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There are many reasons that building offshore wind in Searsport is important, and in this letter I will add one more to the pile: youth mental health. It’s no secret that America’s youth have worse mental health than ever, between a pandemic, social unrest and, most importantly, the existential threat of climate change. As a 15-year-old, I’ve seen this firsthand.
I’m sure many readers will remember the Cold War and how they felt knowing that the world could end any day. How did you cope with that knowledge? Did you try to forget that was a possibility? Did you just live with the dread? Did you take action, and protest against nuclear weapons like my father did? In any case, today we face a very similar threat of armageddon — with a small, but important difference. We are watching the effects of this catastrophe unfold.
This is no “all or nothing” scenario, where the world might end tomorrow, but we’ll never see it coming. We are watching as nothing is done to stop the destruction of our world! It feels completely hopeless. But if we start taking action against this threat, if we can slowly but surely begin to reverse the effects of climate change, then that hopelessness and dejection will just as surely be replaced with a sense of hope and optimism. We will finally see a way out, and fight to reach it.
Please, give us a world with a future.
Ellis Cuddy
Winterport
