I don't like to brag, but life dealt me a pretty good hand. I can pay my rent and my grocery bills. I have the means to travel, to see friends, to eat out, to have a Netflix subscription. I have good health. I have a supportive family. I am only ever hungry or thirsty due to my own poor forward planning. Even writing these things makes me feel a tad uncomfortable, but it is important to see such things clearly – especially when it comes to the climate crisis.

I recently learnt that a friend from university is now working in oil exploration. I did not take the news well. After my initial judgmental gut reaction, my next thought was along the lines of, “Well, surely this sort of thing shouldn’t affect friendships?” And yet, it kept on troubling me. Every time I saw him, it felt like there was an oily elephant in the room, a petroleum pachyderm that was impossible to ignore.

Climate change has rocketed up the public agenda. Many citizens around the world now believe climate change to be the greatest threat to their country. People are worried not just about their children’s futures, but also their own, as the effects start to show themselves: heatwaves, hurricanes and floods are becoming ever more common, and can no longer be dismissed as natural trends. The age of denial is over; now the struggle between apathy and action is in full swing.

I tried going fully vegan. It was obviously the ‘right’ thing to do, for so many reasons. It started off well enough – I’d been veggie my whole life, so it wasn’t a huge step – but there were one or two downsides. For starters, I wasn’t fully comfortable with the whole ‘meat is murder’ entitled stereotype that seems to hang around like a bad smell. Expecting friends or relatives to cater specially to my choices when they had invited me for dinner seemed a tad rude. And finally – and let’s face it, this is the big one – sometimes I just really wanted a pastry.

For many people, climate change just doesn’t appear to be a big issue. Unless you happen to have experienced a wildfire, a drought or a flood, it still seems quite far off. We can spend a lot of time talking through chains of cause and effect but if someone – be they a member of a public, a businessperson or a political figure – has decided for themselves that climate change isn’t a big deal, it can be pretty difficult to convince them otherwise.

Between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, the Costa Rican rainforest is at its brightest. Any earlier or later, and the angle of the sun means that the light cannot hope to penetrate the dense canopy. Everything that loves the sun comes out in this short window, and that included my quarry: butterflies.

I think about the state of the world a lot. From the moment I wake up the changing climate is on my mind; by the time I’m in the shower it’s the impending global water crisis; once I’m munching on muesli (with soy milk, I hasten to add), I’m mulling over the rampant destruction of biodiversity. This might sound like an exaggeration. It’s not.

It was raining when I arrived in Costa Rica. The rain engulfed everything; only the glimmer of headlights and the sound of car horns could penetrate the downpour. The presence, or absence, of anything else was left to the imagination.