Deveena’s Story #2
Everything is happening all around, and now it is too late to stop the ruin of our world with climate change.
Everything is happening all around, and now it is too late to stop the ruin of our world with climate change.
But little did I know, I would come to find out that my entire home state Kerala was flooded, and the flood didn’t only ruin my childhood home, but had also taken the lives of my friends and family friends back home.
It’s tiring and draining feeling the intense heat surround and choke me.
Through “clean” energy developments. See the recording for my full story!
I felt climate change when Hurricane Sandy stormed through my city in 2012.
In my audio recording, I speak about my experience growing up competitively skiing.
From what I researched, aloe is in a grave of danger, and you guessed it: yes, it’s because of climate change.
There was no more forest but spans of dried up trees. Ailing, sad, brown – the place I had once loved and known to be full of birdsong and butterflies now ceased to exist. The birds had all left – Delhi was simply too hot for them.
Some people had to swim out of their second story windows in the middle of night, while others went on rescue missions in the boats they kept in their garages.
It is often towns like my own –the low income, Indigenous, and sidelined areas– that see the brunt of the pollution and the brunt of detrimental climate disasters.
This situation makes me really concerned and fearful for older people who do not have loved ones to help them stay safe or rebuild after a natural disaster like this.
For what seemed like forever, the skies became orange and hazy and it became normal to see smoke somewhere. The smell of burning wood and building materials permeated the air.
The day prior I strolled the streets in flip flops and shorts, then – like an emergency tsunami – a mere 24 hours later the streets are white and the Christmas songs have begun to top the charts once more.
My nostrils burned a little more with each inhale as I realized that there must be a wildfire somewhere close by.
I don’t know if I should dress warmly or wear something that won’t make me sweat all day.
The game was no longer trying to play your best so you wouldn’t get subbed out, but to conserve your energy under the hot sun so that you wouldn’t pass out from the heat.
Although not surprising, Jamaica makes such small contributions to the production of emissions, yet it reaps the consequences.
The forest was no longer as loud; I used to be able to hear more birds chirping.
I get frustrated because I know that the weather is not like how it used to be.
Those families that can barely afford bad quality food but still want to keep their families healthy have to suffer and choose what they should prioritize more: health or supporting their family financially.
This increasing climate crisis has robbed me of my mother for most of my childhood.
Growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, a megacity along the coast of the Arabian Sea, I always had a sense of ways in which nature shapes and molds the everyday texture of human life. […] In recent years, however, these rarer weather events have become alarmingly recurring and exponentially greater in their intensity and the destruction they cause to my city.
I couldn’t ignore the dark spots in the sand from the refinery’s pollution or the amount of plastic and other debris that littered the sand and the water. I had never realized how polluted the beach was because it was all I knew, it was normalized it in my mind.
As Christmas came closer and closer, I waited for the first bit of snow to arrive. I waited and waited, but not one flake of snow fell down from the sky that December.
The mountains are part of spiritual life [across the Indian subcontinent], but mine is a story of when spiritual life is muddled by climate-driven geopolitics. In 2018, between high school and college, my parents decided I should make a pilgrimage to the holiest of mountains, Mount Kailash, which is also sometimes famously called “Mount Meru”.
My relatives … in Chengdu … used to dry their clothes from the outside air, but because of the smog and increasing humidity, they keep the windows closed as often as possible, and leave the clothes to hang indoors.
Instead of waiting for the snow, I’ve come to dread the inch of snow that becomes thin ice, not even enough for a snow day.
I wonder where the birds had flown off to–if they’d been able to adapt to the changes. Do they feel any sadness for their previous stepping-ground? Sometimes I think to myself, if we had only listened hard enough and cared hard enough, maybe we too would understand their story.
I’ve read so much about how climate change affects places like the Arctic and Alaska, but it was different seeing the glaciers in person.
There was nothing left alive in the Schuylkill river. Nothing except us.
Something is missing. It’s hard to place. But then I see it: one lonely floating light. Where are all your friends, little firefly?
Most of the beaches on the entire south stretch of the island were full of foul-smelling and unsightly sargassum seaweed.
It’s place in me will always exist and I hope that I will have places I can go to with it for years to come.
Some paths along the water, usually 10 or so feet from the shore, were being threatened by the encroaching waves.
Mainly, the sounds of animals have diminished
People are uniquely aware of the effects of climate change yet at the same time strangely resistant to change.
Through my health and home.
When I awoke on the morning of September 9, 2020. I was extremely confused. My bedroom was almost completely dark, which was, of course, very unusual…
In the backyard of my college house in Oshkosh a city on the northeastern side of Wisconsin…