Tomas’s Story

Title

Tomas’s Climate Story

Name

Tomas F

Place

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

How are you sensing climate change?

The trees stay green for longer every year. / They stay bare for longer too.

Some leaves drift by my feet, / A wind blowing through.

I love the fall, still warm yet brisk, /and the colors that abound.

I stroll along a broken sidewalk / and sigh, look around.

The green, the yellow, the brown, the red. / All framed by a sky of blue.

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.

How do these changes make you feel?

Grief and helplessness both to some degree describe it [how I’m feeling], but it is more just feeling defeated, since there is hope, we can still change the course of climate change. I will do what I can, but sometimes it feels so useless. Thinking about all that the future will be missing is a tragedy especially since it feels like no matter what I do or say the people that matter will never see it. No one who doesn’t believe in climate change will see this, it won’t change anyone’s opinion. This isn’t the final step to push someone over the edge and start sacrificing their personal interest for the climate, it is just another in a flood of anecdotes and stories foretelling the end, and it is just another that is part of an echo chamber that will only have the group of people who already will listen.