The following post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and Letters to the Future, in conjunction with the U.N.'s 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris (Nov. 30-Dec. 11), aka the climate-change conference. Letters to the Future is a project produced by the Sacramento News & Review, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the Media Consortium, in which a variety of writers, scientists, artists, and others were asked "to predict the outcome of the Paris talks (the success or failure and what came subsequently) as if writing to their children's children, six generations hence." To view the entire series, visit here. Join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #LettersToTheFuture, and follow @ParisLetters. For more information on the project, visit here.
Dear li'l one: To be honest, I used to think about you a lot more. When I was younger, I remember getting furious at the adults for not doing more to prevent climate change, not protecting our planet for the future generations, for my generation, for yours.
But as I got older and began taking baby steps out into the big bad world, the drug of convenience started wearing at my convictions. It was easy to drive, fun to travel and the joy that comes from a steaming shower is so delicious, even in a state plagued by drought.
I didn't always indulge, but it was easy to rationalize away when I did. I would get drunk off imagining your future, the technology you would have access to, how much better your drug of convenience could be than the one I have access to.
Maybe electric self-driving cars would be available for public use. Imagine what you could do in them, the possibility. Maybe you would 3-D print food and clothes and have robots to do all the cleaning. Maybe you would have a cousin on Mars, an aunt under the ocean and a sister rotating endlessly around the Earth, stuck with her two dogs and annoying ferret at the International Space Station.
But in the back of my mind, I knew there was another possibility for you, one less fantastical and much more dystopian. There might not be any use for electric self-driving cars, even if they were public, because there would be nowhere to drive to. Maybe there will be no food products to put into the 3-D printer, because our earth, long since scorched, no longer grows food.
I hope that the fantastical future is yours. More likely it will be a combination of the two. But it all depends on our leaders recognizing the obvious in Paris this December, and actually doing something to combat climate change.
At least know that your great-great-grandmother did something, albeit something small, to try to get them to do the right thing. Regardless, I promise I will do everything in my power to marry rich. From where I am standing, it seems like the wealthy are the only ones with a shot at the future.
Wish me luck,
Nana Nat
A recent graduate of UC Berkeley, vonKaenel hopes to attend graduate school next fall.