We're robbing kids of their future--but also their present

Climate anxiety meets the commitment to the status quo

There’s no question that the rate of climate anxiety is growing—how could it not be, on a world where fires and floods are increasingly commonplace? And once your house has flooded—well, the next rainstorm, or even the next forecast, is going to bring back too many memories.

But I’ve found that a fair number of people, especially younger ones, are feeling really desperate anxiety even before they’ve had a traumatic experience, to the point where, for instance, they don’t want to have children of their own. My guess is that this has as much to do with the sense that they’ve been abandoned by the leading institutions—political and economic—of our societies, who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the scale of this emergency or break old practices...

-Bill McKibben