When I was a young adult, back in the olden days when leisure suits and disco music were all the rage, I recall having a series of vivid and apocalyptic nightmares about nuclear war. My fears about the threat of such a holocaust were exacerbated in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration’s “aggressive rhetoric and military policies.” Books such as Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth and television movies such as The Day After only added to my anxiety. For a brief period in 1983, in an effort to channel my fears into political action, I worked as a canvasser for the anti-nuclear group SANE in Washington, DC. (Those who know me won’t be surprised to learn that I did not particularly excel at going door to door soliciting donations.) During that time, or thereabouts, I happened to be standing outside a Metro station one sunny afternoon, when a nearby air raid siren suddenly began to blare. Not immediately grasping that this was only a test, I briefly went into tachycardia and tried very hard not to pee my pants. Soon enough, though—I think it was 1989—I managed to calm down.

Those were scary times—as are these. While the threat of nuclear war no longer pollutes the national psyche in the way it once did, other threats do. In today’s Washington Post, Darragh Johnson reports on how today’s generation of youth are coping with the specter of catastrophic climate change:

Climate Change Scenarios Scare, and Motivate, Kids

The boy has drawn, in his third-grade class, a global warming timeline that is his equivalent of the mushroom cloud.

“That’s the Earth now,” the 9-year-old says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. “And then,” he says, tracing the progressively lighter stripes across the page, “it’s just starting to fade away.”

Alex Hendel of Arlington County is talking about the end of life on our beleaguered planet. Looking up to make sure his mother is following along, he taps the final stripe, which is so sparsely dotted it is almost invisible. “In 20 years,” he pronounces, “there’s no oxygen.” Then, to dramatize the point, he collapses, “dead,” to the floor.

For many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today. Fears of an environmental crisis are defining their generation in ways that the Depression, World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War’s lingering “War Games” etched souls in the 20th century.

Parents say they’re searching for “productive” outlets for their 8-year-olds’ obsessions with dying polar bears. Teachers say enrollment in high school and college environmental studies classes is doubling year after year. And psychologists say they’re seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon. [full text]

It does not surprise me to read that a good many young people are grappling in some fashion with the threat of a “climactic Armageddon.” In a way, it speaks to how the climate has already changed—at least the country’s psychological climate. Confronted with a very real danger and a political administration that prefers to ignore or minimize such (while fanning the flames of other dangers), those among us who are most vulnerable and have the most to lose are naturally experiencing heightened anxiety. In the absence of substantive intervention by the people who are supposed to represent and protect us, both the psychological and physical climate will likely continue to deteriorate. And our children will remain haunted by not just the specter but the reality of impending catastrophe.