Title
Kaddy’s Climate Story
Name
Kaddy Ren
Place
Chengdu, China
How are you sensing climate change?
When I visited my relatives in 2018, we stayed in their Chengdu skyrise apartment. They 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. Once when my family decided to roadtrip, we stopped at a gas station just before sundown; as my family tended the car’s tank, I turned my attention to the sky that was painted a grey-orange gradient, the texture of satin, sun barely visible. I took a picture, and remember it being so pretty. Why don’t we have these sunsets in the U.S.? It wasn’t until years later that I realized this prospect was the result of mass pollution and greed.
How do these changes make you feel?
These changes make me feel extremely anxious. As Tahmima Anam iterated in the book Tales of Two Planets, the fates of poorer and warmer places only serve as a look into the future of what every country will eventually have to face. Will my children be able to visit my aunts and uncles? Will they mistake pollution for the beauty I had? Climate change makes me feel weak and unproductive. I know I am meant to keep an optimistic outlook on our future, but as long as the top 1% remain unbothered, climate change feels inevitable.
Chengdu, China
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