This twenties generation of nowadays—the 90’s kids that we also like to be proudly called—is such a stuck up generation; stuck up between things that we’ve seen and lost and thus missing them, stuck up between seeing a generation that was hip and classy at the same time, that we used to idealize and a generation that is following us (read the teenagers), making us cringe, what with their music tastes and fashion sense and their cell phone apps that we’re too old to use; we are a stuck up generation because we’re perhaps too wise for our age and too young to think if can make a change—we’ve seen an entire world change before our eyes. In our short lifespan of twenty something years, we have experienced drastic temperature changes that even though we were too young to feel when we were children, we can’t nevertheless forget how cold our winters used to be, how we would actually enjoy our monsoon rains rather than worrying about an onslaught of floods every year, how we could visit the bank of Indus and boat and have picnics in summer there and eat Pallah fish without worrying about the dangerous heights of water that take away lives of little children every year these days.
We are the poster children of climate change, there’s no doubt about it. We’ve been witness to more earthquakes and hurricanes around the world in our lifespan than any of the older generation. We have been spectators to conflagrations overnight burning the entire forests in summers and deadly snowstorms in winters handicapping the entire life of metropolitan cities (in North America) all within the same climatic year. While the climate in our childhood was more predictable, pleasant summers with a heat wave in May usually (specially referring to Southern Pakistani summers here) followed by a two month monsoon season bringing consistent clouds of rain one after another, to chilly winters beginning from October and ending by the end of March with enough cushion of Spring in between to distinguish between a winter and a summer night without muddling them together unlike today. You would never see an unexpected snow in Islamabad in the middle of February and while Lahori winters have always been famous for being foggy, you would never come upon a road accident on Motorway in the beginning of March because of an intense foggy morning. These are signs—signs that climate change is here and is going to ruin this planet, not just our generation, if we don’t do something about it.
We don’t have to look at facts and figures to realize the gravity of the situation, we just have to look around us to see how our lives in general have changed. The good news is, since most of these changes have taken place while our growing up, we are the most ‘adaptable kids’ in the words of Darwin and thus can be the force of change. It’s not just our responsibility but this planet’s right to be duly given to. The bad news is, if we don’t, it will be a little bit too late.
So let’s not get stuck in the earth’s nightmare. Let’s work one step at a time, conserve our resources, not waste water, go for resources that are recyclable, reduce Carbon consumption, recycle more and consume less of everything so that it’s not just our generation that could live more, but so that our own generation is alive to tell the tale.
Of Coffee Conversations 