January 14, 2021
In my first year of school, we grew trees. We were taken into the playground and taught how to press our seedlings into the soil, to pat the new plants in their plastic containers, very gently, against the ground. We watered them, stuck masking tape along the sides and scribbled our names in black marker. It was the first time I had ever nurtured something, and I wouldn’t do it again until adulthood.
This was 1995. There was a hole in the ozone layer, the waters were polluted, there was trash where there should not have been trash, and there were not enough trees. We were told that day, in the way one explains things to five- and six-year-olds, that there was too much carbon dioxide in the air, that trees could absorb the CO2 and replace it with the oxygen they expelled, and that was why we needed to plant more trees. It was a period of relative calm between geopolitical storms. The Cold War was over, Francis Fukuyama had declared History was at an End, and it was, quietly, the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first definitively concluded that there was “a discernible human influence” on the changing climate. But in kindergarten, we were assured that the problem could be solved with just a little will-power, just a little ingenuity. Nothing to worry about.