hinge Powerhouse Generation
Generation Remedial: Inheriting Fire, Planting Futures
“We may not have started the fire, but we are learning how to rebuild with ash in our hands.”
The reality is that this is the situation for the youth of today. We are the first generation that is coming of age with the weight of planetary crisis on our shoulders. Wildfires have blackened the skies orange; coral reefs have bleached into memory; summers are stretching longer, hotter, and harsher; our world is on fire (both literally and metaphorically), and we have inherited the fire, not the tools to extinguish it. Climate change; biodiversity collapse; environmental injustice—it is not what we will face in the future, it is what we are inheriting to become.
We are not Generation Z, nor Generation Alpha. We are Generation Remedial: tasked not to build something new out of nothing, but to repair what was already fraying. Apart from the previous generations who built or expanded, we must restore, regenerate, and reimagine. I am writing this essay with the intention to illustrate how, as the young inheritors of ecological collapse, we are not simply its passive victims, but rather its active architects—as activists, innovators, resilient people, and morally clear leaders. In facing the crisis, we do more than react—we redefine what it means to lead, what it means to care, and what it means to survive.
I. The Inheritance: Fire, Fear, and Fragility
We are not inheriting nothing. We are inheriting the world that is unraveling.
Children born in 2020 are predicted to experience between two and seven times the number of extreme climatic events, including floods, drought, wildfire, food scarcity, and displacement than children born in 1960 (IPCC, 2022). We must also consider that this burden is not equally shared, because while the Global North was the historical contributor to the emissions crisis, the Global South is feeling its tangible impact the most. In the Pacific Islands, coastline is swallowed by rising seas. In East Africa, droughts deepen hunger. In the Amazon, extractive industries displace Indigenous peoples.
But this is an inheritance not just of the environment, it is emotional. A global survey published in The Lancet found that of youth aged 16-25, 59% reported to be “very or extremely worried” about climate change, and 45% said climate change impacted their day-to-day functioning (Hickman et al., 2021). Eco-anxiety is no longer an extreme condition, it is a rational response to systemic failure. There is a reluctance amongst many to have children, not out of selfishness, rather a fear for what they will inherit.
Psychologists refer to it as climate grief. But there is also a post-traumatic growth: the occurrence of pain becoming purpose. And this is the generation we sit in: between the devastation of what is and the determination of what is to come.
II. The Response: Rising from the Ashes
Youth are not frozen in trauma, but mobilized.
From Fridays for Future in Europe, to Extinction Rebellion Youth, and numerous grassroots movements, youth have become the moral voice of a planet in peril. In Uganda, Vanessa Nakate founded the Rise Up Movement to uplift the climate activism movement in Africa. In Indonesia, Jeda Untuk Iklim (Pause for Climate) combines traditional art with climate literacy, building awareness across generational lines.
This is not symbolic, this is structural. In Australia, Seed Mob, an Indigenous youth-led group, is rebuffing fossil fuel expansion by organizing for land justice. In Ghana, the Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO) works within environmental justice to run zero-waste schools and control menstrual equity.
Young people are also engaging with international governance. YOUNGO allows youth to recommend negotiators at COP climate summits. Yet, as ResearchGate noted (2025), youth are showing up more in the IPCC documents, but rarely in the decision-making outcomes.
And yet, we continue. Many youth, as the APA noted (2025), are turning eco-anxiety into a grassroots leadership, and disarming emotional distress into purposeful action. Protest has become process. Despair has become strategy.
III. Emotional Geography: Grief, Guilt and Growth
We are grieving the melting of glaciers, but we are also grieving the slashing of futures. And yet we are acting.
Our age group is oddly guilty—not for the things we have done, but rather for things we may, (or more likely NOT) to undo. But, as ScienceDirect stated (2023), today’s youth are “moral entrepreneurs,” who reconceive climate dialogue as a justice struggle and not just emissions accounting.
That moral coalition is our direction. It instills in us that repair is not a policy, but is the a principle. And our survival, is ring-fenced from equity.
IV. Barriers: Greenwashing, Tokenism and the Divide
But, we are also met with resistance.
Corporations are co-opting climate action in greenwashing and taking away the real power of youth by giving them a microphone. According to UNDP (2024) just 1 in 10 youth feel ‘meaningfully’ heard in their climate policy.
The narratives around youth in the media are about Western youth. Youth from the Philippines, Nigeria, and Peru and other places are often overlooked. Youth living on the frontlines of all of this disaster deserve better attention, and the idea of them being overlooked does not only misinform the narrative, it misfires all of the possible responses across the globe.
Let us not confuse visibility with justice. Let us not confuse performative inclusion for real empowerment.
V. Planting Futures: A Roadmap for Regeneration
So what does true youth empowerment look like?
Power, not tokenism—young people need to have a seat at the decision-making table, not just perform on stages globally. Climate literacy should be a formal requirement in school—for science, history and civics.
Regenerative solutions must lead. Indigenous land management and stewardship, circular economies, restorative agriculture are not fringe ideas, they are essential systems, and youth organizations like Seed Mob and GAYO enact this everyday.
Digital platforms should be treated as a form of infrastructure for change. Social media ecosystem was identified as a new way to gather across borders to organize and educate about climate action (and as arXiv noted 2025), the hashtags are not just distractions, they are our dispatches from the field.
We are already in the work of planting futures—tech-enabled, soil-based, emotionally-resilient. We are not looking for permission, we are looking for legitimation and/or resources.
VI. Conclusion: Inheriting Fire, Planting Futures
We did not start the flame. But we are already learning how to plant through the ash.
As Generation Remedial, we take on the hardest type of work: fixing what wasn’t ours to break. Through this work, we find something so ancient and urgent—that to commit to being regenerative is the best power to possess, whereas domination is the worst.
And, while the world is burning, our imaginations are thriving. Let our legacy be not the flames—but the forest.
By: Brandon Yoo
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