Across the street was a crowd of children, perhaps a couple hundred. They were primary school kids, the youngest of them not much older than my own son. They were chanting for climate action, holding up placards that they had made themselves, presumably in class. One girl held a sheet of paper bearing a crayon drawing of the planet with a sad little cartoon face on it. Another depicted a gigantic blazing sun in yellow and red crayon, beneath which was a somewhat weirdly proportioned man, sweating lavishly, a speech bubble saying IT’S TOO HOT! One kid held up a drawing of a dinosaur skeleton, a message in even-handed capitals that read: THE DINOSAURS THOUGHT THEY HAD TIME TOO. Another had a sign on which he’d scrawled the impressively enigmatic words EARTH IS FALLING…
I walked up the street a little distance and stood watching them awhile. They were all wrapped up in coats despite the relative warmth of the day, some of them in woolen hats and scarves. I thought of all their mums and dads, wrapping them up against the elements, buttoning their coats up to the top, telling them not to forget their drawings, their placards. I looked at their faces and was touched by the innocence and exuberance I saw there, the total absence of self-consciousness or cynicism. They seemed to me to be fully inhabiting themselves, to be fully and unequivocally alive.
I muttered quietly to myself the word unless. It was unclear to me why I had said this word, and I was surprised to hear myself laughing, feeling as I did so a strange and volatile mixture of sadness and delight.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
At home that evening, I was watching my wife breast-feed our daughter, propped up on our bed against a pile of pillows. The baby was in a sleeping bag, which for some reason had images of little colored cartoon bugs all over it, and I was struck by the incongruity of an item of baby apparel featuring creepie crawlies, harmless and friendly-looking ones though they were.
“Did you hear about how insects are going extinct?” I said to my wife.
“No,” she said, looking up from the top of the baby’s head. “I hadn’t heard that. Which ones?”
“All of them,” I said. “As, like, a category. There was a thing in The Guardian about it today.”
“Jesus,” she said, looking momentarily forlorn.
I found the article on my phone and scanned through it for choice phrases.
“Hurtling down the path to extinction,” I read.
And then: “Leading to a catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”
Even as I read these phrases, I wondered what I was up to. It seemed a strangely indecent thing to be doing, standing there reading an incoherent sermon of apocalypse while my wife tried to breast-feed our daughter.
“Weren’t the insects supposed to be our fallback protein source,” she said, “once we all stop eating meat because of climate change?”
“Were they?” I said, locking my phone screen and flinging it wristily onto the bed. “That does ring a bell. Insects, though, Jesus. If they go, we all go.”
I had no idea whether this was true. Maybe there was some way we could continue to live in a world without insects. It seemed like a long shot, though.
“That’s a worry,” said my wife, wincing suddenly as the baby bit down on her. This was a thing she’d been doing lately. She seemed to think it was funny. She’d bite down on the nipple she was feeding from, and then look up at my wife to gauge the reaction. She was turning into something of a joker, our little girl.
I hoped she would be a happy person, resilient and resourceful. I hoped she would be innocent for as long as she needed to be. I thought of the protesting kids earlier, all wrapped up for a day that was a lot warmer than it should have been.
I reached out to her, feeling under my hand the gentle blonde fuzz, the impossible softness of her little head. She pulled abruptly away from my wife and turned her face toward me. She presented me with an impish look, an expression of mock seriousness, and blew a raspberry in my direction, impressively loud and sustained. I laughed and blew one back at her, which seemed to be the desired response.