Writing Competition Winner: Brave, a poem by Julia White

Read the Planet Watch Youth Writing Competition winning entry, with a short Q&A with Julia about her relationship to climate action and environmentalism.

We chose Julia’s submission to our competition, because we felt that it linked strongly to the theme ‘how climate change impacts our communities’ and the emotion in the poem resonated with our judges. She explained that she wrote this poem after experiencing wildfires in her community in Nova Scotia last summer.

Our founder, Tony Carter met with Julia recently to discuss her poem Brave, her climate action work and how her perceptions of climate shaped her poem.

Question: How do you see yourself and your role in the world?

Tony: “Thanks for joining me Julia, I want to ask you a few questions, really just to find out a bit more about you as a as a person if I can. [Firstly] How do you see yourself in this world? You know, we’re all involved in climate change one way or another. But you’re contributing both professionally and personally to environmental solutions. How did you see yourself? What role do you think you are playing in in the world?”

Julia: “I think that my view on environmentalism has changed a lot recently. I feel like I’ve always considered myself an environmentalist, for as long back as I can remember. But I think my perspectives on things have jumped and changed rapidly throughout my schooling and my professional and academic life, to the point where I’ve been incredibly optimistic about the state of our world and incredibly pessimistic about the state of our world.

And I think that a lot of young people who are struck with climate grief and climate anxiety and those kinds of things are often kind of dealing with that more pessimistic side of things and just realizing the extent and the the huge issues and problems that we have to address as environmentalists and conservationists and whatever other roles we’re playing in it.

And I think in the past few years, especially since I was doing my graduate studies, I’ve kind of made peace with the fact that they’re huge issues and they’re scary and I feel like I was battling that kind of recognition for a lot of my life but kind of coming to terms with that and coming to peace with that allowed me to move forward and to find a space where I can make small changes and have small influences on the people, the projects around me to move forward.

So I feel like my role in addressing environmental problems is kind of helping other people come to that same sort of recognition and make the same sort of peace with the problems that we’re facing. And there’s there’s always things that we can do but we’re not going to solve it overnight as much as me we may want to.”

Question: Do you find that people around you ignore climate change as a problem?

Tony: “One of the things you said during that was how clearly you’re willing to face up to climate change… my view is, there are a lot of young people who have voice is this issue, but kind of feel that “I can’t do anything.” So they just ignore it. Do you find that among people you work with, people you know?”

Julia: “I think my my community is very much a similar mindset to myself. So I honestly don’t come across across a lot of people my age around me who are kind of ignoring it. Like within my own circles…you know, friends of friends and family friends, family members…I do come across a lot of people who do, you know, acknowledge it when it comes up in conversation or talk about it like, “Yeah, climate change is awful. What are we going to do about it?” but then kind of go about their lives as normal.

I think that’s obviously a lot easier than coming to terms with what’s going on and finding a place where you can contribute to [climate action]. And so I don’t know if it’s a lack of interest in it or people not caring about the planet. I think most people do care about the planet when it comes down to it. But in terms of the the actual movement that we can make…it makes me think about one of the lines in my poem, “it’s my every convenience and I want convenience,” and I think that’s kind of the epitome or the thesis of my whole poem.

A lot of the work that I’m doing is [showing people] that everybody’s part of the problem but we can also all be part of the solution. It is paralyzing to just kind of realize the magnitude of everything.”

Question: Do you see writing as a way of influencing people about climate action?

Tony: “I’ve got the impression that you actually do quite a lot of writing, yes?”

Julia: “I do. Most of it’s personal [unpublished] though.”

Tony: “Do you see writing then as a way of influencing people? Or is it [just] a way of expressing yourself?”

Julia: “I think I’ve become a lot more comfortable with [using writing to advocate for climate action] in the past couple years. I’ve been writing for years…I was starting like in my early high school years, but really only in the past couple of years have I started sharing my poetry. This poem was the first one that I actually shared with like my closest was friends. I sent it to them and that was like the first time that I had shared something. I shared it with my family because I was really proud of how it had turned out in the end.

But I think I’m starting to see my writing as something that’s more than just like a hobby and like a personal thing for me to do because I do feel like I do have a voice in my poetry [and] writing skills help me individually understand the way that I see the world. I feel like in my head it’s very abstract and it makes sense to me but it’s so all over the place that I can never put it into words. And so by writing poetry – and to a lesser extent I’m getting into song writing a bit as well – I just think it’s a really good way to kind of summarize all of the wild things that are happening in my head into one page or a few lines.”

Question: If you could inspire people to make one change in their attitude, what would it be?

Tony: “Okay. One more question. If you could inspire people to make one change in their attitude, one change in the way they think about things. What do you think it would be?

Julia: “I was thinking about this a little bit today. I think my experience with dealing with all of these issues and trying to convince people to care deeply about a lot of things…most of the topics that we deal with that are contentious, are so polarizing, so I think the behaviour that I would try to inspire change in the people around me is to understand the difference between debating and arguing, and having compassion for the people around you who are thinking about things differently.

I feel like the the solutions to our environmental problems that we’re facing right now are not things that can happen with just one side of an argument contributing to the solution to it. So I would love for young people to learn that maybe their parents and grandparents aren’t so good at understanding how to debate and have proper conversations with people about things that are uncomfortable. Have compassion for people who think about things differently than you do.”

Tony: “We’ve got to persuade people, we’ve got to talk to people. When I was first interested in climate change, it was very simple. It was the Al Gore view that climate change was about greenhouse gases. I then came to embrace biodiversity and [consider the issues of] people looking for minerals and ruining the ecology in doing so. [Climate Change] affects every single person in the world and there’s still too many of those people who don’t understand it. I think we’ve got to be advocates. Julia, you have done a lovely job in writing that poem, thank you.”

Brave by Julia White

I have never been brave. 

I did once have faith, but it has long since passed.

Now, I’m holding my breath, my chest, no rest;

no rest for oil or gas or the man;

relentless, lament over bottom lines

while the hands of the earth do wither and die. 

I have never been brave. 

The hairs of the earth are on fire, 

creeping closer but never close enough

for our eyes to be opened,

phone us to God, get Him on the line and beg for His mercy. 

His cooling hands will save us from trying.

I have never been brave. 

It’s the frog in the water; it boils her out,

but ever growing temperatures cause her demise.

We’re decades deep, and now smoke seeps, from leaves and trees and bumblebees –

they tried to say it’s getting hotter,

of course it is! but there’s ages to go.

I have never been brave. 

There were things we could’ve done when warning bells were fun,

And the tasks were easy to do. 

But now it’s anyone’s tomorrow, and how can we pick someone else?

It’s my every convenience, and I want convenience. 

Just knock off a couple more years. 

I have never been brave. 

In all of this there are victims who suffer alone because we cannot hear them;

can’t see them or maybe don’t care to but still, they perish on our front step. 

They are children and parents, if that’s what it takes for you to give a damn. 

But more important, really, they’re alive and living

and we don’t think that that’s enough. 

I have never been brave. 

And the thing that strikes me, saddest of all, is that this is our line to warrant compliance, complicit with houses we will burn inside of. Smug to be rich and cognizant that we are killing ourselves but not only that – we’re the pilot, down with the plane. 

But I have never been brave.