Young Writers Society

Author's note: This is an entry for a contest, and I'd like to have some criticism on the following aspects:

1. The word count for the contest is 1500, and this story for now is almost 1900 words. So I'd like to know which parts in the story could be shorter.

2. The theme of the contest is:  'We will never stop fighting for this planet' - Greta Thunberg. How can young people make change happen? I'd like to know if the story is able to represent this theme well enough.

3. I wrote this for a contest, so it'll be really helpful for me if the reviews of this story mention how it will do in this contest, what my chances are at winning, etc.

Enjoy!

It begins with the picture of a bird soaring in the air, and a quote in the middle.

“Until my ghastly tale is told,

this heart within me burns.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Marnier

The picture fades. Now there’s an ocean on the screen, peacefully blue under a white sky. Two lines appear at the middle of the screen, which read: Midway Island, North Pacific Ocean, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

A flock of birds are resting in a field fringed by yellowish flowers, and hundreds of others are hovering above the flock. One of the birds glides down towards the ground with all the elegance of her long, black wings. The birds are squeaking altogether, the tune high-pitched, yet musical.

A little bird is all curled up on the grass. The gusting wind is making her straggly, white-brown feathers wave in the air. She’s so light. So fragile.

A couple peers at a somewhat soiled egg. One of them leans in and brushes its curved beak over the egg. The exciting possibilities of a new life.

Seated on a small, hollow scrape, a chick flutters its limbs. She doesn’t have wings yet, but that immaturity isn’t odd. It’s a sign of pure innocence.

The mother has come to feed the chick. The little bird keeps jerking her head for a while, and then finally pushes her juvenile beak into the more matured one of her mother’s. She eats hastily, with the never-ending energy of youth.

There’s a dead bird. Or rather the insides of a dead bird, full of at least twenty plastic bottle-caps, a broken plastic plate, a toothbrush whose tufts have gone dark black—almost as if it’s been burnt—and many more unrecognizable debris.

There’s more dead birds whose bellies are cut open and the insides are shown. More debris.

A little bird is lying on the ground. She’s struggling to move her head, her youthfulness gone.

Another little bird. Unlike the previous one she’s moving her legs frantically, but clearly out of pain. Her insides are killing her.

The view of the field is back on the screen, but not with its lush green. Instead, there are wastes everywhere around the flock of birds. The yellowish flowers are nowhere in sight.

A raspy voice speaks in voice-over:

Do we have the courage the face the realities of our time, and allow ourselves to feel deeply enough that it transforms us?

Once again the birds are flying gracefully, almost obliterating the sky. Once again they’re squeaking.

Come with me on a journey,

A tiny little bird looks back from the screen, her liquid, black eyes surrounded by the lightest of feathers. She blinks and reopens those beauties.

through the eye of beauty

A man is holding up his palms. On the right palm is a dead bird, on the left all sorts of debris that probably polluted her guts. The man strokes the head of the dead bird.

across an ocean of grief,

From a torn egg is peeking out the head of a newborn, seeking all the affection in the world.

and beyond.

The shy is overcast with clouds, and the birds are flying all around. At the middle of the screen against the backdrop of the sky, the following lines appear:

MIDWAY, a love story of our time from the heart of the Pacific

by Chris Jordan

coming soon

Masuma’s heart races. She finds it difficult to breath because there’s some kind of a fire in her stomach.

When she’d clicked on the trailer of this film Midway, she had no idea what was coming to her. So far she’d read scores of articles that detail the scale and effects of plastic pollution, a topic she’d chosen to work on for her class project. But this trailer, this harsh but true reality, was too much to bear.

Guilt begins to consume her heart.

***

In the search bar of YouTube, Masuma types: effects of climate change

A series of videos appear in the search results. Masuma clicks on one randomly. The throbber begins to throb. She waits.

Masuma had topped that class project a week ago. But she didn’t stop there; she continued delving deeper into the topic, reading articles after articles and watching numerous videos. The more she learned and the more evidence she found, the more enraged she felt towards mankind. Towards a system that favors extraction and growth, but never looks back to see the trails of destruction it leaves behind.

She felt a new inspiration too. All of a sudden her life had more meaning than ever. The world was going in the wrong direction and she was going to fix it. The pursuit of such a noble cause was alluring her. She couldn’t wait.

The video starts. She cups her head with her hands and tries to engage more attention.

The video discusses the primary concept of greenhouse effect; statistics regarding carbon emission; effects of climate change on four different aspects, namely, oceans, weather, food, and health; and finally a motivating message about the possibilities of renewable energy for a better world without global warming. Masuma takes notes a couple of times.

As the video ends, she’s about to move the cursor to another video. But then something springs to her mind.

Let’s take a look at the comments. I might find more inspired people. Who knows?

She scrolls down the comments.

Thank you so much for the video. I came here for my homework and this video was really helpful.

She smiles.

Who else is watching this for classwork? Like.

We can’t even predict tomorrow’s weather correctly and these guys can predict what’s going to happen twenty-thirty years from now? Shame!

What!

Frowning, she scrolls further down.

That’s what I’m saying dude. Climate crisis is just bad scientists trying to get more funding.

Climate science is fake! Check this out.

She clicks on the video link.

The video shows how NASA and NOAA have constantly tampered with temperature records, how they have changed the data of the previously published reports, how they have intentionally cooled the temperatures of past years and warmed those of the recent times to support their fraudulent propaganda about the gradual warming trend of average temperatures in the USA.

“This is not science; it’s fraud,” the man in the video says, “and it’s erasing America’s history.”

She finds herself shocked. All that inspiration, all the dreams of a pursuing a noble cause feels so worthless now. Disappointment weighs her down. She feels weak.

***

Lying in her bed, Masuma lets her thoughts wander.

This morning, when she searched ‘climate change lies’, ‘climate change fraud’, ‘there is no climate crisis’ and suchlike, Google initially didn’t show the skeptic blogs. But she stubbornly ignored the pro-climate contents, kept searching, and soon found what she was looking for.

She learnt that surface temperatures cannot be trusted because scientists are constantly adjusting them to support the theory of global warming. She saw old newspaper cuttings that showed fierce temperatures in the past years, which clearly indicates Earth has been warming for a long time and it’s not so alarming as the activists say. Carbon di-oxide, she was surprised to discover, is actually an essential element that makes life possible on Earth which the climate scientists so recklessly ignore all the time. They seemed to ignore a lot of things.

She wanted to deny all of it, but the evidence was right there in front of her eyes, evidence that seemed nothing short of compelling. She was angry at all the climate scientists in the world.

“Damn them”, she mutters now in the bed. “Damn those liars!”

But rage can’t hide her disappointment. Deep inside, she needs the climate crisis to be true. It’s been only a week since she realized she could play a role in fixing the world. And now it seems the world’s okay; nothing needs fixing.

She wonders if all the climate scientists and activists think this way. Maybe this is how this entire concept came into being in the first place: to create an imaginary crisis so that a few people could relish the satisfaction of solving it.

She rolls over in the bed, trying to cease the racing thoughts.

***

Masuma types in the search bar of Google: data tampering allegations on NASA.

She didn’t search for anything regarding climate change in the last two days. She tried to ignore all of it, thinking it would help her get rid of the fanciful craze. But it did exactly the opposite; ignorance made her more frustrated. She started wondering if she was being a fool, if she should’ve delved in more.

And this morning, the frustration had turned unbearable.

The second search result from the top reads: Explainer: How data adjustment affects global temperature records. Curious, she clicks on it.

She doesn’t read the article word by word; she skips the parts that describe scientific detail too complex for her understanding. She reads slowly in the beginning, then fast, then even faster, the beating of her heart gently building up.

She learns that temperature records are adjusted to account for a number of changing factors: switching from old methods of measurement to more modern technology; changes in time of observation—since all the stations do not necessarily record temperatures at the same hour of the day, and that might cause the ‘unadjusted’ data to show an artificial cooling effect; changes in the number and location of weather stations.

She reads more articles and blogs. She learns more. The weight of disappointment disappears, and a renewed purposefulness returns.

I’m so stupid, she thinks. Why didn’t I read these before?

***

"No, that’s too harsh,” Masuma says. “We need to be humble, remember?”

“Yeah, right. They get to curse all they want and we’ll just be all kind and polite.” Tamanna makes a face. “It’s not fair, you know?”

Masuma grins. “It’s unfair. True. But that’s how we convince; being unfairly polite.”

Right now in Masuma’s room, there are six others excluding Masuma and Tamanna. They’re going through the comments on a YouTube video about global warming, searching particularly for the skeptic comments. They want to reply to those commenters politely, try and correct their assumptions showing evidence, and maybe change their minds. They didn’t have a great start; there was this man named Ethan Johnson who fired all sorts of abuse on them, claiming global warming is just an elaborate scheme to authorize carbon tax and make government rich. But there were others who debated calmly, in a scholarly manner. There was even a girl named Katherine who was “in a doubt whom to believe in this horrible mess”, and she was grateful that Masuma and her friends showed her some clear evidence and counter-arguments on the skeptics. “You’re doing a great job to clarify people’s doubts,” she’d said.

Masuma is calling this club of theirs the “Climate Discussion”. They’re not experts. They certainly don’t know everything. But they’re learning every day, discovering new evidence and arguments on both sides of the topic, checking a wide array of contents to get as reliable information as possible.

Most importantly, they are determined not to be biased towards any proposition. Because they believe that, in a world where everyone claims their own assertions as true, unbiasedness is what is needed for change.