Journal of a Monsoon Season

Student

Caroline Zlaket

College(s)

College of Arts and Letters

Faculty Advisors

Laura Walls and Christian Smith

Class Year

2022

Youth in the modern world have a unique perspective as they enter adulthood: they have grown up in the midst of a climate crisis. Because of this, a pressing question has been presented to children that may not have been as urgent to older generations: what does the future look like? Further, should there be hope to have kids/place faith in the future if the planet itself is unstable? While many writers and researchers have contributed their thoughts on this topic, few have been able to do it in the present moment (rather than in hindsight, looking back at childhood or life “as it was before”). The purpose of this capstone was to illuminate the specific emotions youth encounter when actively living through environmental degradation and chaos. Before beginning research for this project, I had rarely read about the climate crisis from a young adult’s perspective, and the readings I did find could not capture all the various anxieties, worries, and joys of coming of age in the Anthropocene. Thus, I felt that exploring my own journey, thoughts, and emotions through creative writing could be a fruitful way to provide raw honesty. I explored the sentiment of suffocation that comes from news and information influx. Additionally, I discussed emotions pertaining to my family and how it felt trying to lean on older generations’ wisdom while the modern-day climate is ever changing. Finally, I addressed the events that cast shadows of doubt on a young person to make them feel apathetic toward any sort of hope for themselves or the world around them. Ultimately, I analyzed what makes the future worth having faith in despite the fear-inducing status of the natural world.

My project is situated in the greater context of environmental writers, all of whom have tackled various aspects of the climate crisis, the Earth, and/or humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Many writers, like Henry David Thoreau or Annie Dillard, have written journals about their personal experiences in nature and how these have shaped their lives; others have written fictional tales about what the future could look like at this rate of resource consumption. My project attempts to join both of these crowds of writers. I wanted to compile a collection of journals that could provide a unique, youthful lens to a problem about which literature has already been written. Though many of the things I have read thus far pertaining to the climate crisis and environmental activism have been poignant, none have really touched on the specific anxieties or worries that come from coming of age in this current era / state of the world. I believed I could provide that perspective, or at least my personal small shred of it.