CPJ Journal is asking readers from around the globe to describe (in a medium they choose) how climate change is impacting themselves and their community. Congratulations to our second ever featured teen, Kylie Liggett!
Kylie is 16 years old and lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. At once vulnerable, perceptive, and witty, Kylie's climate story stuck with me long after I read it. With wistful clarity, she describes how climate change has cleaved generational differences between her life experience and her younger sister's. I was impressed by her self-awareness; though climate change terrifies her (and even impacts her community directly!), she acknowledges that she is one of the luckier ones.
Climate change has impacted my community in southeast Pennsylvania in various ways. I live in a pretty affluent neighborhood that’s far away from Philly, so I know some places are experiencing the effects of climate change a lot more. One way I’ve been impacted by climate change is the heat in the summer. We have days where it can get over 95, which is not fun for anyone. It makes it harder to work, study, and be present when it’s that hot. I run cross country, and I’ve almost gotten heatstroke multiple times during preseason in the last week of August. You have to be much more intentional about when you go out to run or walk. Luckily, my family has a pool which makes it a lot easier to beat the heat, but a lot of families in my area don’t. The second effect of c
limate change I’ve seen in my community is a lot less snow in the winter. I remember in 2011 when I moved to Bryn Mawr we used to get a ton of feet of snow in the winter. I have amazing memories of building snowmen and going sledding, building snow forts, and making homemade slushies. My first date was actually a sledding date, but that’s a story for another time. We use to go skiing almost every week but now there’s barely any snow on the mountain and it’s hard for the ski resort to make enough fake snow. Now we only get about less than an inch of snow a handful of times in the winter. I really miss those snow days and how fun they were. It’s an amazing way to get outside and connect with nature in one of the objectively worst times of the year. It just makes the winter easier to get through. It’s kind of depressing that my youngest singer won’t get to experience that. She’ll never get to go tubing or skiing or make a huge snow fort unless we go up to our cousins’ house in New Hampshire. The last effect that I’ve seen is extreme we
ather and storms. We get pretty awful thunderstorms in the summer, and they can last for hours and we’ve lost power and had a lot of trees down on my road. My dog Luna gets really bad anxiety whenever it storms and she starts shaking and always tries to come into my room. It takes her hours to calm down and she doesn’t sleep all night. There have also been tornadoes close to me that have taken t
he roofs of entire schools. Luckily my house was about a mile away from the storm path, but others were completely demolished last year, which is really expensive to repair. The Schuylkill River, which is really close to me, also flooded last year after a bad rainstorm and people had to evacuate their homes because of the flooding. When people say that climate change “isn’t that bad,” it seems kind of insane that they can experience extreme weather such as hurricanes and tornadoes and not see how they’re connected to climate change and extremely dangerous.
--Kylie Liggett
Wonderful post! Very insightful and thought-provoking!