At the opening ceremony to the 2014 United Nations Climate Leaders Summit, Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner read a poem that was also a letter to her infant daughter. The poem expressed the hopes and fears she held as a parent and resident of an island nation—one which could become uninhabitable in coming years due to rising temperatures and sea levels.
While the climate threats we face in Utah differ, I share many of Jetnil-Kijiner’s hopes for my own daughter and son. At the September 24th, 2021 Fridays for Future protest on the steps of the Utah Capitol, I read this letter as an homage to Jetnil-Kijiner’s.
Dear 13-year-old, animal-loving daughter, Dear 16-year-old, justice-loving son, Before I grew taller than my mother, I played in fields where Exxon and Texaco had replaced wild grass with puddles of tar and jumbles of tumbleweeds. Dirt roads, one for every oil pump, cross-hatched the land like elk trails, but the elk had gone years ago, when the lake had gone. The land was rich, though the people who worked it were not. They knew drought and they knew heat, but they did not know that the sulfurous smell of money drifting among the company-built houses, the football game spectators, the children on the playground, was something that would bring more drought. More heat. Not just to them, but to everyone. The rich companies on that rich land knew. But they didn’t care. So the land got hotter. Dear son, dear daughter, when I was newly long-legged, as you are, I read about a hole in the ozone layer and stopped using hairspray. Soon, the leaders came together and agreed to stitch the ozone closed like a hole in a quilt. When I read that our planet was warming, I waited for the world to come together again. In the meantime, I wore beads and parted my hair in the middle and learned to recycle. But the world did not come together. Cooling it was too hard, would cost too many dollars. Our leaders knew what had to be done. But they did not believe it. So the earth grew hotter. Daughter and son, When you were small, it was all I could do to keep you safe from tricycle crashes and swallowed nickels. Warming loomed at the edge of sleep, in January weather hot enough for swimming, in California’s red smoke fire skies. I hid my worry in recycling bins and organic tomato sandwiches. Meanwhile the air choked, the sea drowned, farmlands dried, and our leaders built railroads and pipelines to hasten the movement of pollution. As they built, they sang the lying tuneworms of the comfortable rich: “The science isn’t settled.” “Change is too hard, too many dollars.” So the world grew hotter. My son, my daughter, last year, when you were newly long-legged, newly grown, doctors dripped poison into my veins to rescue me from cancer, and I gained the courage to look. Here’s what I saw: You, children, are not guaranteed a future with your mother as she is. Not your human mother, who feeds you. Not this planet, who feeds you. I stand today with those who understand the passion that comes with loving something you stand to lose. You do not deserve to lose the world as it was. Like those already counting the cost— island dwellers, forest dwellers, plains dwellers, family farmers, vanished plants and animals, people drowned in floods or burned by fires— you stand to pay a piper to whose music you never asked to dance. How much you pay will be a matter of degrees. I pray our leaders listen to them. I pray our leaders listen to you. I pray to witness 2050, to see that our leaders have listened to the scientists they pay, that we've slowed the rising tides, the rising mercury, the rising masses yearning to breathe free, the rising masses hot and hungry and afraid. I pray to see a future world with ancestral lands that still grow food, with summer air that nourishes instead of kills, with new medicines from species still thriving, with ancient redwood trees and technicolor coral reefs, and maybe even a glacier or two. But if not, my son, my daughter, listen— if our leaders have ignored us or if I'm not there to witness— I want you to remember you and your mother were here together today. I want you to remember love makes you both rich and powerful. I want you to remember the world needs leaders with that kind of wealth. I want you to remember that this world, no matter its changes, will always be beautiful and worthy. Like you. I want you to remember the sure hope for a better world Which we hold in all our clasped hands today As we stand in the presence of mountains in the warm sun at the end —or maybe the beginning— of a long, long summer.