There is something which is said just enough to seep into my consciousness, but never enough — before now — that I could understand it. Every time I heard it, it stopped me, and I stood or sat briefly still, and wondered.
Anyway, the comment in question is one I encountered a lot at university, and have heard a little since in the media: and it relates to climate change, and the threat of the things to come.
Occasionally young people — they were generally women — would tell me, or say within my hearing, that they not only thought about the changing climate with the regularity any forward-looking person might, or with the concern of the activist or observer of world events.
Instead, these women said, they would picture the uninhabitable world they would soon see before them. They would see it and think it through, holding it in mind, and might even begin to experience cold fear, or have an attack of panic.
These women would imagine the burning earth, the bank-breaking oceans, the tropical storms, the storming dust, the powerful thirst of millions — all confidently predicted — and they would get something from the visceral reactions these things prompted.
Now this reaction is one thing. Whether it could be justified is worthy of discussion. Whether it’s all likely is another.
