ACT I
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How is the story of Being Human on Planet Earth supposed to end?
There’s only one way that story can end, and we don’t want that. That’s what Extinction Rebellion is rebelling against.
As long as there are humans living on Planet Earth somewhere, the story keeps going.
But I can’t keep talking forever. Instead of reaching an end, we need a conclusion.
Greta Thunberg, and others in Fridays for Future, have said that the climate crisis has forced them to sacrifice their childhoods and their educations to deal with the problem. They’ve also said that young people with new ideas always win.
Well that’s nothing new. Young people with new ideas have been winning for 50,000 years.
So let’s conclude the story for now by talking about how the power of childhood makes that happen.
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How did our ancestors spread from a corner of Africa to living all over the world? They used their intelligence to adapt to the different living conditions all over the world.
Here in America, 10,000 years ago and more, some people used their intelligence to figure out how to live in the desert, where it gets over 100 degrees every day in the summer. Other people figured out how to live on the Arctic tundra, where it gets down to 40 below zero at night in the winter.
People still adapt to different living conditions in different parts of the world today. That’s what immigration is.
If you and your parents moved here from another country when you were 4 or 5, what does it mean for you to be from there? Your parents are from there and you were born there. But you grew up here.
If you’re a teenager now, you probably speak English better than your parents do. You probably know a lot of things about America better than your parents do. And if your family had moved to any other country, by now you’d fit in there better than your parents would. That’s what always happens.
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Does your grandmother have a smart phone? Or does she still use a rotary phone? If she does have a smart phone, how often does she ask you to show her how something on it works?
Your grandmother learned how to use a phone at the same time in her life you did. But that means the using a phone part of her brain is already filled up with knowing how to use a rotary phone. When she thinks about using smart phones now, she’s trying to use what she knows about rotary phones to understand what smart phones do.
You don’t have that problem. Because you learned how to use smart phones right from the start.
Whether you’re immigrating to another country or learning how to use new technology, you’re better at learning than your parents are. Because you’re better at seeing and feeling underlying themes in what’s happening and connecting them in your mind.
That’s the power of childhood.
Your parents and your grandparents learned that way when they were your age too. But we knew a lot less about the world back then. And the threat of environmental disaster was still decades in the future.
So is the environmental crisis really as impossible to solve as old people keep saying it is? Or are they just not seeing solutions because they’re trying to look them up on their environmental rotary phones?
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How else do you learn growing up?
From your friends. And the other people you know around your age.
Why do those people have such an affect on you? Because they’re going through the same stages of life you are. They’re learning the same kinds of things you are along with you. They’re seeing the same kinds of underlying themes you are.
The story of Being Human on Planet Earth we’ve been telling here is the most clearly defined and most broadly applicable body of underlying themes ever. How many people around your age have you met who’ve been listening to this series too? You and they understand each other and support each other better than anyone knew how to do a year ago.
You’re going to keep that for the rest of your life. And the rest of your life hopefully is going to be longer than for any of your teachers, your principal, your police chief, your mayor, your governor, Representative, Senators, or president.
That’s what young people with new ideas winning in the end always means.
ACT II
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If you’re in high school and you’re keeping at least a D average in your classes, you’re probably getting a lot of mail from the US military, trying to recruit you.
How many brochures have any of us gotten from an environmental equivalent of Hogwart’s School of Magic or Star Fleet Academy or the Jedi Training Academy?Shouldn’t someone be trying to recruit us for that?
We should have something like that. And if you and a lot of people your age want one, we’ll have it pretty soon, won’t we? Because really, we’re all helping to start it right here.
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You know who else wasn’t allowed to vote on their futures in the US back in 1919?
Women.
Women weren’t even allowed to vote on whether or not they should be allowed to vote. Women had to convince a majority of men to vote for women’s right to vote.
So women protested for the right to vote. They supported each other. Many got arrested. How much did getting arrested slow them down?
If you’re a teenager, walking down a street in broad daylight, not carrying a gun, how are they going to stop you? Who is going to stop you? The only people in America that adults want to use violence on even less than you, are elderly people and children even younger than you.
If adults want to use violence to try to prevent teenagers from protesting for their own futures, that really does spell out the problem for anyone with a camera phone to see, doesn’t it?
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If you’re a teenager, the environmental crisis isn’t really helping your mental health, is it?
Every time the police arrest you and a hundred or a thousand of your new friends, or shoot tear gas at you, you make the environmental crisis take a toll on their mental health too. And the mental health of everyone who sees it and who feelsthat just isn’t right.
If you and your thousand or million new friends agree with each other on why you’re protesting and getting arrested, you can support each other. If your mayors and city council members want to order the police to cram you into jail cells, all they’re doing is giving you a chance to tell each other your stories and get to know each other better.
When activists go to jail together, every night is open mic night.
47 episodes ago we were talking about high school students raising their hands in class and asking how people in history or literature were making the best decisions they could think of in the situations they were in for themselves and the people and things they cared about.
Now we’re talking about someone in a jail cell saying, “Hey everybody, we’re going to be here a few hours. Who wants to share a story of how you got involved?”
You’re probably all mad about something. But as long as you can all hang up the rotary phones and forget about 20th century political ideology and 20th century economic models and 20th century religious ideology, and just talk about how all of you making the best decisions you could think of in the situations you were in for yourselves and the people and things you care about led you all to be sitting in the same jail cell at the same time, you’re not sacrificing your education. You’re bringing your education with you wherever you go.
So where are we building Hogwart’s Starfleet Jedi Academy for environmental activists? Anywhere two teenagers can talk to each other about their lives.
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If you’re serious about activism, you’ve voted against taking an easy path through life.
So your first step is: Eat healthy, and get plenty of exercise. For both your body and your mind. Because the healthier you are, the more you’re capable of.
Now go look at yourself in a full length mirror. And repeat after me.
This is my body. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Everything I do in life begins with my body. I will use my body to live a good life.
Even though people will do things to me that are unfair, I will use my body to overcome those obstacles.
My mind is the most important part of my body. I will use it a lot.
All the other parts of my body are important too. I will use them a lot.
Working for a healthy mind and body is the first step toward living a good life and succeeding at my goals.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? All you’ve done is state five facts about biology that a fifth grader could understand, and make five simple decisions based on them. But all of a sudden you sound like you’ve just signed your name to the Declaration of Independence. Why is that?
Because there are a lot of people in the world who do a lot of different things to keep you from noticing that you have those choices.
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What about video games?
Have you ever played one of those video games where you play a character who keeps leveling up, and every time they level up you get to pick new skills or abilities or equipment for them? Or do you have any friends who play those games?
If you know a lot about how the games work, you can plan ahead, so that every time your pick new abilities they’ll add up to more abilities you’re going to want in the future. In real life, that’s called career planning.
If you were playing yourself in a video game about your life, how good of decisions would you want to make?
Now look in the mirror again. There’s your video game screen.
Now ask yourself:
What are your goals? What are your long terms goals? And what are your short term goals that build up to your long term goals?
Do you have the abilities and skills you need to reach your long term goals? Do you have the environment you need? Do you have the abilities, skills, and environment to succeed at your short term goals?
If you don’t, what can you do about that? Can you get the abilities, skills, and environment you need? Or should you rethink your goals to fit your abilities, skills, and environment?
The key to success is to set attainable goals. Not that they should be easy goals. But goals you can find a path to reaching.
Often the best goals are the ones that stretch your mind and body to their limits, because they’re the ones that show you how much you’re capable of.
You succeed at your long term goals by breaking them up into short term goals. If you can’t decide on long term goals, or see a way to reach them from where you are now, pick short term goals that help you do things that you care about. Looking for a path that leads in the right direction is what you do when you don’t have a map.
ACT III
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What else do teenage activists automatically have on their side?
I told you two things back in the beginning of this series. Children look up to you. And colleges and employers need you.
Here’s another easy one.
Your generation is bigger than your parents’ generation, and even bigger than your grandparents’ generation. Because that’s how population growth works.
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If you’re a teenager, you probably have a lot of time on your hands.
Have you ever had one of those friends who goes home from school in the afternoon and then spends 19 hours every day playing video games?
They probably mop the floor with old people in their 30s and 40s all the time. Because those people spend most of their time working at their jobs and making money and buying houses and stuff. So they only play an hour or two a day.
Meanwhile, your friend learns all the tricks and finds all the secrets in the games. Then when the old people run into your friend, they have no idea what hit them.
Well think about it. If deciding the fate of the global environment has come down to a competition, how many hours a day do you want to spend winning at it?
You still have to figure out how to win at it. But you understand the founding concepts of it better than most adults, you have a lot of time to devote to whatever you want to do, there are more people in the world who are your age than there are of any age older than you, children look up to you, and colleges need you.
Every generation of teenage activists always has all those things on their side.
ACT IV
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What can we learn about dealing with emergencies from what’s happening in Ukraine?
One day everyone was living their ordinary lives, and the next day they were in a fight for their survival. All the men under 60 were drafted into the military. A lot of women volunteered also. They were all given a few weeks of training and sent to help wherever they could to keep their country from being destroyed.
What can we learn from them about how to balance using our talents and pursuing our ambitions to try to lead a normal life whenever we can, with being prepared for the disasters we know are coming?
First, think about what you really want to do in life. Then figure out how you can use that to help deal with the climate crisis in some way. Then figure out how you can build upon that to prepare for emergencies.
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Let’s say you want to be a biologist. There are a lot of ways you could help do something about the climate crisis working as a biologist.
Then what can you do to expand on that skill set? What else can you learn that biology would help you with? And that would help your career as a biologist?
What about hiking, camping, and backpacking? Those would help you for doing field research. They’re also ways that you plan ahead for traveling and living outside of your normal home life to meet all your biological needs. How do you use your muscle power to hike up a mountain and back, and make sure you bring enough food, water, clothing, and everything else you’re going to need with you? How do you spend the night in a campground, plan your meals, prepare your shelter, find water, build a fire, cook, and deal with the temperature and weather changes outdoors over the course of a day and a night? What happens when you combine the two and spend three days on the trail?
Then what could you do if a tornado destroyed half of your city and you had to shelter in place without any electricity or plumbing for a week? Or if you had to walk for four days to evacuate the area?
What about running and swimming? Those are also ways you can use your body to do more things. They help with your health and fitness in general. And they help you move more quickly, which you need in an emergency.
What kind of biologist do you want to be? If you want to be a plant biologist it would be easy to combine that with farming or gardening. If you want to be an animal biologist it would be easy to combine that with emergency medical technician training. People are always going to need food and medical help, so there will always be jobs that let you apply what you learn about biology to everyday life.
What about writing, drawing, photography, and video? If you’re going to study living things, these are all ways to help gather information. Then if you get caught in a disaster, you can use them to help report on that too.
What about bird watching? Or watching some other type of wildlife if you want to be a different type of zoologist? Bird watching depends on you being patient and quiet and still for long periods of time, so you can hide and observe. How many Ukrainian zoology majors do you think there are right now, who are spying on Russians, gathering information about them, and sending it to people who can use it?
How many ways do you think Ukrainians are finding to adapt their educations to defeat the Russians’ plans?
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What if you want to be an architect?
You can design energy efficient buildings. You can also design buildings to withstand hurricanes or whatever extreme weather events are going to happen in your area. You already know there’s going to be a big demand for people to design buildings that way in the coming years.
If you want to be an architect, you could start by going to a community college to learn construction skills. Then you can find construction jobs easily, to make money and get related work experience.
If you work in carpentry, concrete, masonry, electricity, or plumbing, you get first hand experience at building buildings that other people designed. You also learn skills you can use at home, and to help your family and friends. You can join volunteer groups like Habitat for Humanity or the Peace Corps. You can get a lot of practice at working with other people that way, and at teaching some of your skills to other people.
When you major in architecture, you’ll meet a lot of other people who major in architecture, and a lot of other people who go to college for other things. By working and volunteering in construction you’ll get to know a lot of people who didn’t go to college. The more diversity you have in the people you get to know, the better you can understand why other Americans care about the things they care about, believe in the things they believe in, and vote for the things they vote for
Then what happens if your city gets destroyed by a flood? If you have to evacuate to a FEMA camp, you can help set up the camp. And then help maintain it.
When you return home, you can fix your own house. And help fix your neighbors’ houses. If you can’t go back to your regular job right away, you can go back to working in construction and help fix more people’s houses. If your house is unsalvageable and you have to move into a different house, you can save money by buying one that still needs some repairs and do them yourself.
Whatever you want to do in life, the more ways you canuse what you learn to produce results you want, and the more ways you canadapt it to changing situations, the more in control of your life you are.
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What if you don’t know what you want to do as a long term occupation?
Figure out what you like to do now. Something that will give you skills you can use to make money and that you can use towork for things you care about. Then go to a community college for that.
Either you’ll get a better idea of what you want to do in life while you’re in college, or you’ll graduate and get a job and start making money and gaining experience and you’ll think of the next step to take in life that way.
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What’s the difference between geometry and basketball?
In one you look at a problem on paper and you figure out how to solve it with a pencil. In the other you have to think on your feet. You start moving while the other team is moving, on the belief that by the time you get to where you’re going you’ll figure out what to do there.
What if you had to do both of them at the same time? What if every time you tried to pass the ball or shoot a basket, you had to do a geometry problem?
That’s basically how emergency service jobs work. You see a problem, you start running toward it, and by the time you get there you’ve used some high level training to figure out what to do about it.
Well in the 21st century, whatever your goals are in life, we’re all emergency responders now.
ACT V
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Now that you know what you know, what can you do as a student to push the education system in the direction you want it to go?
One easy thing you can do is to set up student clubs where you can learn what you want to learn.
What about an open mic club? Where everyone can write poetry or music or comedy or make videos that express what they think and how they feel about whatever they feel is important? That’s science, English, current events, and performing arts classes all at once.
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You have sports teams. You can play basketball or softball or soccer. You learn teamwork and get exercise and learn to follow the rules of a game.
But why bother with arbitrary rules? Sports like running and swimming and rock climbing teach you skills you can use in real life.
You know what else depends on teamwork and exercise? Firefighting.
You can use all that running and climbing and lifting and carrying and help save people from danger. You learn about the physics of how fires spread and affect buildings. You learn about the biology of how smoke affects people. You use physics and biology together to assess dangers and to plan on how to overcome them. All firefighters are EMTs, so you’d learn some first aid too.
The difference between safety and danger is knowing how to outsmart the danger. You don’t have to want to be a firefighter to train for firefighting. Everything you’d learn from firefighter training would make you better prepared for the 21st century.
Then what if students at a nearby high school to set up their own firefighting training club? Your two clubs could meet and train together sometimes. Then you could compete against each other to see whose clubs have trained better for each part of firefighting. Just like that you’ve turned it into a new sport.
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If you put open mic club and firefighter training club together, what do you have? People talking about things they feel are important, and people training to do something about things they feel are important.
What’s the purpose of education? To prepare students for the future.
How much support for climate science denial do you think comes from people whose educations just didn’t prepare them for this possibility? How many people do you think there are in your parents’ generation who have spent 20 years building up careers that there’s no way to use to do anything about the environmental crisis?
If you wake up in the morning and the choices you can see in what to do today are to go to work and make money in your 20 year career as a hair stylist, an accountant, or an art history professor, or write letters to your Representative and Senators about the environmental crisis, which one seems to you like it’s going to do the most for you?
It’s a lot easier to get past the denial stage of a problem when you feel like there’s something meaningful you can do about it.
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What else does a community of people training for environmental emergency services mean?
It means you have a career path that you can talk to each other about, and give each other concrete advice about. It means you can have get togethers with each other in the evenings and talk about your goals in life in clear terms. It means you can go to parties on the weekends, and meet strangers who already have some idea of what you do.
It means you can go on dates with women, or men, or women and men, or whoever you go on dates with, and when they ask you where you see yourself in five years you can tell them an answer that sounds to them like a plan. Instead of you sounding like you have noble ambitions in life but your career goals are about as abstract as collecting Star Wars action figures for a living. If volunteering for a career in environmental emergency services means volunteering for the social life of a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, how many volunteers do you think we’re going to get?
ACT VI
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Helping each other means helping each other directly, and also being generally supportive of each other.
In any large activist movement, like in any society, there are too many things to do for anyone to be personally involved in all of them. But we are all working together, because our combined efforts are leading to our mutual goals.
A strong, healthy society is one where you can look a stranger in the eye and agree with each other right away that you’re on the same side.
This is where things get challenging. And this is what makes heroism so important.
Hating people is easy. You can decide that you hate anyone, for any reason. Hate can unite groups of people against other groups. It can bring together two groups against another group. But it can’t bring together all the groups at the same time.
We could say that to move beyond hating people we need to think in terms of hating ideas.
That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s only one step. The next step is to understand ideas you don’t like, so you can understand why you don’t like them and why other people believe in them anyway. Or maybe you’ll find that you were wrong and the ideas are good for something after all, in ways or in situations you hadn’t thought of.
And unfortunately, sometimes people show themselves to be so inseparable from destructive ideas that there just is no conceivable way to convince them to stop being a threat.
Before a mass shooter start shooting, he isn’t a mass shooter yet. He’s just a person who has serious emotional health problems and access to a gun.
When you understand someone’s problems, you can do something to try to help them. But when someone starts intentionally trying to kill you, empathizing with them doesn’t help you anymore.
The environmental crisis is more complicated. But there’s a big difference between a person deciding to own a car and a person deciding to buy a TV network so they can spread lies about the climate crisis so they can keep making a billion dollars every year making it worse.
After a mass shooter gets arrested or killed, some people might feel pity for them. But many people won’t. Both of those feelings are understandable.
People’s emotions surrounding the climate crisis are a lot more complicated because it affects us in so many ways. But one thing we can be sure of is that there is no long term solution to anything that’s based mostly on hate.
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The environmental crisis threatens all of us. It will take many people, with diverse talents, skills, and backgrounds working together to make it come to any kind of positive outcome.
It takes courage just to admit how big the problem is. It takes courage to trust each other to want compatible things when we’ve never even met each other. It also takes courage to trust that we can create a solution together, when there are so many people with so many different talents and skills working together in so many different situations around the world that there’s no way anyone can know them all or plan on how they’ll fit together.
That’s part of all of us being emergency responders now. We start running toward a problem on the belief that we’ll figure out something to do about it by the time we get there, and we have to believe that other people are thinking the same thing.
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Finally, if you’re a teacher or parent, you have a decision to make too.
Part of my reason for writing this series for high school students was to show how much of a story of the world we can tell with information that’s readily available to us. Should we do that? Should we use our 21st century knowledge to write a story for the 21st century? Or should we limit ourselves to believing in stories from previous centuries?
Our Lives Matter. Our Lives Matter. Our Lives Matter.
Courage, Not Hope.
