Another fall season comes with another back to school frenzy. But this year is different. The chaos that surrounds back to school is coming from nervous and upset students as well as hard-working parents and teachers whose jobs risk the health of their households. Every family is facing their own struggles as school districts struggle to find a solution that promotes high-quality learning while keeping families safe—by no means an easy feat. Combining together all of these factors and more, almost every student is living within their own unbalanced world this Fall. Sadly, our own personal world is not the only one that is unbalanced this year.
Our communal home, Planet Earth, has been wrecked by forest fires on the West Coast, record-setting hurricanes up the Atlantic seaboard and in Louisiana, and an increased amount of food and plastic waste from an unpredictable and devastating pandemic. How are we supposed to find any time to focus on what is going on outside our homes, when we already have so many issues on our plates?
For me, acknowledgment and proper scheduling have become the bridge between these two worlds. As a high school student, I speak from experience when I say that many of us are very busy balancing schoolwork, a social life, sometimes a job, sports, and now the extra challenges of online school. On top of our own work and commitments, our Earth is being destroyed by pollution, the ever clearer effects of climate change, and natural resource depletion. While it would be easier to turn away from the environmental issues harming humanity, I cannot—not anymore. I used to live in ignorance of the state of our warming world. Of course, I knew it was happening, but like many people today, I simply saw but then turned away, back to my own world where I already had enough to worry about. Eventually, after researching and focusing on the issues, I had effectively changed my outlook, and I could no longer be idle. The first step I took was acceptance.
Acceptance: The Challenging First Step
Acceptance is tricky and painful. Coming to terms with true issues is the most difficult barrier we have to face when becoming activists, and it just so works out that the hardest step is the first. We cannot expect to change our viewpoint of the world in only a few days or even weeks. Accepting how humanity interacts with our planet is a journey that each person has to complete at their own pace. It begins with working up our “tolerance” to looking at the issue until our eyes have adjusted.
Ignoring our problems does not make us stronger and actually makes us powerless and naive. Think of the famous 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. WebMD calls the first stage of this process, denial, a “defense mechanism.” Staying in this stage gets us nowhere, and if we want to transition towards a balanced planet, we must be brave enough to overcome this obstacle. Once we can accept the current state of our planet, we can transform our anger, depression, and hopelessness into innovation, visioning, and progress—exactly what humanity needs to thrive.
Balance Before, Action After
So, all of this acceptance is great, but progressive thoughts are nothing without an arsenal of actions behind it. As in any movement, the variety of opportunities and roles are near endless, but quite often the challenge comes back to balance. Many students are overloaded with school work, extracurriculars, and the added stress of the pandemic. The pathway that all too many students are conditioned to follow is to suck it up and to add on more work without changing their pre-existing schedules. This system will in the end prove unsuccessful, neither helping nor hurting our communal world while decimating our inner worlds which live and breathe on downtime and relaxation. We can only give a part of ourselves to activism when we already have a part left to give.
The act of making time will be as diverse as the readers of this article, since it is all about you and your personal situation. For some people, it may mean downsizing the number of clubs they participate in, or simply taking one less tricky class this semester. For others, the change might not be so straightforward. Only once you are able to handle your current schedule with downtime, are you ready to take on some meaningful environmental organizing. Taking the extra time up front will pay off in the long run for your mental health, which comes before anything else.
Picking and Joining a Group
Now let the activism begin! I would recommend joining a structured group or club which regularly meets (virtually) so that it is easier to build into your schedule. As I touched on before, environmental activism is very rewarding but also emotionally draining, and that is why it is important to not go into this work alone. The relationships that form through your group will become a safety net, helping you to rebound during the inevitable moments where the problems seem too big to handle, or when your own world is falling apart. During this time of great isolation and physical distance, these connections to each other and the greater world are more important than ever. Joining the right group with a time commitment that works with your schedule will help you achieve these benefits.
In a world that is constantly changing, the journey of environmental activism perfectly reflects the balance between the individual and society, personal and worldwide connections, and the push and pull of our greatest treasure: our time. It’s almost as if this is Mother Nature’s gift to us: if we work to reestablish her stability, she provides stability for us in return.
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