CATALYST MAGAZINE: Fall 2025
Finding Hope in a World of Climate Nihilism
EILIR BJORLIN
Catalyst Student
It's December 2019, and nine-year-old me is cozy in a narwhal onesie. Bolognese is simmering on the stove as it waits for the hum of my mom’s Tesla coming up the driveway–a sign that dinner will soon be served. My dad and I are feasting on an array of cheese I’ve elegantly set up on the table when disaster strikes.
He walks across the kitchen to the refrigerator, his glass hovering in the blue spotlight cast by the ice dispenser. Ice cubes cascade into the glass. One slips on the rim, falling past his hand, straight onto the hardwood floor. Dust clings to its edges. Water spreads from its circumference. Without a second look, my dad picks it up and flings it into the kitchen sink, where it slides down towards the garbage disposal, never to be retrieved.
The back of my throat gets hot. I feel tears well in my eyes, caught between my eyelashes. Before they begin their path down my face, I run to the sink, screaming in protest. You’re Wasting Water! Why would you do that? Why would you throw it away? I would've taken it! My dad is shocked that what was second nature to him was a sin for me. Once I let go of the prospect of pulling the ice cube out of the garbage disposal, my anger slips away, revealing my fear. In my state of illogical panic, the ice down the drain was a direct impetus of droughts across the world; my dad was somehow stealing from others by disposing of it. As upset as I was, I was also overcome by a need for comfort–That night, I ended up crying in his arms about climate change. I sobbed that the water he wasted was precious to people around the world, and soon could become precious to us. I cried that the world was getting hotter, that the polar bears were dying, that the icebergs were melting. I cried for my future; I cried because I wholeheartedly believed that the world was so doomed that every ice cube held my fate.
At school that year, I presented to third and fourth graders about the dangers of climate change. I left them in tears after telling them we were heading towards a mass extinction, and took pride in it. I thought fear would motivate my peers stronger than anything else, because I myself was driven to cut out meat and palm oil and save every ice cube by the terrifying vision I had of my adulthood. When I applied to Menlo Middle School, I wrote my essay about dreaming of meeting Greta Thunberg, an emblem of both my Swedish pride and fear of the burning house she preached about. When the pandemic ended and I shifted into the later years of middle school, I lost sight of my climate obsession. I stopped wanting to live in fear, and I was tired of being known as the girl who berated people for using single-use plastic. I was going to a school with all new people, and quickly realized that making other people afraid for their future didn’t make me fun to be around.
I was relieved to stop analyzing the global impacts of my every move. While in some ways I felt like I was finally releasing one of my greatest anxieties, I was subconsciously growing a new form of guilt, about my ignorance. Going into high school, I felt trapped between a life of anxiety and a life of guilt–big choices for a fourteen year old! My junior year, Catalyst changed everything.
Catalyst reignited my interest in solving the climate crisis, and it motivated me with hope rather than fear. When I discussed my prospects to join the program, I was told, the field trips sound cool and all, but who even cares about climate change? Suddenly, fifth-grade-Eilir was reignited. I accepted my spot in the program, and began to see climate, and more importantly, climate education, in a completely different way. Rather than obsessing over the amount of water in a beef patty, I get to visit Biotech start ups that want to create a greener future for agriculture through genetic engineering. Instead of lecturing my friends on sorting their trash, I visited a local landfill to understand how trash is truly stored and separated after use. The problems have only grown since my fifth grade days—we’ve skyrocketed above our 1.5C warming goal—but the solutions have grown ever-clearer. Like my teachers have preached to me since the start of the semester, I have finally fallen in love with the problem.
Catalyst reignited my interest in solving the climate crisis, and it motivated me with hope rather than fear. When I discussed my prospects to join the program, I was told, the field trips sound cool and all, but who even cares about climate change? Suddenly, fifth-grade-Eilir was reignited. I accepted my spot in the program, and began to see climate, and more importantly, climate education, in a completely different way. Rather than obsessing over the amount of water in a beef patty, I get to visit Biotech start ups that want to create a greener future for agriculture through genetic engineering. Instead of lecturing my friends on sorting their trash, I visited a local landfill to understand how trash is truly stored and separated after use. The problems have only grown since my fifth grade days—we’ve skyrocketed above our 1.5C warming goal—but the solutions have grown ever-clearer. Like my teachers have preached to me since the start of the semester, I have finally fallen in love with the problem.
Critically, I’ve begun to understand the reasons people my age don’t care about climate. For a large portion of us, denial, ignorance, and preaching “that won’t affect me” against our better judgement is comforting. I’ve understood that I have never been alone in my fear. In a survey of over 15,000 US youth aged 16-25, 57.9% indicated they felt very or extremely worried about climate change, 38.3% responded that their negative feelings about climate impact their daily lives. Across party lines, the vast majority of youth felt worried about climate, at 85%. We are subject to anxiety disorders, sleep and health problems, and depression not only because of the future that has been left for us, but because it is constantly talked about like a hopeless, inevitable extinction. And sure, there are people who truly don’t care. Some of those people joined Catalyst, and by the end of the semester, they’ve begun to find a personal investment in climate change. I believe this is because it is posed as an interdisciplinary problem that can be solved and a crisis that affects every individual’s interests. There's youth everywhere still suffocated by climate anxiety. In elementary school, I felt responsible for educating my peers about climate, because the adults in their lives–parents and teachers–never did. I taught them to be afraid like I was, and I didn’t have a chance to unlearn and understand that emotional response until my junior year in Catalyst. There's a misconception that climate has to be a scary or serious conversation with youth. Instead, I’ve found that the more I talk about climate–discussing it in a productive manner, not sharing anxieties in circles–the more hopeful I am. In reality, the only way out of despair is to go straight through; we must focus on small steps towards solving the problem rather than drown in the work it will take to solve.
This generation has climate change on their shoulders. That’s why we all need to take responsibility for providing youth with the ability to both fall in love with the world’s crises and develop the tools needed to address them--without collapsing under overwhelming anxiety or avoidance. If this semester has taught me anything it’s that telling kids that their future is rapidly disappearing will lead to inordinate despair. Instead, we must show them how systems thinking and solutions-oriented models can instill them with hope.
I want to be the person in the room whose hope is contagious. This semester has made me capable of being that person. That is the greatest gift that Catalyst has given me.
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