Take those corny 1960s beach party movies I used to watch with my mother, the ones where Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello twisted and shouted on pristine sandy shores. #HERE COMES THE SUN ORIGIN TV#Most startling, though, is how the songs and movies and TV shows I loved back then, things we might expect to be safe from climate devastation, read differently today. Since reading that report, nothing about my life-not my work, my relationships, the ways I eat or sleep or consume pop culture-has felt the same. Every day, as news reports about climate change become more threatening, I grow more nostalgic for the places and objects of my childhood that feel increasingly imperiled: the Florida beaches I vacationed on as a kid, the fall leaves that will become less vibrant as the ancient cycle of the seasons grows haywire. One of the more unexpected changes has to do with my relationship with the past. But what I didn’t understand then, and would not realize until almost twenty years later, when I read the first part of the Intergovernmental l Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report, was the extent of the damage. On our AOL message boards dedicated to environmental causes, we learned that grown-ups were doing terrible things to food, animals, each other, and the environment. Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather told us that a hole had opened up in the ozone layer and that major environmental groups were split over the effectiveness of NAFTA. Monsanto was never the sole source of our outrage. I don’t believe that all genetically engineered crops are dangerous, but I don’t regret those protests. Today, my thoughts on GMOs are more complex. When the company introduced genetically engineered seeds in the mid-1990s-seeds that our grandparents told us were suspicious-we took up the anti-Monsanto cause as our own. What fueled us most were the words of our grandparents, all of them crop farmers. Monsanto was also a player behind DDT, a pesticide linked to cancer and infertility in humans, as well as hormonal and developmental problems in birds and other animals. The germs of our rage were passed on by our hippie, anti-war parents, who never forgot the role that the monster corporation played in developing Agent Orange. Our protests were sparked by an anger that gripped us like a hormone and burned with the intensity of a first love. When our blood sugar dropped, so did we, falling into the grass while still holding our signs upright, drowsy with booze and fading fury. Sometimes we’d chant to the empty sidewalks- “Hell no, Monsanto must go!”-but that lasted only as long as our sugar high. Instead, we gathered outside the capitol on Saturday afternoons when no one, let alone our state congresspersons, was downtown. We had yet to learn the tactics of activism, like the ones wielded by Extinction Rebellion today: blocking doorways to politicians’ offices, risking arrest. We were passionate, but not very effective. Dressed in band t-shirts and cut-off jeans, we waved handmade signs we’d painted the night before: brightly colored skulls and crossbones, the bones an overlapping fork and knife, the skulls misshapen ears of corn with fangs. This is In This Climate, a column by Amy Brady on climate change and childhood nostalgia.īack in the 1990s, my high school friends and I, all hopped up on Nerds candy and bottles of Zima stolen from my dad’s refrigerator, would hold anti-Monsanto protests on the lawn of the Kansas State Capitol.
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