The Earth We Borrowed, The Future We Owe

My grandfather still remembers exactly where the mango tree stood outside his childhood home near Varanasi. He talks about it the way people talk about someone who has passed away, with a mixture of fondness and disbelief. The tree is gone now, cut down years ago to widen a road, but what he really mourns isn’t the tree. It’s the summers he remembers alongside it, hot, yes, but never the kind of heat that keeps birds silent at noon or softens tar on the road enough to leave footprints. I used to think he was exaggerating, the way older people sometimes do. Then last May, when parts of North India crossed 47 degrees Celsius, I understood he wasn’t exaggerating at all. He was describing a world that no longer exists.

That is the strange thing about climate change. It rarely announces itself. It arrives in small shifts, an early flower, a delayed monsoon, a river running lower than usual, until one day those shifts accumulate into something we can no longer dismiss as an unusually hot year.

The science, once you strip away the jargon, isn’t complicated. Our atmosphere naturally traps some heat from the sun, and that’s a good thing, because without it, Earth would be a frozen, uninhabitable rock. But since the Industrial Revolution, human activity, burning coal, oil, and gas, clearing forests, expanding industry at a pace the planet has never seen, has released far more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than natural systems were built to absorb. According to NASA and the World Meteorological Organization, global average temperatures have already risen by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius since the late 1800s. That number sounds modest until you realise it can decide whether a glacier holds or collapses, whether a monsoon arrives on schedule or three weeks late, whether a harvest survives or fails entirely.

The consequences are not distant or theoretical. They appear in a farmer’s ruined crop when the rains don’t come when expected. They appear in the bleaching coral reefs of the Gulf of Mannar, as ocean temperatures climb year after year. They appear in cities like Chennai and Mumbai, where flooding that once occurred once a decade now happens almost annually. Agriculture suffers because staple crops like wheat and rice are highly sensitive to heat stress, which means food security depends on a stability the climate can no longer promise. Water tables are falling in states like Punjab because of decades of over-extraction combined with erratic rainfall. Public health systems strain under a growing burden of heat-related illness. Even Himalayan glaciers, which feed rivers sustaining hundreds of millions of people, are retreating faster than scientists had projected. None of this is speculation. It is simply what the evidence has been showing us, patiently and repeatedly, for years.

I am in Class 11, and in a strange way, my future has already been shaped by decisions I never had a say in. The career I eventually choose, the city I might settle in, the food available to me at forty, the water I’ll be able to drink at sixty, all of it depends on choices being made right now, largely by people who won’t be around to face the consequences. This is why climate change isn’t simply an “environmental issue” for my generation. It is an economic issue, because industries from agriculture to insurance are already being reshaped by climate risk. It is an educational issue, because school closures caused by extreme heat and flooding are becoming disturbingly routine across India. It is even a mental health issue, as growing numbers of young people report genuine anxiety about the world they are inheriting. And it is, above all, a justice issue, because the people who contributed least to this crisis, farmers, fishing communities, the urban poor, are often the first and worst affected. We did not create this problem. But we are the ones who will inherit it, and quite possibly the ones who will have to solve it.

Consider Chennai’s 2019 “Day Zero” crisis, when the city’s main reservoirs ran nearly dry and residents queued for hours just to fill a few buckets of water. Consider the Kerala floods of 2018, among the worst in a century, which displaced over a million people and were linked by scientists to unusually intense monsoon rainfall. Consider the forest fires that swept through parts of Uttarakhand during the dry, heat-stressed summer of 2024. Consider the plastic waste choking rivers like the Ganga, which studies estimate carries thousands of tonnes of plastic into the ocean every year. These aren’t isolated tragedies scattered across unrelated headlines. They are patterns, and patterns are exactly what science is trained to read.

But there is another side to this story, and it deserves equal attention. India has become one of the fastest-growing solar energy markets in the world, with the cost of solar power falling so sharply that it is now often cheaper than coal. States like Gujarat and Rajasthan host some of the largest solar parks on the planet, turning once-barren land into a source of clean electricity for millions. This isn’t a hopeful hypothesis. It’s proof, already standing under the sun, that transformation is not only possible but already underway.

Solving this crisis doesn’t require every person to become a scientist or a policymaker. It requires everyone to do something, at whatever scale they can manage, and to understand why that something matters. Individually, small habits, reducing single-use plastic, walking or cycling short distances, being mindful of water and electricity use, matter not because one person’s choices will fix the planet alone, but because habits shape culture, and culture eventually shapes what a society demands from its leaders. In schools, eco-clubs, tree-planting drives, and waste segregation programs work because they build responsibility early, so sustainability becomes instinct rather than instruction handed down too late. At the community level, initiatives like rainwater harvesting and neighbourhood cleanups succeed because they rebuild the small ecosystems our cities have worn down; Bengaluru’s citizen-led lake rejuvenation projects show what collective will can achieve when people stop waiting for permission. Government policy remains the most powerful lever of all, because stronger emission regulations, investment in public transport, and support for renewable infrastructure create change at a scale no individual can match alone. Technology offers genuine hope too, from increasingly affordable electric vehicles to advances in battery storage that finally make solar and wind power dependable. And businesses must be held accountable, since a relatively small number of industries produce a disproportionate share of global emissions; consumer pressure and honest regulation work because they remove the profit incentive behind convenient marketing and force real change instead.

Writing this article made me think harder than I expected about my own habits, and I won’t pretend I’ve done anything extraordinary. What I have done is small: carrying a steel bottle instead of buying packaged water, switching off lights out of habit rather than reminder, occasionally saying something when a friend litters instead of staying quiet to avoid awkwardness. None of it feels heroic. But I’ve come to believe that responsibility rarely does. It usually just looks like showing up, again and again, in ways too small to photograph.

Imagine a history textbook written in the year 2100, describing this decade the way we now describe the years before a vaccine was discovered, or the years just before a war could still have been prevented. It will not ask whether we understood what was happening to our planet. The evidence, the warnings, the data, all of it already exists, undeniable and public. What that textbook will ask instead is a far harder question: once we knew, what did we actually choose to do with that knowledge.

We often speak of the Earth as something fragile that needs saving, as though it were helpless without us. But the Earth has survived ice ages and asteroid impacts. It does not need saving. What truly hangs in the balance is us, our food, our water, our health, our future. We borrowed this planet from the generations before us, and whether we admit it or not, we are borrowing it on behalf of the generations still to come. The mango tree outside my grandfather’s house is gone, but somewhere, in some other yard, another tree is still standing, weathered but alive, waiting to see what we decide to do next.

The Earth was never truly ours to keep. It was only ever ours to care for

WriteToWin Monsoon 2026