By Marie Young
It's in our Nature (formerly The End of Wilderness and Changing Minds in Changing Climate Times), by Marie Young. After growing up in a conservative religious household and attending a religious school my entire life, I had to make some hard realizations in college about my core values. What resulted was my rejection of evangelical Christianity and a radical shifting of beliefs. Ultimately, I found purpose through my pursuit of an environmental science degree.
It is nearly impossible to convince someone to change their entire worldview.
Logic cannot defeat sheer stubbornness and denial. Perhaps with brute force you can eventually make a dent. However, is it not an act of cruelty to take a sledgehammer to someone’s sense of identity like a god? Instead, you must wait patiently as the cracks begin to form. First one, and then another, and then their world comes crumbling down and they are only left with pieces to make sense of.
This story flows in bursts and intervals. It begins at fourteen, when two Christian parents sign their daughter up for an outdoor adventure club because she is afraid. She survives terrifying trips and learns to enjoy taking risks. Now she is eighteen and moves away to college, committing herself to a deeply devout and Jesus-filled college experience. She leaves her camping equipment in her childhood bedroom to be forgotten. Two years later, she has forgotten herself.
The first time I accepted that evolution existed was during my sophomore year of college at UNC in a biology class. Before then, if you had asked me about evolution, I would have explained that evolution is split into macroevolution and microevolution. Only microevolution– such as antibiotic or pesticide resistance– is real. Two months of lectures and powerpoint slide after powerpoint slide of skeletal evidence tracing the emergence of different species systematically challenged everything that I had learned at my private Christian school. Evolution was real, I was wrong.
As I untangled my scientific education, everything else in my idyllic college life began to crumble. Things came to light for the first time as I navigated friend problems, church scandals, physical injuries, and academic burn-out. Life became overwhelmingly messy. So, with my sleeping bag in my trunk and a headlamp in my glovebox, I ran away to the woods.
“Mom, I’m worried I made a massive mistake.” I’m in my car, holding back tears as I drive 35 minutes down a treacherous mountain road to buy groceries. I cautiously ease my car around the sharp curves that border a steep 100-foot ravine, trying my hardest not to drive off the road or hit other cars. It’s my first day at my environmental research program in the Appalachian Mountains, and I’m absolutely terrified.
My mother responds, her voice crackling in and out from the poor cellular signal. “Of course you’re afraid, it’s your first day. It’ll get better once you know everyone. You can do this!” Then she cuts out, the signal just as lost as I am.
A week later, I'm in a lab nervously waiting to hear about the research I will undertake for the semester. My professor tells me I'm going to be working with small mammals. My partner and I decide to research the effects of human developments on mammal populations. We go out in the early morning week after week to perform fieldwork. We learn that the native red squirrels are being outperformed by their invasive gray squirrel counterparts, who are evolutionarily adapted to living in more developed areas. The red squirrels are disappearing in Highlands, and it's our fault. As I walk back to the lab contemplating these findings, I feel hopeless.
Belief matters in environmental science. When faced with humanity’s failure to protect our planet from ourselves, it’s easy to lose hope. It’s even easier to deny there’s a problem in the first place. No problem equals no worry. For most of my life, I belonged to this latter group, firmly denying that humans could cause extreme damage to our landscapes. When I went on outdoor excursions, my intention was to commune with the natural world, feel God's presence, and restore my soul. I romanticized nature so deeply in order to create a religious experience for myself that I had to ignore the destruction that humans created. These were my beliefs when I backpacked in Alaska in 2019, two years before I stepped foot on UNC's campus.
I will never forget my first views of the pristine Alaskan landscape. We filled our water bottles unfiltered from a stream so pure that pollution was not a concern. Our tents were set on soft beds of moss that gently cradled our weary slumbering bodies. Even the sun in the sky accompanied our trek, never setting, its orange glow constantly glancing off the surrounding glaciers. It felt like the Garden of Eden, although the giant clouds of mosquitoes desperate for a meal helped challenge that impression.
One night during dinner, our guides began discussing climate change, explaining how the glacier in front of us was melting at a rapid rate. I listened as he told us that the weather just wasn't getting cold enough to offset the melting that occurs each summer and that pretty soon, the glacier would be no more, and it would be humanity's fault.
I didn't speak up, lacking the confidence to initiate a debate that I knew would not go well, but in my head I was incredulous. We were in a place so untouched by humans that we did not even need to filter our water and they're claiming that we are making all the ice melt?!? Yes, this glacier was melting, but that's what ice does in the summer. It melts. And the earth warms and cools. Climate change doesn't exist–humans can't cause that much damage to the earth. We can't do anything.
Then I forgot about that conversation until that day in Highlands. If it’s not true, then you don’t have to worry about it.
Oftentimes the most frequent defense against opposing views is by using their own vocabulary and jargon against them. I grew up mobilizing scientific terms as my artillery, tearing down anything that stood in the way of my religious beliefs. When I ventured into no man's land my sophomore year, I lost all my weapons. I did not belong anywhere. Now, I am on the other side of the battlefield. With my new vantagepoint, I have finally realized that the fight was entirely one-sided. There is no battle. I have access to 13 years of religious education to weaponize, but my desire to hurt others is nonexistent.
These realizations were disastrous. With each new piece of information, my worldview continued to crack until I felt unrecognizable. I spent the majority of my junior year attempting to build myself back up again, examining everything that I once considered ineffable with intense scrutiny and skepticism. I stopped attending church. I began attending therapy instead. I found alternative living arrangements for my return to UNC’s campus. I was not the same person that had once easily navigated the intricacies of a godly life. To the world I once belonged to, I had turned into a disappointment. I don’t like disappointing people, but I could no longer disappoint myself.
And I healed. Moss filled all the cracks as I slowly rebuilt myself. I dusted off the camping gear that I abandoned in my childhood bedroom. I will need my old hiking boots and trail gear this summer when I analyze wildlife biodiversity for a wetland restoration project, a position that I was hired for because of my work at the environmental research program in the Appalachian Mountains.
I can no longer romanticize nature as I once did. Now that my environmental science classes taught me that nothing is pristine, I see all the contradictions of wilderness. After all, we are in the Anthropocene—the epoch of humanity’s lasting impact. Can wilderness even exist in a world where microplastics can be found in our ocean's deepest trenches and our most remote areas? Every decision we make has consequences that reach far out into the future, a cancer to our future generations. It spreads only ruination.
I grew up hearing about how God commanded humanity to exercise dominion over the planet and ordered us to be responsible. Even though I now doubt the existence of a god, I will always feel that responsibility over this planet.
Everyone agrees that this planet is worth saving. However, not everyone believes that science can be trusted or that experts who have spent their entire lives studying parts of this world speak the truth. Trust is hard to come by, and that is the real tragedy.
I am not without hope. After all, belief matters in environmental science. It’s easy to deny a problem exists; it’s harder to cling to hope. But we must draw on our hope to fight.
Perhaps I was wrong about the existence of a battle. Maybe there is a battle raging around us. But that battle is individual, as we all work within ourselves to value and trust others and recognize what is worth saving and why it deserves to be saved.
Three years ago, I did not believe in climate change. Now I will spend the rest of my life fighting—not against people or beliefs— but for people and belief.