It is safe to say that the vast majority of the young people in this country have no idea how badly their future is threatened.  When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with a report last year, stating that the world has until 2015, at the latest, to stabilize greenhouse emissions and prevent the worst effects of global warming, relatively few of us paid attention.  It is no large surprise: we are all so caught up with our own lives - with school, with day-to-day activities, with plans for our future careers and the life ahead of us.  This is supposed to be one of the best times of our lives; in college, new worlds open up to us - new independence, new experiences, and new possibilities for the future.  And yet it is ironic that the very future we are all preparing for is in more danger with each passing year.  Massive shifts in global climate - and the drought, flooding, famines, and loss of biodiversity this will bring about - threaten to transform our world beyond recognition.  Will the college degrees we worked so hard to earn be meaningless by the time we are in our thirties?  Will the global economy and natural environment be in such chaos that no one cares what accredited schools we attended, what ideas once sparked our imaginations, what dreams once kept us awake at night? 

The world is altering around us - and it is hard to blame the majority of us for failing to see the danger.  Do we not have a right to enjoy young-adulthood as generations before us have?  To be relatively carefree for a while?  To just savor the experience of growing up?  We did not ask for the mess that previous generations made of this planet.  But now it is our job to set it right - whether it is fair that the task fall on our shoulders, or not.  Those of us who have awakened to the danger - we must kick, scream, agitate and protest at the injustice served to us, and attempt to set it right before it is too late.  But we cannot do it alone.

Realistically very few of us, if any, are going to be in a position to alter the course of history anytime soon.  Ironically, then, we depend on the generations before us - some of the very people who got us into this mess - for help.  We can and must do our part to become involved in politics, influence elections and laws, and bring pressure on our elected representatives ourselves.  But to a certain extent, our future rests in the hands of others - of people who may not even be able to understand what it is like to have your life blighted for no reason, because ExxonMobil wanted to make money.  The politicians currently in power - at all levels of government - are the ones who might be able to save us.  Yet most show little inclination to do so.  So what is there for us to do?  We agitate, we protest, we hope that our demands will be heard.  We watch the world crumbling around us, and wonder if it can be re-built.  We scan the newspapers for hope.  And we wait.

Any day now, I hope to be contacted by Commissioner Desari Strader from the Washington County Board of Commissioners - to learn whether she and other members of the Board are willing to work with some of us young people to reduce greenhouse emissions from this area.  I don't know what the answer will be.  I do know that I am grateful to her for at least trying to work something out.  I also know that if the Board still refuses to acknowledge our demands, we will keep fighting - what we students have done so far in Washington County is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we can do.  I wonder, though, whether our efforts will come too late.  I wonder if all levels of government across the country can be wakened to act quickly enough.  I wonder.  And I think of the future.  And I wait.

-Nick