The essays below demonstrate the power of personal narrative to illuminate what can sometimes feel like an abstract or seemingly distant phenomenon: the changing climate. Originally printed in Write the World’s, Writers on Earth, these pieces showcase the artistry of weaving together scene and reflection, capturing singular experience within universal themes, and hopscotching through time by flashing forward and jumping back. Together, they remind us how the climate emergency impacts each and everyone of us—in big and small ways—and how writing can connect us across the crisis.
The crash of the unrelenting storm almost drowns every sound—the loud barks of our Shih Tzus in the garage, the cautionary announcements and occasional static on the radio, the loud thumps of footsteps across the whole house—but the whispers of my breath against the window pane grow louder every passing second. For a moment, my breathing falls into a familiar rhythm, bringing me back to last night.
***
It was all the sound I had to distract myself as the loud storm got more isolating. Slow breath in. Slow breath out.
I was lying on a metal bench in complete darkness, my dirty laundry carefully piled together to protect me from the growing cold. It had been almost two hours since I decided to get off the bus at the entrance hall of a nearby school, after the bus conductor announced that they were going to be rerouting. Apparently, the road through my hometown was declared unpassable—neck-high flood. The Camiling River had overflowed again.
It was already past midnight, and I was coming home from Manila with all my college work and dirty laundry for the week. I read from a text message earlier that signal number 2 was raised in the whole province of Tarlac, and so I brought my umbrella with me in anticipation of an unusually wet evening. But I did not expect I would find myself stranded alone on a cold metal bench in complete darkness, with only my breathing and the crash of the rain to keep my mind company.
This sense of powerlessness intermittently gave me surges of panic through the night—my life and my fate seemed to be no longer up to my own volition, and I could only wait in the darkness for the night to unfold. And for the first time, I understood what it felt like to be trapped—to be stranded. Not just in the physical sense, for beyond being alone and trapped in a dark hall while a huge storm raged on, I felt even more stranded in my own terrifying sense of helplessness in the moment.
The roar of thunder breaks me out of my trance, and I’m back to the fogged window pane in our living room, peering out across the cemented patio and onto the drowning yard where brown water silently forms an ocean. The empty lot beside our house is already submerged in flood water, the young banana trees almost drowning entirely, some bottles and plastic floating aimlessly. Even the dirt road in front, extending up to the main road, is now an expanse of brown water.
We’re still safe, my sister reminds us every 30 minutes to ease our nerves. Our house has a six-foot elevation from the ground, and floodwater reaching even the first step of our patio stairs is highly unlikely. But my growing fear is not for myself anymore. As I look restlessly outside the window at the water menacingly gaining volume, images of the people in lower areas flash in my mind. Early this morning, hundreds of online posts crying for help and prayers flooded social media. Photos of districts nearest the Camiling River show they are already swallowed by floodwater, flash floods gushing through broken dikes, entire living rooms already submerged, and people—wives, children, babies—trying to survive and get help.
While I worry if the floodwater is even going to reach our house’s doorstep, other people are already swimming desperately to survive, climbing to their roofs for temporary safety, crouching and huddling together, praying for miracles. While I sit behind a window pane, relying on the safety and privilege of my home, somebody out there could be all alone on a metal bench in the middle of the dark, stranded. Trapped. Helpless.
I can only hope the storm lets up soon, and that the horrors of Typhoon Ondoy or Yolanda—millions of people displaced and thousands killed—do not repeat themselves. Tropical storms have become more deadly in recent years—and research saying warmer sea surface temperatures intensify tropical storm wind speeds and strengthen precipitation have warned us enough to get used to such horrors.
In the days to come, relief operations and rehabilitation will take place. But these short-term compensations can no longer hide the reality that we are in. The horrors will repeat themselves again: people will shudder in fear again, people will drown and die again, and the wake of tragedy will be another reminder, another regret, another wave of prayers, and another hope for new beginnings. But the cycle never ends, and those privileged enough to survive and privileged enough to be mere observers in this deadly cycle seem to be comfortable enough, safe enough in their own positions. And people who are fundamentally trapped in this never-ending cycle of powerlessness could only remain stranded.
Systemic and policy changes that focus on climate change mitigation and on long-term effects that could potentially mitigate this deadly cycle and save lives are what we need. But a lot of people have yet to grasp that.
A lot of people have yet to experience what it feels like to be stranded in a state of powerlessness—to have our fate and our survival outside of our own volition—to realize the immensity of the decisions we make and the cruciality of the change that calls upon us. A change that literally means safety for somebody else. A change that means freedom for somebody else. A change that means life for somebody else.
Living in the seasonal climate of Massachusetts, I became accustomed to extreme weather patterns during my childhood. This was, as most things are, a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I can confidently say surviving in –10 degree Fahrenheit weather is possible and that 80 degrees is the blessing of a cool summer’s day. On the other hand, I can affirm that seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is one of the closest ways a human can get to experience the hibernation cycle of a bear. Still, the area just a half-hour drive from Boston, where I grew up, relinquishes any trace of city or even suburban life. Forests and rolling hills and farms lie adjacent to the winding Charles—chameleon green for a time, the palette of a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Special next, and then, for the finale, a milky, crystalized blanket stacked inches (or feet) high.
When, in 9th grade, I discovered my mom was offered a job in California, I willingly encouraged her to take it and move us all to the West Coast. And move us she did. Santa Barbara was an intense change of scenery, beautiful in wholly different ways. I loved it, and SAD vanished! The first year here was remarkable. After school, new friends and I swam and surfed, enjoying driving up and down the 30-something-mile span of surf spots, keeping an eye out for the best wave. Once, I went out on a friend’s boat to wakeboard, and we ran into some lovely whales—on Earth Day, nonetheless. It is truly a magical place.
To my dismay, all precious things come with a cost; the trade-off for living in SoCal is having to take military showers because of the extreme drought. I could live.
The winter of my second year in California, I experienced, for the first time, a forest fire. The Thomas Fire started in Ventura, not so far away from our little SB cove, and spread rapidly due to the Santa Ana winds. The mountains caught flame and the palms did too. Everyone I knew evacuated the area, and school was cancelled indefinitely, for it was not safe to breathe the high levels of particulate matter in the air. My family left and didn’t come home for three weeks. People’s pools were used for firefighter water, and firefighters were flown in from all across the country to help. It was a big deal, and it was scary—especially leaving so quickly. How fast a paradise can be destroyed is still unimaginable to me. The fire, however, veered away just in time, and few homes within my small city were actually burned. Cautioned by doctors, we had to install air purifiers in our rooms after that.
It didn’t take long before our community was hit again. At around 4 a.m. on a January night, a rainstorm instigated a mudslide that catapulted a massive stream of mud and boulders straight through our neighborhood, uprooting homes and killing families. This was the scariest thing I have ever experienced. The night before, our local news station cautioned an evacuation—not a mandatory evacuation—but we still left for the night because we are cautionary people. In the morning, we woke to the news broadcasting what looked like our drive home, except there was no freeway, just mud; no little village road, just mud. Cars acted in ways objects act in Dali paintings—so distorted that you could no longer claim the thing functioned how it ought to.
After a fire especially, but in California in general, the earth cannot hold the water from a large rainstorm. Plants here do not require much water, and therefore when it does rain, water isn’t sucked up by plants. Literally, the water has nowhere to go; the drainage system in Santa Barbara is all but nonexistent because of how mountainous the region is. In addition, the drainage we do have is insanely impractical for rains: when the containment of runoff overflows, it is simply dumped into the Pacific. Because the runoff is not put through the filtration system, pollution from streets, fertilizers, and pesticides is dumped into the ocean, causing numerous issues. After the mudslides, we could no longer swim or surf in the muck-filled Pacific, and to this day, many Montecito houses remain deserted.
It was my surroundings that ignited my desire to find answers—to find out how and why nature works the way it does. I wanted to know what part people played in it. This year, I took AP Environmental Science, a class whose very premise is to spotlight how interconnected the world is. I learned: weather is not climate. Even if a senator holds up a snowball in the Senate as proof
that Earth isn’t experiencing climate change, just know one thing: he’s wrong. The climate change we need to look out for is the warming of Earth by 2 degrees Celsius; if Earth’s temperature rises more than that, we have little chance of saving ourselves. I am hopeful for the future because we already have the technology to save Earth and do what we must. The only factor that will change from the past to the future is that my generation, Gen Z, will be the decision-makers. We are fully aware of global politics before we are even able to vote, thanks to social media. But with so many outlets and resources consumed by just one individual, filtering to get to the issues that matter is important.
In terms of issues we are expecting to take on, global environmental justice is at the forefront of Gen Zers’ minds, with Greta Thunberg leading the way. I trust my peers more than any adult in decision-making because the way we were raised forces us to approach life objectively, without prejudice or precedent in the way. In this way, we are unbound from many chains older generations were forced to operate under—we can work efficiently, collaboratively, and effectively. The only way to tackle a problem as huge as climate change is to hear and value as many perspectives as possible, because there will be that many more solutions and strategies.
Perhaps the most important truth in this day and age is that we need Earth, but she doesn’t need us. Earth has survived meteors, several mass extinctions, and two ice ages—how bad would it really be if humans got booted? Earth is resilient; humans are too, but not as. I understand I must do something with what I’ve learned, and quickly, because time is running out.
In the heart of my grandparents’ HDB block, neighbours around the area grew a garden. Not the ones rich with rare species and never-before-seen flowers, but more like a plot of land with shrubs, fruit trees, and some ferns nestled around here and there—but still, undeniably, a garden. Having grown up with it, I guess you could say that my roots were intertwined with those of the plants. But out of all of them, the one that I felt the most connected to was the mango tree that my grandfather and I planted together, right smack in the middle of the humble garden. It was short, unimpressive, but hopeful. It was what connected both of us—a branch from my heart to his.
As I grew older, the mango tree grew taller, and I watched its arms slowly spread over its shorter friends as the years went by. Even though I very much enjoyed watching my green comrades grow together with me, it would be a lie to say I loved the garden for solely that reason. At first, the garden was just a place for me to play with the neighbours’ children, but after we outgrew the phase of running around and sweating for fun, they stopped coming down, and I went to the garden for the pure joy of watching my grandfather and his neighbours bond over something that made them happy. It became evident to me that every leaf on each plant was a symbol of my grandfather and his neighbours’ hard work and passion, and that made me appreciate the garden’s growth even more.
On days the sun scorched, I would watch my grandfather and the neighbours water their plants meticulously, beads of sweat trickling from their hair into the soil, and when it poured, I peeked out the window of my grandparents’ 14th floor flat and watched the rain beat against the leaves of our mango tree. I remember how impressively green the garden looked after every downpour. I started appreciating the sun, for heating up the ground to just the right temperature for the plants to grow, and the clouds, for quenching their thirst when they needed it the most.
My secondary school days, however, threw my life into what felt like a thunderstorm. The drastic change in workload and lifestyle took a toll on me in ways primary school had not, and I was held back from a lot of my simple pleasures—including visiting my grandparents and the garden. When I finally took the time out to properly visit the garden, four years had flown by, and I noticed the plants were ever so slightly browning around the edges. It turned out that the consistently above-average temperatures and lack of rain in 2018 made it the eighth warmest year on record, and this, in turn, took a toll on the plants. Apart from that, the familiar faces that met me on a daily basis when I was younger were nowhere to be seen, and it hit me that the plants were starting to wither with their owners.
Yet even as the mango tree stood lifeless, I couldn’t bring myself to see only loss. In its brittle branches and cracked bark, I saw a story—a legacy of resilience, of warmth, of bonds quietly formed in the heat of the sun and the softness of rain. I realized then that the garden had never been just about plants. It was about people. About my grandfather’s laughter carried on the wind. About neighbors sharing water and stories. About childhood roots stretching far deeper than I’d ever known.
In this fragile world shaped by climate change and shifting seasons, I know that gardens like ours will continue to wilt unless we act. But I also know that the love we pour into the earth leaves something behind—something worth fighting for. So I’ll keep returning to that patch of land. I’ll clear the weeds, turn the soil, and maybe plant another tree. Not to replace what was lost, but to honor it. Because in every seed lies hope—and in every act of care, a chance to grow again.
randfather. The curtains were drawn on what once was a humble but beautiful garden, overflowing with heart and soul, a land of precious memories.
Clearing up what was left of the garden was painful, yet reflective. I started to wonder if maybe our plants would have survived if nature was a little kinder, if the climate stayed how it was so many years ago. We could’ve kept the memories of our relatives alive—each fruit the plant bore would have given comfort to so many, as if showing that their loved one would always be there, growing beside them. I know I would’ve loved to have a memory of my grandfather kept alive, but it was a possibility that could not be explored, and that stirred up my feelings.
However, as I pulled the last of our tree’s roots, I found a mango—brilliantly yellow, unfazed by the catastrophe that had occurred around it. When I picked it up, I was reminded of how the garden filled the hearts of so many, and a sense of hope overwhelmed me. I thought, perhaps a day would come, when the climate would be a little kinder, and the flowers could bloom, and fruit trees blossom, and we could all feel the same way I felt when I picked up that last mango.
I was nine when my parents moved all our belongings to the second floor of our house, stocked our bathrooms with black basins of clean water, and filled our bedrooms with instant noodles. It was 2011, and I barely knew how Facebook worked, so I merely watched as my parents scrolled through pictures of people perched on their roofs as torrents of tea-colored water rushed past beneath their feet.
I turned on the television and saw boats where there shouldn’t be boats—on streets and in buildings and in rice fields… or what used to be rice fields. I thought it was funny at the time, and secretly hoped the floods would reach my area as well, so I wouldn’t have to go to school. Living in Bangkok, removed from the struggles of people living in less developed, more affected parts of Thailand, I didn’t feel that the floods were anything more than a surprising break from my routine.
I didn’t know that beneath the boats were bodies—and not just bodies but lost lives, lost dreams, lost futures. I didn’t know that the floods were a message from our planet.
Like I said, I was nine.
I was thirteen when the black basins made a comeback in our bathrooms and we started a collection of bottled water. My sister and I weren’t allowed to shower for longer than seven minutes each, which seemed like a very short time to me. It seemed ironic, really: we had too much water before, and now we didn’t have enough. I was old enough to know, then, that Earth was not just randomly acting out, sending us problem after problem. She had pulled the fire alarm, and not enough people were rushing to save her.
I am sixteen now, and two months ago, I looked out my window and saw fog. Except it wasn’t fog. It was dust. Dust like no one had ever seen before. Dust that made global headlines. Dust that allowed students all over Bangkok to stay home from school. Dust that cleaned out every store’s supply of air purifiers. I kept my dust mask on every second I was outside, and yet I didn’t stop sneezing for weeks. Then the dust moved up to the northern parts of Thailand and we stopped caring as much.
I took a five-minute walk from my mother’s workplace to the train station the other day, and it was blazingly hot.
Interestingly enough, that’s what it took for me to realize just how much our world needed our help. Living in Thailand, people are always complaining about the heat, whether they’re an office employee or a street vendor—or a student, like me. But how much more complaining will it take to realize that, like the natural disasters that had such an impact on our lives, this heat is more than a passing annual event? How long before we realize that we do not need to look to grand gestures from the planet to recognize the state of crisis it is in? The irregular seasons, the heat waves, the melting glaciers—all are more than natural phenomena: they are warning signs, alarm bells, beeps on the monitor of a planet on life support.
William Shakespeare said, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” This is especially true of natural disasters. Like an inattentive partner in a relationship, we force our Earth to resort to desperate measures before we are willing to take notice of the state it is in. Because when a natural disaster befalls us, for one devastating moment, we are kin. We are family, children of the Earth, working together to save her and ourselves. And when that moment is over, we go back to ignoring her again... but we never do stop caring for ourselves.
Unfortunately, caring for ourselves usually means exploiting and damaging our blue-and-green home with little to no regard for the consequences. We forget that our planet may survive without us, but we cannot survive without our planet. It’s all well and good to take action in the face of natural disaster, but how many of them must happen in order for us to fully realize the growing urgency of our situation? How many of them can we endure before it’s too late?
I stepped outside today and there was no flood, no drought, no dust. And yet I knew that our planet was dying.
Author’s note:
At the time of writing, the problem of toxic dust is still going on in the northern region of Thailand, and yet no one is paying as much attention to it anymore simply because it’s not happening in the capital. Countries like South Korea and China are also suffering from a similar situation with toxic dust pollution.
Once upon a time, there were stars.
Fields of stars. Realms of them. Galaxies. Worlds—and we could see them.
Once upon a time, the stars we saw were not merely the delight of the eye, the wonder to the heart, or the proof of the existence of God. When the day’s compass retired below the hazy horizon, and all was cold and dark, the stars marked the ways. The stars were the hope.
There are no stars now. The fumes have enshrouded them. The fumes from those belching fossil-fuel power plants that have been belching for decades now, and, as long as it’s profitable for the government, that will obligingly belch for the decades to come.
As we zoom past those smokestacks, belching assiduously, incessantly, I am repulsed. Then I wonder.
Do they not realize, those businessmen in their palaces and mansions, what it means to lose the stars? The bejeweled field of heaven is the smallest, yet the greatest, thing they can ever lose.
Small, for it is so far away and of no market value. Great, for it is the ancient promise of health and comfort—of life itself—further along the right path.
“We do not interact commercially with posterity. So what if our great-grandchildren breathe in polluted air? So what if fifty years hence, every other young child contracts asthma and every other venerable elder buckles under lung cancer? We live in and answer for the present only; let their respective generations attend to the past and the future.”
I expect it is easy to forget; comfort and contentment are anesthetics to worry. The window is open as the jeep courses down the highway, and my hair, like a banner behind me, sails. Though the smokestacks have not passed from sight, the cool rushing wind is anything but unrefreshing. For a long instant, I ignore that I ride in a machine that coughs copious carbon, a mobile smokestack itself, and let the speed invigorate me.
The sun and the crescent sink; we are racing to meet them at the rim of the earth. We are almost there.
We are thirty miles and more from any civilization. Nothing has changed perhaps for centuries. Westward stretches dune upon dune beyond dune, like golden waves frozen in time. The sunset crowns each breaker with fiery foam that blinds the eye.
Shouldering the disassembled tent, the water, the telescope, and all paraphernalia that we did not believe we could stand a night without, we sink our feet in the chilly sand, tread the ancient way.
The tent is mounted and the campfire lit. I watch the smoke billow and curl higher and higher, till it merges with the darkness of the evening above. I wonder if the elders who cleave to those old, old ways instar the sky nightly with their tears; I wonder how long until even those remote haunts of theirs are choked with the carbon fumes. Then those tears all shall fall—caustic, undrinkable—and posterity will weep in its turn; but now, what do those profiteers care?
My father has mounted the telescope. By now, the crescent has slipped beneath sight, and my eyes are wide, straining, seeking.
Weeping.
“What’s the matter?” He leaves the telescope, seeing the shine in my eyes.
“Look,” I whisper, and point.
The North Star.
“What about it?”
“I—I can see it.”
“I know, right? You can see it better through the lens. Hold on, let me focus it.”
I don’t need a lens. That single naked star is the most beautiful and fateful thing of all the carbon-choked earth. Polaris always led the stars, the hope.
I reach a hand forward, as though my fingers, so small suddenly against the background of the endless heavens, could seize the hope, preserve it, in their feeble grasp. But reconsidering, I lower my hand. One by one, the celestial lamplighter is kindling them: the other stars blink and shimmer forth, some bashfully and some boldly, all beautifully.
Leave the North Star to posterity—they will well need it who follow us. There remains hope for us yet.
But how long will that hope last? The cold night is long, and though I am loath to wrench my gaze from the sky, I fall, anyhow, to sleep. Just at twilight, I rise, where one by one, the lamplighter extinguishes the bright little dots. How swiftly they are put out!—Stay, stay! They each are smothered, one by one.
Those who wallow in the luxury of profit, if they would but spend one night as once did their forebears, stripped of their mansions, silks, and silvers, BMWs, and private jets—then they would see. There is no such thing as past, present, or future: it is but one continuum of time that the heavens lead to eternity. The hope of the past is the hope of the present and the hope of the future—but they are killing that hope, disappointing the past, bereaving the future. The sun is brimming yonder, and the businessmen believe they rise to the auspices of a new day.
Yet there are no auspices. The stars are fading.