 I grew up with a shadow over my head. The first time I heard a grown-up explain that the environment was going to be destroyed, I was so little that I was still using a booster car seat. 50 years, they said, until it's too late to save our planet. I was scared then, and I'm scared now. And today, scientists say we have a lot less than 50 years to turn things around. I grew up with a shadow over my head. Did you grow up like that? I can't really imagine what it would feel like to look at how beautiful the world is and not feel like I was grieving for a dying person. I think most of us understand the external dangers of climate change. Rising tides, melting permafrost, polluted air, these are very real problems. But have you taken time to grapple with the harm this is causing in our minds and hearts? They are equally real problems. Children breaking down from trying to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. The guilt we feel every time we do normal things like buy food or turn on a light switch. The trauma of the slaughterhouse and the factory farm that we know and suppress. The oil drillers and farmers and manufacturers who must constantly cope with the choice between respecting the planet and earning a paycheck. I grew up with a shadow over my head. There are so many parts of this crisis and I can't speak to all of them. I can speak to how it feels to be a young adult on the verge of independence and know that it's not enough for me to finish my degree, get a job, and have a family. I know how it feels to believe that if I don't give everything in me to stop these ecological massacres, to literally save the world and billions of innocent human and non-human creatures will suffer. I know how it feels to wonder if my future will be only a series of disasters and crises one after another. I know how it feels to ask myself when I was only a child if the human race even deserves to survive. I am not the only young person who feels this way. Maybe it's our role in the world to feel the pain that others will not or cannot feel. We have grown up with a shadow over our heads. Of course I asked myself if I had the power to change all of this, what world would I want to see? When I think about that, I keep thinking of the word honest. I want us to live lives that are honest about three things. Honest about limits, honest about work, honest about pain. To be honest about limits means that we take planetary boundaries seriously. We would like to always be comfortable, to never have to make sacrifices, to have access to everything we want, but we can't. Our planet has limits, and we will run up against them one way or another. To be honest about work means that we reckon with what it takes for us to stay alive. We get connected to our food, to our bodies, to our communities. We make meaningful work a part of everyone's life at every stage, and we get used to working with our hands and feet because our bodies are the most honest things we have. To be honest about pain might be the hardest thing we ever do. It means that we surrender to this truth. Pain, uncertainty, and loss are a part of the world. And we also are a part of the world. We do not control it. Can we let go of the lie that money, possessions, and power can protect us from feeling grief and pain? Can we trust our communities, trust nature, trust time to help us handle hard things? Somewhere in ourselves, we already know these things. We know that limits, work, and pain are real. We know that without them, the world just doesn't work. And our attempts to avoid what scares us have resulted in so much harm to the world. I grew up with a shadow over my head, and I spent a long time trying to avoid that shadow. But when I faced it, when I leaned into my grief over the state of the world, I found a sense of meaning that I had never known before. To turn our path around means that we all have to find the courage and the empathy to face what's hard. If we can do that, we can reinvent our relationship with the world. We can make sure that no more children grow up under a shadow, but in the full light of the sun.