I hope your 18th birthday is a day of happiness for you (1) with your family, friends and wider community.
Birthdays are celebrations, time for reflection and thinking about the future. There was a time when that was mostly in the context of a person’s own circumstances, and that of their family. Over the last generation – since before you were born – birthdays (and of course every day) happen with the dreadful knowledge of climate change.
I am not going to explain to someone living in the South Pacific what that means.
For the people where I live, sea level rise is an abstract thing. They think – if they think of it at all – as lines on a graph. For people where I live, storms that flatten towns and islands are something they see in Hollywood disaster movies or, lately, on television news programs.
Nor am I not going to whitesplain colonialism, extractivism or the ways your life is hemmed in by rich people and their corporations who want to get richer.
I am not going to lecture you about white people who claim to have your best interests at heart, Through The Power Of The Free Markets or under some other banners. You know all about these types of people, their words and the value of those words from your own life, from the hard-won wisdom of your parents and your elders.
All I have got for you is the following.
The day you were born, Monday October 9th, 2006, Australian charities and scientists were trying to get Australian politicians to give a damn about the problems climate change was already causing for your parents, and the ever-greater threat it would pose to you as you grew from child to adult.
They released a report called “Australia Responds: Helping Our Neighbours Fight Climate Change.”
Australian politicians either ignored this report, or used it as a step up for their own hollow ambition.
If I could see you, I suspect I would see a raised eyebrow and a quiet smile. “You expect surprise? Shock?”
When I was turning 18, the newspapers and television (this was before the Internet, long before social media) were full of “The Greenhouse Effect,” as we called climate change back then.
So my first advice’ – let no-one tell you that somehow they didn’t know.
If you will allow a second, final piece of advice. It is natural for a young person on the cusp of adulthood to be deeply frustrated with the world they have inherited, that those older have not sorted out the big problems. On climate, please do not blame your parents. Or your grandparents. The people of the South Pacific have been raising their voices for decades, pleading with the rich countries to act, explaining that the peril facing the South Pacific would grow and grow, and devour everything.
That they were basically ignored is not the fault of the speakers, but those too greedy, arrogant and stupid to listen. The problem is not to be found in Kiribati, or Tuvalu or anywhere near you. The problem is in New York, Manchester, Canberra, Adelaide, Auckland, Berlin. And elsewhere. But I am not here, in this letter, for geopolitics.
For my part, I will continue my inadequate efforts. I will try to be an ally. I will fail repeatedly, of course. But people like me – with privilege, education, water coming out of my tap and food in my belly – have far more to do than we have been doing, if we want to be able to look you – and any children you have – in the eye.
Finally, I hope, despite the knowledge of what is coming (some of it is already here, but so much more is to come), that your celebrations are full of joy. And at some point, of course, thanks to the November 2023 agreement, welcome to Australia.
Footnote
- By the way, you are both a tired rhetorical device, but at the same time, you are flesh and blood; dozens and dozens of real human beings, with names, hopes, families, endangered homes, becoming an “adult” (or turning 18 – perhaps that does not have the same cultural or legal weight where you live) across the South Pacific.