I am lying in bed, thinking about today’s German class. It was a demanding day. We had to write an argumentative essay and were given two lessons for it. The topic was whether we should grow grain again on our meadows. It is a topic we often discuss at home. My father works at IndoorAgri, a company where grain is produced for all of Pakistan.

I turn onto my side and look out of the window. Where there once were fields, there are now beautiful wildflower meadows. It is quiet, and yet full of life. I imagine what it looks like during the day, how it sounds, how it hums. Many insects move from flower to flower. My grandmother says that many of them had disappeared in the past. Now they are back.

Far on the horizon, I can see small lights. They glow softly into the night. That is where my father works. It is one of the large IndoorAgri halls where the grain for our country is grown. He says it is the cleanest way to produce food. And when I look at the flowers, I believe him.

I close my eyes for a moment. Maybe it is good that we have learned to live differently. Maybe we have made space for something that had once been lost.

I think about my essay. I wonder if I wrote it correctly. In the main part, I tried to explain why I want things to stay the way they are. If we plough the meadows again, the flowers will disappear. And with them the animals that live there. If chemicals are spread on the fields again, the air and the water will be polluted, and maybe I will get sick. If we grow crops outside again, and heavy rain or drought returns like before, the harvest could fail, and we might not have enough food.

We are still living with the consequences of climate change that generations before us set in motion. Our scientists say that it may take another hundred years until the climate stabilizes again, around the year 2226.

I turn onto my back and look at the ceiling. I wrote my conclusion differently than I had planned at the beginning.

I wrote that I hope everything can remain as it is. IndoorAgri uses only as many resources as necessary, and if more children are born in Pakistan, we will simply build more halls.

And then I wrote something else. Something we are not really supposed to write, but I wanted to keep it.

I am proud of my father. He works so that we can have wildflower meadows again. Meadows that hum with life. Meadows that live.

I close my eyes and think: maybe this is the right answer.