Dear Greta

Dear Greta

You tell us again to wake up, and to act. You speak to the adults, blithely consuming the planet. It is an old story, the young berating their elders. Some get furious and tell you to go back to school; I feel the need to explain our situation.  

Coming to be an adult is a slow thing. Learning how to get the baby to sleep, how to go to work each day, settling for less that you imagined, how to keep the kitchen bench tidy, stay friends with your partner. Being adult means coming to terms with the world as it is.

We made it to 50 yours, 60 years, 70 years and more. We thought we were getting on top of things. Now we find ourselves complicit in an economic system that feeds and infatuates us while eroding the life of the earth. Single use plastics. Those handsome cuts of meat in the supermarket. The good feeling as the car accelerates on an open road. Everything is suspect. 

Your fury wakes us up. You are bold, which is what the young must be, and what the times demand. Many of us are with you in spirit, but we start with a burden you don’t have, to challenge the prosperity we thought was progress.

We have to break apart the way we live and somehow make something else, with no blueprint, and not much influence. On bad days, everything aches, the joints and the heart. If there’s something new brewing in human consciousness, like genuine care for living things, it sure is taking a while to show up in the mainstream. 

Dear Greta, Google News tells me you are sailing now from the USA to Madrid, live streaming the four-week journey. There’s another UN Climate Change Conference, and there will be more plain speaking. It is your time.

We older ones are coming to terms with having been so mistaken and so slow, and that too is quite some journey. But we will shape up to the world as it is, because that’s what adults do. 

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare