Sarina Prabasi ’95: Collective Power

The snow on the majestic mountains of my old home in Nepal is melting like the dripping ice cream cones of my childhood. At the same time, thousands of miles and several landmasses away, sea levels are rising around my new home in New York City, with water sloshing around the island like in an overfull bathtub. I live “in the heights,” the highest part of a city that may be submerged in the not-distant future. I wonder if my neighborhood will be the last one standing when the salty floods come.

My entire career, I have worked with people on the losing end of the bargain. People without access to health care, education, water or sanitation have long been suffering the effects of climate change. In my work with international nonprofit organizations, most recently as the CEO of WaterAid America, I believed that we were helping, that things were getting better. The scale and pace of recent climate predictions, however, make our achievements seem woefully inadequate. On a recent trip, my 6-year-old daughter looked out of the airplane window and squealed, “The city is so tiny!” Like her view from mid-air, progress on global development seems minuscule in the face of the climate-related destruction unfolding all around us. 

I used to wonder about inaction amid an emergency. Isn’t it human nature to mobilize in a crisis? In a world more unequal than ever, perhaps that is no longer the case. In 2018, 26 billionaires owned more wealth than the poorer half of humanity. Twenty companies contribute a third of all carbon emissions; a hundred companies are responsible for over 70 percent of all emissions. Investors, shareholders and governments have the most power to make the fast, dramatic changes we need, but in the terrifying future that scientists predict, the wealthiest are wagering that the first-class lounge of life will remain open. They will buy the services of private firefighters, fly private planes to escape the floods, secure their own supplies of purified water for themselves and their loved ones. 

When I go back to Nepal, my first glimpse of the Himalayas always makes me cry. This time, as the plane starts its descent, I’m teary-eyed again, but also struck by the fact that these mountains, always snow-capped in my mind’s eye, look like the patchy heads of my balding uncles. During my visit, amid family reunions and celebrations, I’m surprised by regular warnings on the radio about dengue fever, a tropical mosquito-borne disease. I notice that my cousins and elderly aunt all sleep under mosquito nets. 

Dengue was unknown in Kathmandu’s once-temperate climate, but it is surging now along with rising temperatures. I conjure up the calamities that await my daughters in their adulthood: life-threatening extreme temperatures, new diseases and dangerously contaminated water, air and particles of plastic flowing through their bodies. 

While everyday folks worry about suffocating on a planet that has allowed humankind to grow in such spectacular and disastrous ways, the wealthiest among us are investing in interplanetary travel and dream of colonizing Mars. To add insult to injury, our largest corporations (having squandered Earth’s resources and siphoned staggering amounts of money to a tiny percentage of people) put the burden of climate guilt on us as individuals. They want our focus to be on small actions, rather than large systemic changes. Instead of drastically reducing plastic production (359 metric tons produced in 2018 alone), we are asked to consider our plastic straw. Rather than tackling carbon emissions from fossil fuels, we are encouraged to replace meat and dairy with water-intensive, industrially produced alternatives. Instead of eliminating excess packaging, they would rather we recycle. 

Individual actions provide us with an important sense of agency, but our real power to change our future is our collective power. The world may be at its most unequal, but our power is still in our numbers. I have to believe that it’s through our growing mass movements that we will save ourselves from mass extinction.

This story appears in the Spring 2020 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.

Sarina Prabasi ’95 calls for the power of collective action to bring about systemic changes. Photograph by Beth Perkins