Seven years ago, a fourth-grade girl standing alone in a library curiously picked up a volume titled Global Warming. As she flipped through the pages, she learned for the first time that the world as she knew it was in jeopardy.
That girl was me. I’ll always remember reading the words in that book and how it inspired me to take action. I gathered some of my friends, hoping to create a club at the school to learn more about what we could do to address the problem my eleven-year-old mind struggled to comprehend. We made an entire slideshow and even cited our sources. But the teachers weren’t too interested. Eventually, I decided to drop the matter. After all, I had friends to worry about, book reports, and games at recess.
I didn’t think a ton about it again until two years later. The winter of 2019/2020 was one of the warmest on record in Germany, where I lived. In mid-December, temperatures neared 70°F, and underneath our hedges, a confused primrose opened its petals and bloomed. I stared at the magenta flower in fascination. It was a welcome burst of color in midwinter, and yet I couldn’t help but think back to my book. Could something so lovely be a sign of impending doom?
The following year, we moved, and I didn’t have to worry about warmer winters. Coastal California hardly even had winters, but the climate crisis found other ways to insert itself. Monterey, California, is famous for being a sanctuary for monarch butterflies, which overwinter there. The sight is spectacular: thousands of butterflies fill the air in autumn and gather in the trees. Except that winter, they didn’t come. A few dozen butterflies fluttered through the otherwise empty sanctuary, looking lost.
Luckily, the next winter, some of the butterflies reappeared. But experiencing their absence touched me deeply. I imagined a world where parents would tell their children stories about a wonder that no longer existed. A world where the town of Pacific Grove would never again hold its annual parade to welcome the butterflies.
Christmas primroses in Germany, missing butterflies in California—these were different problems, yet they were one and the same.
In New York, the disturbance took a less colorful form: snow. An unusually long summer left Lake Ontario well above normal temperatures that winter. And where I live, that means a blizzard. Nearly six feet of snow descended upon us and then completely melted—all before Thanksgiving.
Reading about the effects of climate change is eye-opening. But as military teens, we experience them firsthand in new and frightening ways with each duty station we’re sent to: more powerful hurricanes, more destructive tornadoes, heatwaves, and wildfires. We don’t just see a single symptom of the problem—we have a unique perspective on its larger scale.
This gives us a unique opportunity to share our stories. The part of New York where I live has an incredible network of environmental advocates. They’ve taught me that facts don’t change minds and inspire action; stories do. Stories touch people in a way that numbers never will.
When I first flipped through the pages of that book, I felt afraid and alone. But that feeling is replaced with joy as I meet other people, young and old, with countless political beliefs and personal backgrounds, tackling this issue through science, art, storytelling, and activism. Believing we are alone makes us hopeless. Stories connect us and cut through the sense of despair holding us hostage. And military teens like us have a lot of stories to tell.
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