Where Were You When the Climate Crisis Began?
Making sense of an undefinable moment
About a year ago I was on the porch of my house with some friends and we were watching the rain. One friend remarked, “This is a moment we will look back on in ten years and think ‘that’s when the climate stopped being normal’”. It was an unseasonable rain. It wasn’t harsh or threatening. It didn’t wash away bridges or cause terrible destruction — it was just weird.
A bit unexpected to have a chilly rain in the middle of a hot, dry, central California summer. If he had not mentioned it, I probably wouldn’t even remember that evening.
There is a concept called “Flashbulb Memory”. It’s when a massive piece of news enters our lives and we generate a vivid, important memory of where we were, who we were with, and how we felt in that moment. A flashbulb memory is what you recall when asked, “Where were you on 9/11?” or “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” These moments can define our individual lives, but they can also define entire generations. They can create tipping points in political or cultural revolutions (Also, FYI, flashbulb memories can also be somewhat unreliable and our stories change over time). But how do we create change when there’s no clear answer to “Where were you when the climate crisis began?”
Climate change doesn’t have a single, universal flashbulb moment. There’s no definable minute or day when it “began”. There’s no way to fully attribute any given natural disaster or event to our abuse of the planet. So for each of us, we decide where and when it really began. For many people, this year may be the year climate change began for them. Droughts, wildfires, record heat. My social media feed is full of people questioning the wisdom of staying where they live. Extreme events pushing people to really reconcile their lifestyle with climate reality. They are forming answers to the title question.
So for me? On 9/11, I was 12 years old, on an airplane flying from New York to Florida. That’s obviously memorable, easily confirmed, and that day is used as the textbook example of a flashbulb memory. But when climate change began, was I even born yet? Did it begin when I helped my high school environmental club raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims? Was it when I was shopping for N95 masks and air filters at the hardware store while wildfire smoke filled the air?
It could have been any of these moments — but instead for me, it was just a sort of mundane summer rainfall. I think we had tacos for dinner.
