To start off, even though I’m proposing a way to “fix everything”, the point of this essay is not to claim I know better than any of the uncountable scientists and activists who already do incredible work to save our home. Just because in the theoretical sense I am putting the weight of civilization and the planet on my shoulders, does not mean that if I was actually put in charge of fixing the world, I wouldn’t likely be the victim of a well-meaning political assassination within the week. I do, however, claim to listen to these talented professionals, unlike a depressing portion of American Politicians, which gives me somewhat of a leg up on them in this scenario. Because, unlike this subset of my government, I care about what happens to the air I breathe, the land I walk, and the people I love, and the people I’ve never met. I care about my future children and their children, and how America was founded on life and liberty for all. Because unlike most in power, as a young person, I will live to see the fruits of their indecision and greed, while they will be long dead. Because unlike what feels like an overwhelming portion of America, what we have and others lack is not a badge of honor to me, it’s not proof we are superior, and it’s not something to hoard. The prosperity we keep to ourselves, the waste we create, and the help we hold back ways on my conscience. 

Let us restart this ramble with some questions. How do I live with the fact that I get to order from Jeff Bezos while the Amazon rainforest burns? How I pollute the planet with my coffee pods and plastic water bottles, my thirty-minute drives to go anywhere worthwhile, and my fast fashion? I think I could continue this list forever, so how do I live with that weight? How do I live with my excess, knowing millions of kids my age have virtually nothing? When kids my age are dying? How does anyone live with that? How do the wars, the famines, the outbreaks-- how does that not live in the nightmares of these politicians and millionaires, when they have the power to stop it? How do I live with the fact that I, with no power or voice to wield, care so deeply, but everyone in power is either apathetic, spiteful, or outnumbered by everyone encompassed by the first two adjectives? 

One final question for now: so what is this essay about? Is it about the laments of a teenager worn thin by the news cycle, and wracked with American white middle-class guilt? Is it about this terrifying helplessness, this building dread? It could have been, but those are more suited for a notes app or therapy session. Those feelings can be used for good, yes, but alone they are useless. But at the same time, what “good” could I do with them anyway? Even with all the power in the world and the ability to play god, what use would I be, with all my naivete and lack of credentials? What could I do, when all I know is just empathy and a dream? When has one, painfully fallible, painfully ignorant, and painfully human with all the power to “save us all” saved anyone anyway? Or saved more than they hurt? Why am I writing an essay about how I’d save the world, if I know I couldn’t? 

Let’s start again, this time with less question marks. I posed a lot of questions in the last two paragraphs, and I don’t have the answers to many. I don’t think anyone does. But I know the answer to one, and it’s why powerful, selfish people can rest. We all know it’s down to apathy somehow, but that apathy rests on a strong foundation of dehumanization and ego. In their minds, they deserve what they have because they have it, and anyone with nothing deserves that too. Money, success, and the ability to live in an echo chamber where you don’t have to watch the world burn around you, because the flames of that fire you fed won’t touch you-- it’s been moralized now, hasn’t it? It’s been moralized to serve the dehumanization. Why help people when they don’t deserve it? Or when you deserve it more? When your strangled conscience tells you it’s right to do as you please and destroy the world for profit, then any push or force to help other people, to stop death, to stop the slow erosion of our planet and humanity becomes the real evil. Because “you can’t make me do anything, because this money is mine. It doesn’t matter how much I stole from everyone else to get it.” Because in their world, they’re the only real people. The rest of us are just tools or collateral. The rest of us are irrelevant. 

Let’s start again, and this time shift our camera away from the minuscule number at the top, to our shrinking middle. Every summer where I live, the number of excessive heat warnings and air quality warnings rise, and my local creeks get more and more laden with litter. This “idealistic” suburbia has no sidewalks, nothing but endless houses within walking distance, so to get anywhere cars are not only helpful, but required. Zoning laws mean our cookie-cutter neighborhood wouldn’t be able to transform into a less gas-guzzling, eco-friendly, community if it tried by letting small businesses, local farms, and community buildings to spring up or be run from someone’s home or backyard. However, my neighbor is still allowed to list their house as a church for tax purposes despite, from what we’ve observed, having a congregation of literally just his family. Go figure. 

As you drive along the streets, or go to the local shopping center, you’ll inevitably find someone struggling to make ends meet and “panhandling”. Every time. We avoid making eye contact with a laid-off father on the road’s median strip who needs money so his family isn’t evicted, and we breathe a sigh of relief as the light changes and we can continue our hour-long commute to work. Outside the supermarket, we pretend not to see a mother’s cardboard sign asking for cash so she can feed her children, and we continue our quest to buy out-of-season fruit picked by exploited migrant workers from California, chocolate and coffee that very well could have been made by child or slave labor, and beef from a meet industry that’s cruel and destroying the planet to boot. Later that night, the supermarket will throw out pounds and pounds of food that’s still perfectly fine to eat, and then poison it or lock it up in a dumpster to rot, where it’ll pollute more cities and landfills unused, all so homeless people can’t eat it to survive. Why? Because CEOs subscribed to the previously mentioned one-two-punch philosophy of apathy and hate. But enough about them for now.

The suburban middle class was created to escape the chaos of cities. Yet in doing so, we lost the diversity and community that comes with one. A city can be a great equalizer, rich and poor from the same marker on Google Maps, but simultaneously a stark, vivid reminder of the world’s injustice. A city shows that we are all human, that we all ride the same busses, and walk the same parks, and eat the same food-- it shows that we’re all the same, but not treated as such. Suburbia is an attempt to remove ourselves from observing poverty, to remove ourselves from the real world, to create homogeneity and a fake “true” identity. But the inequity is clear, and this suburban escapism attempt is in vain. We’re all still human, we’re all still on Earth, and the world and everything else is still slowly dying. But to acknowledge that truth means we weren’t special, we weren’t superior, we weren’t invincible after all-- and many, many people can’t do that. Least of all, anyone who’s absurdly wealthy enough to recreate the space race. 

So, what happens now? Now that the middle and working class in developed countries have been tricked into compliancy, and the rick are allowed to run amock? Well, they’ll build indoor pools while California turns to dust. They’ll buy beach houses on Cali’s cliffs and Florida’s coast; never mind the rising sea level and mudslides, they have insurance and what’s a couple million down the drain anyways? They’ll languish in their indecision and shut down the government to save their ego from a compromise. They’ll go to house parties during the pandemic while my grandmother dies of COVID. They’ll try to find a way to live forever while millions die from starvation, ever-growing natural disasters, and completely eradicable diseases like tuberculosis. They’ll turn the stars into billboards we won’t see through the light pollution of cities and forest fires. And while they burn it all to the ground, we’ll smile and say, oh of course they can do that. It’s their money, it’s their right to do with it what they want. We shouldn’t tax the rich, it’ll trickle down to us anyway. Plus, who knows, I could be a billionaire someday!

Let’s start again, for one final time, and circle back around to answer one final question: how would I save the world? How would I, when I know that even with all money I could want, all the political power I could want, and still know it wouldn’t be enough for me to do it alone? How could one person create a single strategy written in 2000 words to combat the massive, all-encompassing, myriad of problems that face us on a jointly economic and environmental front-- and then genuinely believe it would work? No one person knows enough, has enough skills, has enough empathy, has enough of anything necessary for every facet of this problem. It’s not a job for one person alone. So if I could magically change anything to save the world, the one thing I’d do is make sure I wasn’t alone. 

I’d make it so every person with the potential to enact change, every person on the high rungs of this ladder with me, all the way to the tippy-top, loses hours and hours of sleep. I want them to stand on top of a cliff and Yosemite and confront the fact they’re standing on layers and layers of too much time and rock to comprehend, and that they’re looking out on a valley of trees that were here before them and will be here after they’re gone. Then I want them to drive back to the cities, past farms struggling through doubt where all the billboards alongside the road are about lack of water. I want them to confront their insignificance, confront our planet’s dwindling awe-inspiring nature, and how we’re selling it for crypto and shein, and how once we lose it we’ll never get it back.

I want them to exchange apathy for crying weekly over the news. I want them to trade their hollow superiority and separation from the rest of us for the burning pain, warmth, and reassurance that you’re not alone on a pedestal, that you’re human, and so is everyone else. And I’d make it so we all saw ourselves not as special or above everyone else, but as a part of a whole. I want us all to see us, and “us” with no parameters or exclusions, as a part of something, and for us all to realize that this “something” is worth saving. Can you imagine, all of us hand-in-hand, with every area of expertise and skill and bit of information at our species’s disposal? Can you imagine what we could do with that?

I can’t save the world alone, but together, we’d lift each other up and then rise further. Together we’d survive, because that’s how humanity’s made it this far in the first place.