My heart wrenches when I see on the news footage of the South Korean contractor in Iraq begging for his life – “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” Poor, poor man. A few days ago, I watched a Current Affair piece (quality journalism, of course) about families under the strain of raising autistic children. I felt so bad that we as a society weren’t supporting them.

Every day in our newspapers and on TV we hear of people fighting, dying, struggling. I’ve become quite blase about it, I suppose. I say, “Oh, that’s terrible,” and forget about it half an hour later. But when I am able to put faces and personal stories to the statistics… It’s not a nice feeling.

When I was in grade four, I remember trying to catalogue all the problems in the world in the expectation that solving the world’s problems would simply be a matter of checking things off my list. I sat down and thought really hard. “Right. So there’s poverty. The Environment. Homelessness. Drugs. Unemployment. War. Hunger. Health.” Then I was satisfied and forgot about it.

As the years went on, I added more issues to my mental list and at some point, I realised that it couldn’t all be solved and that these problems were all tangled up in each other like a mass of vines in the Amazon jungle. We could start at one corner of the tangle and try to unravel it bit by bit but I had been hoping that we could get a flamethrower and burn the whole lot away.

In all my time at school, I must have considered career options in every university faculty except medicine. I never wanted to be a doctor, didn’t even bother with the UMAT (although, if it were free I would have done it for fun). I wanted to “help people” (the way that idealistic young’uns want to “help people”… it now sounds as inane as a Miss Universe beauty pageant response) but I didn’t want to deal with human pain.

That’s why I chose to do environmental engineering. Trees don’t cry. Passions don’t run as hot when dealing with plants rather than humans, right? But as an enviro, I could still save the world. My mental justification was that making an environmental difference would last longer than helping individual people (a simplistic and wrong premise, I know).

To some extent, I was correct. I don’t know of anyone who cries over the loss of an ecosystem as they would over a loved one. But passions do run hot. There is plenty of anger and frustration in the environmental movement. But anger I can manage. Pain, I’m not so sure.

I sound like one of those teenage diaries that try to be deep and meaningful. Ugh.