It’s sacrilege to spend the first day of spring inside, when the weather finally hits 70 degrees and you can leave the house without a puffer. At least, that’s what I told myself after deciding to skip my 10:15 a.m. class to sit on the green by Franklin Field to photosynthesize with my friends and pretend to do work—even though my computer was completely dead.
The other day, it suddenly struck me that eventually, I will have to work a big girl job in an office and sit inside at a desk. “I need a job where I can just go outside and do nothing if the weather is perfect,” I told Digital Managing Editor Hannah Sung. “I think that’s called being unemployed,” she replied.
Modern capitalism demands a divorce from nature. Time, once marked by the passage of the sun, has now been abstracted into the standard hour as the basis of wage labor. We spend most of our time nocturnal in front of a computer in an artificial paradise.
Spending all day inside and all night awake, it’s easy to forget that we too are reliant on the sun, the air, and wilderness—not just for enjoyment or beauty, but for our very survival as well. When we consider the catastrophe of climate change, humans aren’t merely acting on the environment from afar. Rather, we are irrevocably part of nature. It’s not just the polar bears’ ice caps that are melting; it’s our homes that are sinking under water as well.
The last time I went back to Texas over the summer, I could hardly step outside after 9 a.m. without risking heatstroke. Texas has always been hot, but in the last few years, it seems to have gotten even hotter. Rather than spiraling into climate despair, I decided to ignore the apocalyptic heat by simply blasting the air conditioning—probably sending out even more fluorocarbons into the ozone.
It’s easy to ignore that we are in a state of crisis. After all, all you have to do is go inside. But as the wildfires in California and the hurricanes on the East Coast have shown us, the shields we have built are frail and impermanent. The more we try to build up our seawalls and barriers, the more we destroy the very ecosystem that we are part of. We are drowning in quicksand, frantically swimming toward doom rather than taking a step back and living alongside nature. The truth is that we can never fully separate ourselves from the environment. It is easy to cast ourselves as the villains in the climate crisis, but at the end of the day, we are natural beings, living on borrowed land.
In “The Greens Issue,” Street offers a voice to the face of the climate crisis at Penn. From community gardens to revitalized vacant lots, local Philadelphians are working to create a greener future in the city. Yet at the same time, integral environmental research at Penn is under attack amid political funding cuts. The climate crisis is much closer than the Great Barrier Reef. It’s right outside our window. Just look outside. Published on recycled paper, take this issue of Street and turn it into whatever you wish—be it a poster, an envelope, or a collage. But more than anything, turn it into a call for action.
