Tamara Ullyart, presentation 2023
Imagining the Future.
Ask me to imagine my future, and my honest response is ‘I don’t know’. As te youngest generation, facing the worst consequences of Climate Breakdown, I’ve no idea what my future holds, or even if it exists. But, let me share the different futures I’ve pictured throughout my life, and in doing so, share what I’ve learnt from a childhood faith, a teenage despair, and an adulthood of determined hope. I fell in love with the Natural World when I was six years old and watching a documentary following a cameraman in Alaska who filmed grizzly bears. Now, I’d watched nature documentaries before, but this was the first time I was old enough to understand that what I saw on screen was a specific, actual place, in the real world. So, when this cameraman explained that this far north there was a season where the sun never set, I was in awe. ‘The Land of the Midnight Sun’ he called it. It sounded, and looked, like a fairytale. But it was better than that, it was real. From that moment on, I was hooked. I discovered David Attenborough, and watched everything he put out, religiously. I accrued a wealth of highly specific animal facts, and a deep-seated love and respect for the Natural World. I saw its intricacy, its vibrancy, it’s utter brilliance. And I understood it’s unquestionable, fundamental importance. So, when I became involved with climate-change charities a year or so later, and gradually learnt of the problems this world faced, with the faith of a child, I trusted we would fix them. Sure, I began to understand how big these problems were, but I knew we could solve them. I imagined Climate Change would become a story I’d tell my children, like conquering smallpox, or reaching the moon. I imagined a future where everyone learned to loved nature as I did. With the faith of a child, I imaged a future where the Natural World was protected, respected, and encouraged to flourish. It wasn’t until my teenage years that two events really shook that faith. The first was a trip to China, aged fifteen. Here, I experienced first-hand the horrific air-pollution of Beijing. It looked as if someone had rubbed out the entire sky with a dirty rubber, chocking it to a permanent grey. And the air itself hurt to breathe. It caught it the throat and burned in the chest. Only the tourists didn’t wear a mask. And, almost worst of all, you couldn’t see the stars. As someone who considers gazing up in wonder at the stars to be something fundamentally and quintessentially human, that was deeply upsetting. For the first time, I imagined a future where we didn’t solve climate change, where everything worsened, spiralled out of control. I imagined raising children who never saw the stars. Then, aged nineteen, I was involved in a local campaign designed to get the council to install toad ladders in the drains of a new housing estate. Toad ladders are small, inexpensive pieces of plastic, inserted into drains, so that any little creature which falls into the drain when it rains is able to climb out again. Now, toad ladders were included in the development’s plan, but the developers hadn’t put them in. As a result, literally hundreds of creatures drowned. Especially infuriatingly, this included many Great Crested Newts. These are tiny lizard-like creatures with back spines and a brilliantly orange belly. They are as close to England is ever going to get to a dragon. They’re beautiful, they’re critically endangered, and they’re protected by law. That spring, I spent a week fishing their stinking, oil-slicked corpses out of drains. One day was especially bad. I remember crouching in the grass, emptying the same drain I had emptied the day before, and the day before, and the day before that. Sixteen toads, three newts, all dead, lay slick and black and bloated beside me. A council worker had finally arrived. He looked down at me, at the pale-faced teenager surrounded by death. “It’s illegal to interfere with the drains” he said. “The drains are public property.” “It’s illegal to interfere with the drains” he said. The third time he said it, I felt something inside me physically snap. Because if it was this hard, to do something so cheap and easy, that was already supposed to have been done, to save a species protected by law–if something this simple was this difficult, what hope did we have for anything else? Suddenly stopping climate change felt like trying to stop a hurricane with a dream catcher. I couldn’t imagine a future at all. I went home, cried, and fell into a climate depression scarily deep. For three months, I functioned at the bare minimum. At times, my fear became physically, viscerally painful, like being tied to an electric fence. Everything lost its meaning. I was supposed to be preparing to study English at uni. Now I couldn’t justify studying the subject I had always loved. It felt crazy and selfish. What good was Shakespeare when the world was burning? What good are books on a broken planet? What was the point of doing anything expect climate action? When being told to plan for your future feels like being told to dance on the Titanic, what do you do? You go on. You learn that without hope, there is no action, and with no action, there is no hope. So, you learn to hope again, not necessarily because it makes scientific or logical sense to do so, but because you have to. Without hope, there is none. So, you return to climate action, and you earn the right to imagine a more hopeful future. And, if you’re lucky, you discover Project Drawdown, a step by step scientifically verified plan to solve climate-breakdown using technologies that already exist. Drawdown imagines a future where the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses is rapidly reduced down to pre-industrial levels; a future where we not only stop climate-breakdown but reverse it. I like to imagine the day we get there. There will be international celebration bigger than anything we’ve seen before. And I will tell my children the story of Climate Change like its conquering smallpox or reaching the moon. I like to imagine that this all happens before I’m too old to dance without worrying people. Cause it’s gonna be an amazing party. By Tamara Ullyart, Young Climate Writer, Speaker, and Activist.