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 felt climate change when Hurricane Sandy stormed through my city in 2012.
I am sensing climate change through the increase in extreme weather.
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.
As subway stations swelled with water and cars floated down the streets, the hustle and bustle of the fast-paced roads quieted to an eerie silence; it felt as if the gray clouds of the regularly scheduled rainy season had come back on their own accord.
The turn of the seasons only an hour from the place I’d spent my eighteen years was unpredictable and mysterious to me.
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.
I fell witness to the slow destruction of my neighborhood, watching stray animals die, houses and trees collapse, and cars on the road crash all because of Hurricane Ike.
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.
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.
The forest was no longer as loud; I used to be able to hear more birds chirping.
Just knowing that something like this is possible is horrifying.
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.
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”.
The violent winds lifted me up into the air. It would’ve succeeded if it wasn’t for my dad anchoring me down. “Let go of the umbrella”, he screamed. I watched as my umbrella flew away.
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.
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.
As the years ticked by, snow has made less and less frequent appearances. Maybe this is just a side effect of childhood nostalgia—the feeling that every weather event, holiday, and outing was just a bit more dramatic and exciting when I was younger—but part of me tells me it isn’t.
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.
During the summer of 2022, the temperature was so high, there were a lot of days where the temperature had reached over 100℉.
Listen to attached audio file for my 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.
As these problems remain unresolved, the impact will grow exponentially.
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
The violent winds lifted me up into the air. It would’ve succeeded if it wasn’t for my dad anchoring me down.
Holding infant-me, my parents huddled on the kitchen floor in order to avoid the windows. Because of the raging hurricanes in the summer of 2004…
Ohio was home for the first eighteen years of my life. Since leaving it, however, it has become refuge.
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…
Near my college apartment, there is a small nature preserve. Located behind an elementary school…