When I walk by the train station to get a magazine, I generally stop by the cooking and baking section of the shop and find motivation and inspiration looking at recipes of pies and other summer-friendly sandwiches. Sometimes the only thing one needs to feel inspired again is a piece of brie combined with cranberry jam under 2 lovely pieces of multigrain bread.
This week I found my inspiration in a lot more complex issues than salad dressing and toasted pine nuts: climate change. Not that it would be a surprise for our frequent readers to know that this is a topic of interest, but it's not often what I plan to proactively chose as a distraction topic to optimize my commuting time.
While I was hoping to get a stronger case in the Time in view of the cover, the dramatic future of sinking islands to growing sea levels is sadly not new. We had talked about it 10 years ago already when I first sat down at university to attend a Sustainability Science Masters. By then, it was still considered an "if": "if we do not reach any climate agreement", "if temperatures keep on increasing", "if CO2 emissions do not decrease"... The disappearance of islands is now a reality, and the concept of "climate refugees" is not much of a concept, but a fact.
As for Greta....Ahh, Greta! She represents so much to me and to many that it would be again too difficult to summarize it in a few lines only. She is the face of a fight that a new generation needs to take onboard to guaranty Life in the future. She is a threat to many others who see in her words and her face an ennemy for unsustainble businesses and industries. To me she represents the voice and guts I wish I had had when I was her age, when I was still looking at defining who I am rather than thinking about what the world actually needs. In this issue Wired also looks into the profiles of other young, "climate influencers" in the world who do not share the same public coverage but who deserves respect and care.