Climate change isn’t the crisis of our generation. To leave it at that would be to reduce its gravity. The warming of our planet and melting of our oceans is too big a problem to be put into the hands of today’s youth, to be called our responsibility to solve. Climate change and its effects have been a long time coming, and the consequences of our delayed action, whatever tragedies they will soon prove to be, will plague the years, decades, and centuries to come.
I, like every writer in this issue, am tired of this rhetoric that perpetually passes around the responsibility of climate change. I am tired of the now–clichéd numbness that people associate with climate change. I am tired of endless discussions followed by little to no action.
So how could we not dedicate an issue of our magazine to this rampant sense of exhaustion, and our efforts to maintain hope in the face of it? For the last several weeks, we poured our hearts into pieces on self–improvements in sustainability, highlights of climate activists on campus, and what our responsibility is in all of this as members of a leading research institution.
This issue reflects the way in which every choice we make can be thought of in terms of its sustainability and impact on climate change. We can choose to be vegan, to stop traveling by plane, to reduce the amount of waste we produce. But beneath every story that investigates these smaller adjustments in this issue is the urgent need for greater action. Though we should all start obsessing over the individual ways we can adopt more sustainable habits, we need a revolution around the globe in order to halt the dire effects of climate change.
Climate change and its fallout are no longer worries that we can push to the back of our minds and ignore, but ones that we need to consider in every second of every minute of every day. This issue, and the pieces within it, are our commitment to doing that. In writing of climate change through the lens of a college campus, we challenge ourselves and our readers to do more. This is our world too, and we should never forget that.
