterforce of facts, to increase the volume on these solutions by presenting them as components in a greater, united plan, a vision of a Greener Future (based on data and not on false advertising), a vision that can counter that overly nihilistic mindset induced by the election of Donald Trump and fueled by fake news. This isn’t to discredit the problems that got Trump elected in the first place, but rather bring light and conversation to the solutions to those problems, solutions that rest largely rest in the same domain as the solutions for the Climate Crisis.

We know we’re right because the moral imperative of Climate Action has persevered for decades. We’ve faced not just a passive enemy but an active one too and have achieved more than we give ourselves credit for while facing insurmountable adversity from multi-billion-dollar industries, and the fact that the above is public knowledge is incredible. Our moral imperative is winning. Despite the situation we face now, despite how strapped we are for time, we are making progress, and we should celebrate that.

Your commitment, Greta, to bringing power and value back to the truth is undoubtedly impactful, and part of the reason people young and old alike are talking about Climate Change as much as we are is because of your unwavering bravery to telling the truth and getting others to believe in it and value it again. You are the nemesis and kryptonite of fake news.

But we can’t afford to just be reactive with the remaining time we have left; we have to be proactive, and while reciting the indisputable facts and figures will eventually bring around action and the adoption of the technology, we need to do it as fast as we can. To combat fake news and Climate cynicism, we have to make the truth as marketable as possible and attractive as it possibly can be, for people to want to listen and to engage in it.  

Now that we have most of the technological pieces of the puzzle, and they’ve been proven to work, it’s time to put them together into a united vision. It’s time to draw a definitive line in the sand between our Green Future and the fake one, between the old world and the new, an image that can be a reference and an unmistakable authority. It’s time to come up with a more coherent image, literally, one that, paired with journalistic reporting and new human-centered measurements of success, the corrupted industries and fake news organizations can’t hijack, penetrate or masquerade as a part of, a vision for our future.

This vision keeps oil executives and authoritarian leaders up and night, a world where we don’t value the source of their material wealth. They know that we can make it happen, so they go about lobbying, bribing and purging, funding and creating disinformation campaigns to stop people from ever believing that this world could come into existence, because they know the second we see and start sharing this vision of the future that their days are numbered. This is the future we need to share with the world, and using its power, we can fight the incentives and subsidies for harmful technology and bring an end to the industries and mechanisms responsible for humanity’s most destructive behavior.

For politicians to rid of these terrible tax incentives, of the old industries that perpetuate the outdated model of the American dream, they have to be convinced that the people are willing to take the hit. The older generations need to be convinced that the hit is worth taking, and that starts by telling them that there is still hope for the future and showing them what it looks like and the sacrifices of comfort we need to make to get there. So we have to construct a more accurate vision of that future, an example for people to work towards.

The basics of the society we need to build have been outlined in the Green New Deal, plans birthed from the Paris Climate Agreements and the UN sustainable development goals, and are, in many ways, an updated revision of the modern American and European dreams and the UN’s vision of a world united by peace, an evolution of our highly imperfect but still decent and beautiful modern, peaceful, free world instead of a regression. But it hasn’t been properly visualized in an imaginative capacity. We know what it needs to look like, but not what it could look like, and that makes it difficult to conceptualize, to understand what they’re fighting for and for those who don’t or aren’t actively engaged in the issue to be emotionally invested. “Electric vehicles by 2030” (for example) may be the goal but that doesn’t materialize well in people’s imaginations, especially when they don’t know the ins-and-outs of urban development or electrical engineering and the underlying education of the systems of understanding to put together an idea of what it will look like or what the possibilities and options are. Nevermind what that’s like for dedicated Climate activists, that extra hurdle of work will and has switched off the average consumer. Even prominent politicians such as Nancy Pelosi dismiss the Green New Deal because they don’t have the imaginative capability for a vision of that world, nor the motivation to see it. In many ways, the world has been given a PowerPoint presentation with no graphics or images, only text, and been expected to understand it. But with the power of art we can help them see it.

This is where young people come in.

In this day and age, the information age, young people such as yourself are better educated in schools, peering into the future with the power of science and understanding the impact of 1.5 degrees, that we’re better informed, with the internet putting the headlines on the Climate Crisis from a diverse array of news sources right in our hands, that we’re more independent than our parents and can create action on our own. Growing up in the internet environment, we’ve developed the skills to tell the truth from the lies, the fact from the fiction, to develop an accurate understanding of the situation. Our elders and leaders may chastise us for “inexperience” but mistake it for miseducation or a deficiency of knowledge. But It is specifically because we are so well informed that we are acting (and will continue to) on the front lines of Climate Action. As a matter of fact, our very lack of prejudice, the power of science, and the good power of the internet, gives us a realistic, optimistic, vision for our future. We may know nothing about how the world has been, but we know everything about what the world could be.               

You, I, and our young generation share a common superpower that the rest of our society currently seems to lack; vision, through imagination. That superpower, when informed by science, gives us the ability to see into the future, without the prejudices and reservations of the past. Like our parents, we can visualize the worst-case scenario for the Climate Crisis in our mind’s eyes, but unlike our parents, we have a much better grasp on the positive vision of the future too.

With our vivid and brilliant perceptive engines, we can clearly visualize a society where electric cars glide silently on our highways alongside trams, trains and buses in and between our cities, where the planes and boats essential to our modern world coast across the sky and water on hydrogen instead of fossil fuels, where biodegradable materials are the norm and plastic bottles, bags, nets and trash are only seen in museums, where the next generation are taught to maintain an equilibrium with nature instead of extracting from it, where our energy is produced from the same natural processes that power the nature we know, and more; solar, geothermal, sustainable hydropower, wind power, wave power, whatever other renewable forms we master, and maybe, just maybe, even fusion power. Where our data makes our vital systems energy efficient and filters for the truth instead of being sold to advertisers to essentially cheat capitalism and turn consumerism into one big drug. Where our moral technology makes us only use technology for its best applications, and where everyone has a solid, equal, dignified baseline for their lives to grow from.

Where, in the wake of the 6^th great ecological extinction is the great ecological explosion, forests and coral reefs, wetlands, taiga flourishing in all colors along the rainbow to new, revived and restored species of flora and fauna in nature’s innovation hub in parallel with humanity’s own autonomous cultures, religions and ethnicities, where every nation and peoples achieve national self-determination and dignity, and instead of being torn apart for a monopoly on scarce resources in wars that destroy humans and the earth, releasing ash and gases into the air, we resolve our problems with peace, understanding, empathy, knowledge and faith in the entropy of morality.

A world where we don’t farm or slaughter for meat but grow it in our labs or through natural cycle of life and death, where our water and air is clean and pure and available to everyone, and where we don’t self-destruct on unregulated addictions, vices and deadly sin, but celebrate and share nature’s bounty and wisdom together. Where we take only what we need from the Earth, reducing, reusing and recycle materials and neutralizing the waste, where we are conscious of our footprint but don’t have to worry about irresponsible pollution, where we value nature equally as a material resource and a resource of knowledge, as humanity’s mother, where we’re at an equilibrium as one harmonious system again. Where, to quote Captain Picard, the challenge is not the accumulation of resources or wealth, but to “improve yourself. Enrich yourself,” to be the best you can be. This is the Green Dream.

We’re not that far off from it. This vision, if everyone was able to see it, could change the narrative of Climate Change, from that nihilistic, close-minded, short-sighted pessimistic narrative to a longer term, optimistic one. The reason we act today is because we see the possibility of this future more clearly than anyone else. So what we need to do is capture this vision, take it from something that’s only in our minds to something concrete and sharable with the rest of the world. Instead of spreading it indirectly through the scientific imagination, we should spread it directly through the artistic one. Scientists have taught us young, educated people what the world could look like, and we have imagined it. So now we need to connect artists with young people to bring the vision of a Green Future to the minds of those who can’t imagine it, who don’t have the time, energy, resources or knowledge to envision the Green future for themselves.  

Our leaders and society see us as anarchists working to tear their world apart, not build our own better one. To get them on board, to truly inspire and motivate them to follow science and the vision possible with our technology, we need to demonstrate a vision of the future we want to build, the one we need to build, a future that isn’t some great sacrifice, but a beautiful evolution of humankind. Only if we flood the world with a hopeful, optimistic, vision of the Green Dream can we truly inspire people of all ages to dare to work towards it, and only then will we stand a true chance against irreversible self-destruction.

So here’s what we must do.

We need to start a “Green” cultural revolution to truly inspire people to action, using the power of art and artists, literature and writers, performing arts and performers to bring our vision of a sustainable future to life and to spread it across the world, with the goal to inspire people not only to adopt the technology but the mindset to make it possible. We need to make the Green Dream an idea worth thinking about, worth investing in, worth fighting for, a vision people want to talk about and discuss, inducing artists to create art with the Green Dream at the center and as the subject, showing the world visions of the future in which the Green Dream already exists. Visions that people can work towards, to end the stagnation of our evolution. We need to make this movement unavoidable, easily sharable and enticing, to spread it to ever corner of society, of the internet, TV, Radio, Books, Newspapers, to every aspect of their lives so that no-one can “escape” this existential crisis that we face but also the world we want to build from it.

To do that, we need scientists and young people, who both understand the Climate Crisis and the world we want to build from it, to team up with artists and creators who can use their skills to manifest the vision of Green Dream into engaging content. Films, paintings, books, poems, music, dances and whatever else. We need to create and share art and stories that put the older generations into the shoes of our generations fighting for the Green Dream, to see the future we see, so they can be inspired and know what to help us build towards.

To truly engage people in the Green Dream, non-fiction and nature footage won't cut it. Ridiculous, contradictory and against-all-logic as it sounds, we need to employ the power of drama and science-fiction, of fantasies and modern fairytales, to capture the attention, imagination and energy of our parents and elders, to inspire true action and discussion amongst all ages. Projections of tomorrow anchored, but heavily based in the science of today, to compete in the arena of irrelevant, false and outdated narratives that our current leaders and parents were raised under and continue to perpetuate throughout popular culture and society, a vision that our generation can physically point to and say, together, “this is the future that we want.” We can use the very mysticism bred around Climate Change, by filling in the gaps with art and literature, to entice people towards the prospect of the Green Dream, to invoke the imagination by imbuing the Green Dream with artistic value, so that that people will be engaged by the truth behind it and that it represents.

In order to engage people in action, we need to engage emotions for people to believe in the science, and nothing can engage the emotions like music, art and performances, because artists and writers are the emotional intelligence of society. Science may teach us what to think, but art teaches people what to feel. Artists, designers and storytellers are the ones that inspire science and innovation through shear creativity. The flip-phone would have never come to fruition if it weren’t for Star Trek’s “communicator”, and countless other inventions have followed suit. Artists, like scientists, are also innovators, and when informed with the nature of a problem, can create outline for credible solutions never even considered, letting the scientists worry about making it feasible while motivated by the idea. Leonardo Da Vinci was as much an engineer, mathematician and inventor as he was a painter, sculptor and artist, and an understanding of both disciplines fed his work. Artists aren’t constrained to communication through research papers and prototypes, or creation by economic and material constraints, only by the canvas and inspiration. For many artists, the vision of the Green Future could be the inspiration they need. The purpose of the artist is to illicit emotion around an idea, and when the principles of that idea are based in scientific truths, then art becomes an extension of those truths, and vice versa for scientists. Artists need to use their skills and make the voices of young people, scientists, and their own heard on Climate solutions.

How does this solve the problem of disengagement?

1)          First of all, art shortcuts the education barrier; instead of having to explain the problem and the solution, one can simply demonstrates it through an example, that we can lead by. It’s easy and faster to share and communicate, too.

2)          It makes it personal; with the power of empathy the art fundamentally accesses, it puts readers and viewers into the shoes of someone in the world, whether that’s the Climate Apocalypse or the Green Future, suspending their disbelief and doubts to understand the way of life of someone in the future. This allows them to feel and understand the impact of Climate Change by comparing and contrasting the projection of a post-Climate Crisis life to their current one.

3)          Not only are the learning about the impact of Climate Change through a comparison with a personal character, but readers can compare the projected world with their own and learn how Climate Change will impact people without having to explain the underlying science. We don’t have to teach people how to imagine the future; they can just compare it for themselves. The solution is technology that exists today, so if they see that in the Green future everyone is driving electric cars as the result of a moral imperative to safeguard the future, then people will probably go out and buy an electric car today to make it real.

But most of all, it gives people hope for the future.

Instead of punishing the people for their inaction, we can give them a clear direction to act in. We’re already surrounded by progress that we haven’t been noticing or focusing on, especially in the context of the larger Climate Crisis, so we falsely believe we aren’t making any significant, meaningful progress, which, in turn, decreases demand for these solutions and makes it hard for them to come to fruition. The trick of the Green Dream is saying that this does matter, that a Green certified building or biodegradable packaging or a solar power plant or an electric car does indeed hold great value in our society, by enticing people with an image of a future where we celebrate these innovations as part of the world we built to defend against Climate Change. The trick is making these solutions part of a greater, optimistic move towards the future.

The positive image will not only be a beacon of light in a time of great cynicism, darkness and strife, and people are attracted to the late as much as they’re scared of the dark. Art and Literature can unlock the power of hope to spread the Green Dream like a virus, and in a world that is overwhelming pessimistic, a positive, fresh, morally just vision will take off like fire and stick in people’s minds, a vision that people will want to discuss and play a part in building themselves. By marketing the Green Dream, a future worth investing in, we can change not just what people buy but how they buy, how they can live individually sustainable lives. We can literally transform the economy, and society, by telling stories about a better future.

Before humans were rational and logical, before we understood the world through mathematics and science, humans listened and understood the world through the stories, that engaged the uniquely human ability of empathy. It’s a core part of our nature, of our natural programming, to take the words of stories, whether spoken or on the page and build a world in our heads, and to let that world guide us. Science and data are only sympathetic in nature and won’t get people who don’t understand or believe in it to move, but stories are a truly universal technology that we are all engineered to understand and to understand the world through.

Nothing can invoke change quite like a powerful story. Case in point two of the most widely read books in the world, the Bible Jesus and Harry Potter; stories so widely read and beloved that they exist in a world between reality and fantasy, stories so widely read and so powerfully believed in that they became real by inspiring real action. But where those works were based in fantastical, mystical worlds, the Green Dream will be based in a world we could actually build.

I know it sounds ridiculous, the idea that telling stories and creating art could save the world. Moreover, it’s childish: why should we have to use art and stories to make adults understand what is their duty to understand? It’s their duty to listen to science and to understand it.

Unfortunately, it’s clear this isn’t working, that the majority of society doesn’t share the responsibility and understanding of the truth that we thought they did, and that systems of knowledge distribution that are designed to produce the truth have failed to the point where many people believe they are no longer (ironically) trustworthy. I think there’s some truth to that. So we need to step down our expectations a notch, and use all the tools at our disposal to speak to the disengaged.

Things are only going to get worse. At least 70 countries have had disinformation campaigns, according to the New York Times. And the upcoming elections are only going to exacerbate that problem. The battle not only for world power, but for the planet is being fought by controlling the perception of the truth, and we’re yet to see the worst of it. We need to get ahead of the game, using art and stories anchored in our science to revise, restructure and fortify the truths, values and morals of modern Western society and Human society.

Stories offer immunity to that by reminding people of what their values are. Stories tell the truth implicitly and invoke readers critical mind to compare and contrast the values demonstrated against their own. You have to be engaged in a good story and the mindset it creates to understand it’s message, but you can step back and from the story and analyze it. That’s where stories have an advantage to other forms of knowledge sharing, and that’s what makes them immune to disinformation. Whether they are true or not, they engage the mind to think critically. That’s what makes them so powerful.

To use a metaphor, where science and logic are the pictures on the wall of a world beyond that is worth understanding, art and literature are the mirror that asks you what to think of yourself, in relation to the world. A good look in the mirror, not just as individuals, but as a society, is what we need right now. To remind ourselves who we are at what we stand for as a society, for people to remember their dedication to the truth, and to science.

Whenever Capitalism goes out of control, we make course corrections instead of revising the system. We invite activists to speak at the UN and host concerts and make music telling people to care more about the Earth. 30 years later, we’re doing it all again. You made your speech in the stead of Severn Suzuki, and though we’ve made progress, though we healed the ozone later, it wasn’t enough, and our planet still continues to warm towards the 1.5 degrees Celsius mark. We continue to export oil and drive cars and burn coal. We regressed back into destructive policies and predatory economics. We may have learned to recycle and think sustainably, but the underlying habits of destruction are still there. The job is only half done, and 30 years later we’re paying the price. I’m sure you would agree that this isn’t very sustainable.

In my mind, the Green Dream is not only a vision of a renewable future, but a moral recalibration and a philosophical revolution in the West, learned from the philosophies and religions of the indigenous peoples whose cultures and practices we’ve ignored for thousands of years in the pursuit of our own greater comfort through industrial development. At the heart of the Green Dream is the Green philosophy, that revolutionizes how we think of our world and our relationship with nature. This is the fundamental, ideological shift at the core of the Green Dream and Greenism that safeguards us against future self-destructive, predatory practices. It’s time for us to change our ways more permanently, and ensure that, in the distant future, people keep close to their minds and hearts the ideals we fought for, that they don’t forget why we fight for the Climate. We can’t just show them the light now; we need to ensure that the light stays on, that the idea and vision of the Green future stays with us for years to come, and that’s what a Green Cultural Revolution, with the power of Art and Literature, will do. It will entice people who don’t understand the science or are disengaged from the cynical news cycle to get involved and learn a little more about how we’re going to build a better world.

I started writing stories about climate change and issues of social injustice a couple of years ago, driven by the frustration I felt inside me with each statistic I learned, each new element of the puzzle that I uncovered. My greatest regret is not only that I got distracted and let this motivation die, but that I actively suppressed my drive to write, my drive to act, my drive to fight for my survival with delusions of needing to choose a STEM job with a decent salary if I was ever going to make a proper living in an economy rigged against me. I was afraid to stand up for what I believe in out fear of being wrong or my reaction being out of proportion. But with the unchanging message of science, and with my personal experiences, and your speech and example, I’ve been inspired me to dial up that motivation once again, and this time, to keep the momentum going. I’m working on a bunch of projects where Climate Change and the Green Dream have fundamentally shaped the world, for better and for worse, and the impact it has. When people jump into those worlds and compare it with the real world and the real Climate science, they may start to believe it as being true. I hope to share these in the near future.

I’m still working on a plan for how to start this movement, but one of the first major steps is getting others on board with it, making connections with artists, Climate Scientists and of course the (young) people spearheading Climate Action movements. That’s why I write this letter to you, Greta, and to anyone else who reads it, because I came to the rather sensible realization that I won’t be able to do it alone, especially not soon and fast enough. I can’t make change happen tomorrow morning, though I can try.

This is why I need your help. I implore you to call for people to write, paint, to use whatever their canvas to manifest the vision for the world we want, the world of the Green Dream and not the one we do not want. I urge you to talk to artists and painters, people who can manifest our emotions into something easily communicable and get them to paint our future, to organize art contests and face-to-face meetups between activists, scientists and artists, to motivate them and others to paint the vision of the future we want. Trust me, I’m not trying to get out of my responsibilities; I’m in the process of writing my own novels and short-stories centered around these issues trying to lead by example, but we should use the momentum around the Climate Action in the recent months to inspire people and spread the vision of the Green Dream. I think you could do that more effectively than I could.

Right now, people are beginning to wake up. Especially in America, income inequality and Climate-Change-induced natural events has reached the point where they are willing to listen. But they are not energized the way we are. They still haven’t seen our vision for the future, and they can’t support us until they know not only how we’re going to fix the holes in their society, but how we are going to prevent them from ever being created again, how we’re going to make the world better and more beautiful in their stead. I believe when they see the world we want to build, they will find the energy to support us. We just need to capture their belief in that future.

America especially loves dreaming big, making the impossible possible, standing by the underdog with the moral high ground. It’s why the world still looks to us as a leader and an inspiration, despite all the sham and drudgery and our imperfections, despite our recent spiritual void, at heart we mean to do good. We pride ourselves on being underestimated and mobilizing towards the vision of a better world. Because, like us, America is young, still growing and relentlessly progressive. Still learning how to be the best it can possibly be, under the guidance of visions and visionaries.

I am optimistic of the Dream, because people young and old are thirsting for a new vision, a new direction, a new greater purpose and all the excitement that comes with it. Something to build together.

In the future, I hope to see your speech and your story in recycled paper textbooks or on solar-charged laptop screens being studied in history classes. I’m cynical for what comes next, by nature we have to be. But I would much prefer (and I’m sure you would agree) that the worst-case scenario for Climate Change unfolds only on the page instead of the real world.

But I believe in the Green Dream, in the positive narrative, in the power of art and stories to communicate science and the anxieties of our time, that it could accelerate the intensity of efforts and support for the defense against Climate Change, to truly inspire people of all ages to act beyond what you have already inspired many to do. I truly believe in this idea and this vision, and I hope you and others do too.

Maybe I’m overestimating its potential influence. But I think it’s worth a shot, and, if nothing else, we’ll have be able to look at art and read stories that will make the world and the future a little easier and more beautiful to live in, knowing that at least we tried.

Thank you for reading this haphazard of a letter (it took many revisions and is definitely not my best work, and it’s wayyyy too long, but oh well. I hope it serves it purpose). I wish all the best for your future, and for ours. Perhaps I will have the privilege and honor of meeting you some day.

Sincerely, and all the best for a better world,

Bryce Wagner

P.S: Again, if you'd like a more condensed version of this letter, please let me know and I'll put it together.