Green New Generation

The other historic 2020 political contest began in a hallway outside Speaker Pelosi’s office just two years ago. Not along party lines, oddly enough. The language was incendiary, but Donald Trump wasn’t there and didn’t much care. “We are angry,” said the 24 -year-old Varshini Prakash for the newborn Sunrise Movement, “angry at the cowardice of our leaders at a time when courage is needed most.” For the Democrats in Congress not to have a plan to save the underpinnings of human life, she declared, was “a death sentence for my generation.” And an era opened: a spontaneous alliance of mostly teenagers and 20-somethings mobilizing their own experience, observation, and deadly fear.

Step out of a mad whirling news cycle, for an hour, back to climate reality, meaning the storms, the fires, the climate threat to human and other kinds of life that the presidential candidates won’t get around to, because they never do. We’ve been living in a two-tier conversation, even a two-tier world, divided between a power class that never could deal with the ruin of climate, and a rising generation, speaking for itself now, that can’t talk about anything without a climate connection, like race, justice, equality, or politics.