HIS SUMMER, THE HOTTEST ON RECORD, may go down in the history books as the turning point when climate change became truly personal. Extreme weather has become our new normal, affecting a majority of Americans and many millions more around the world: deadly heat waves across the U.S., Mexico, southern Europe and China; torrential rain and flash flooding in Chicago and the Hudson Valley; intense wildfires, first in Canada, blanketing cities a thousand miles away with smoke, then in Hawaii, which quickly became the deadliest such blaze in a century.
It’s not exactly surprising, according to a recent Gallup poll—including about 60 percent of people ages 18 to 34. With the most at stake over the coming decades, it’s also not surprising that young people are the ones leading the way to find solutions to our global environmental challenges, many of them rejecting prevailing climate gloom-and-doomism to focus on ways to sustain hope for the future of the planet.
