Breakthrough Generation

Young people are crucial in ending the world’s dependence on dirty energy. We also must play a pivotal role in reinventing the ways in which we produce and consume clean energy.

If there is one idea that serves as our core identity and our rallying cry (and the somewhat lame excuse older generations use to pin us with the consequences of their own inaction) it is this: young people today have the power to change the world. Many of us emerge into the adult world a bit groggy with confusion and perhaps a lack of direction, but with the fierce motivation to “make a difference.” And the world, it seems, desperately needs us.

We all know we face an incredibly uncertain future. As a forthcoming UN report concludes, seeming almost entirely redundant, we have never seen calamities at such a global scale:

Half the world is vulnerable to social instability and violence due to rising food and energy prices, failing states, falling water tables, climate change, decreasing water-food-energy supply per person, desertification and increasing migrations due to political, environmental and economic conditions.

So, we sign petitions, write letters to Congress, and organize, organize, organize. We have recently begun to seriously step it up, in some places putting our bodies on the line as we fight coal plants and let corporations know that they can’t monopolize our future for profit. We fight to stop the problems that threaten our future.

It is our relatively new conception of the world as a connected global community that enables us to feel the sadness and anger inherent in these calamities. Images of malaria victims in Africa, war-torn countries in the Middle East or mountaintop removal in our own country inspire us to work to end the problems that face us. Those of us who live in post-scarcity comfort, with most of our own fundamental needs met, can’t bear the injustice of a world where billions of people do not. As the UN report points out, “ours is the first generation with the means for many to know the world as a whole, identify global improvement systems, and seek to improve [them].”

In this way, we are beginning to succeed, and the UN report outlines how far we have come as a global community and the potential within our own progress. Our modern understanding of a connected world enables us to think creatively about how to further connect and leverage our actions to a global scale. The power of the internet to facilitate idea and information sharing has untapped great potential in innovation and social power, “reinventing citizens’ roles in the political process and changing institutions, policy-making and governance,” while “advances in science, technology, education, economics and management seem capable of making the world work far better than it does today”.

This is where the true challenge lies. We know our future has the potential to be bleak, so we are doing everything we can to stem the forces pulling us in that direction. And this effort is essential.

Yet our future also has the potential to be great, so we need to simultaneously be pushing ourselves to become our own force of change if we want to seriously step into our own potential. To do this we must tap into the creativity and innovation that young people have historically provided for the world.

A recent WorldChanging article challenges us to imagine the world “after green,” where we think beyond mere environmental improvement and into a literal and figurative re-invention. It ends with an open invitation to think about any outdated idea, get rid of it, and ponder its replacement. Once we begin to imagine our future world in term of reinvention, we open up a diverse array of new ideas and unleash infinite potential. This kind of radical imagination will lead to the ideas–in policy, technology, planning, design, communication, you name it—that will pave the way to a clean energy future.

While people of all ages can succeed at this fundamental shift in the way we solve problems, young people are uniquely positioned to succeed in this endeavor. Without the social and psychological conditioning that years of a certain way of thinking can instill, we have more freedom for radical pursuits. Some of the boldest and transformational ideas come from people under 30. Think of the genius behind Dylan’s lyrical opposition to the status quo (”Blowin in the Wind” was written when he was 21) or even Mark Zuckerburg’s vision for the ultimate procrastination tool and crush-stalking online network that became facebook.com. Young people must stop coal fired power plants and put an end to our addiction to coal, but they can also be the leading innovators and thought leaders that carry us into a clean energy future by imagining entirely new ways to succeed as a global society.

This idea of reinvention is hard, and it subjects our movement to incredible complexity. Once we are no longer thinking merely about ways in which the things we do now can be more environmentally friendly, but ways in which they can become fundamentally different, we lose the clear moral guide that the idea of “improvement” gives us. As a recent post on IGHIH illustrates, the path to a clean energy future will not be black and white, with a clear direction of what needs to be done. Re-invention is marred with shades of grey.

So let’s embrace the shades of grey, understand that our future is neither doomed nor bright but has the potential for both, and get creative about how we can direct it. There is an infinite number of ways for young people to get involved in a re-imagining of the world that will transcend traditional activism; let’s all find the place we can play off our strengths and passions, and join this re-invention. It will take activists and artists, engineers, designers and policymakers. We can’t wait until our own journey leads into a more established professionalism–we need the potential locked within our own ideas now.

There is tremendous potential in the power of youth to change the world. The most beautiful and inspiring part about it is that we have yet to even imagine the scope of it.