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.
I am sensing climate change through the increase in extreme weather.
The forest was no longer as loud; I used to be able to hear more birds chirping.
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.
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”.
Suddenly a thought comes unbidden.
This will be gone soon too.
Every year it feels like I’m seeing the trees change later, and when spring comes around and I see either dead trees or trees that have been green for a while I just think about how I might be one of the last generations to experience this.
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.
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.
Listen to the companion audio
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
Ohio was home for the first eighteen years of my life. Since leaving it, however, it has become refuge.