Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Significant problem, Extraordinary opportunity


“The significant problems that we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
-Albert Einstein

Here I sit, in a classroom plastered with posters of the Great Lake Wetlands, immersed in my normal world of essays on environmental management, running in the regional park system after school, and Caribou Coffee visits with friends. Nine days from now, I will be boarding a plane for Lima, Peru, a country, continent, and hemisphere that has never felt my footprints or been the subject of a picture on my iPhone. In this completely foreign land, we will be immersed in one of the most pressing conferences the world has ever seen.

It must have been a year ago that I first heard of this opportunity, visiting a foreign country to immerse oneself in the culture, stay with a host family, and attend one of the most influential conferences in the world. Being a lifelong climate change believer and activist, it seemed like a natural fit. Yet no matter how many documentaries I watched or how many articles I read, it still didn't seem real—that a high school of three hundred fifty students in the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley, Minnesota could be one of two high schools on Earth to attend the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Flash forward to three months ago, I sat around a table with other prospective delegates eating ice cream from the local gelato shop. Looking around the table, I thought, each one of us is privileged to go to not only a life-changing and eye-opening school, but also one that is safe, runs effectively, and provides a peaceful atmosphere in which to learn. In other words, no matter how many times we study biodiversity, pond ecosystems, and the work of Thoreau, no matter how much our perspective of the world has been altered by the School of Environmental Studies, there is a certain lingering detachment from many of the issues that we study. We don’t deal with the melting polar ice caps in our everyday life, we don’t watch the habitat degradation of the polar bears first-hand, and we certainly don’t reside in the Rainforest, thus it is difficult to fathom the complex issues that surround our earthly systems every single minute of every single day. So why am I going to COP20? Why on earth would I want to attend an event that removes this detachment and puts all of the issues surrounding the most pressing issue on earth out on the table and eliminates all doubt that we are in grave danger.

This is where one would expect me to say “To learn more about climate change” (insert scripted tone here). However, between the research that I have done and the realization that this conference is not really meant for “learning” in the traditional sense, I would say that traditional education is not my objective in Lima. Rather, my objective in Lima is to voice the importance of my values and listen to those who are crying out for help with their own. As an 18-year-old residing in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, my values and perspectives are very different than those of the rest of the world. 

For one, I value the park systems. Regional, state, and national, they are all meant to remain in their natural state forever. But how can they if we are doing everything we can to destroy their natural systems and change the climate of their habitat?  Can we even claim to be taking care of them?  What would happen if our beloved Boundary Waters becomes so warm, is destroyed so much by sulfide mining and CO2 emissions that we drive such a vital and valued part of our state into utter destruction?  

This is the reason to go to COP20. The values we have, the values that are experiencing such loss, all need a voice—a vote—in order to encourage widespread global change. Climate Change is a scream for international collaboration; a voice from one is a voice from many. Speaking out about “my” BWCAW and "my" Lake Superior and “my” park systems and “my” open wild spaces gets people talking and inspires thought and collaboration and solution proposals. The more voices we hear at the conference, the more change will be inspired. The more changes that are inspired, the more we learn about how we, 18-year-olds from Minnesota, can speak out and cause change ourselves. There is no way any one person, community, or country can completely stop climate change, but someone, everyone needs to throw themselves out there and give it all they have. Why not us?  After all, if we don’t, who on Earth will?

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