Making It Happy

“What are those black clouds with sad faces on them?” I ask an eleven-year-old participant of the SHINE: A Musical Performance for Youth Authored Resilience CU Science Discovery camp. We’re looking down at the massive, hand-painted timeline the kids at the camp have created to illustrate the history of the Earth. It starts 300 million years ago in the Pennsylvanian Period, where the kids have painted trees and vines to portray a lush, vegetation-covered planet. The timeline moves through each subsequent period all the way to the present, where the ominously dark clouds in question hover over towering smokestacks and sputtering cars. “Oh that’s the present day. It’s kind of sad because we have a lot of carbon in the air and it’s not really that happy. But then we have the future,” she says, pointing to just beyond the gloomy scene, “which is happy if we can make it happy.” Read more ...