Simple Actions for Big Changes
This past few years have been turbulent time for the environment. COP27 and COP26 were both held, oil prices are climbing, and more and more youth climate activists are rising to fight against climate change. With so many different events going on in preventing a larger climate catastrophe, it can be easy to lose track of what all of these issues are, and what we are even striving for. What climate activists around the world want and are trying to achieve is a world that is clean, pollution free, and habitable for all. This means there is no trash or plastic in oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, or anywhere on land. This means we have switched to electric vehicles, and factories run on clean energy. This means we have restored our forests, and created more conservation areas for wildlife. This means the loss climate change has left on communities has been repaired. There is so much that needs to be done to get to this point, and it needs to be done now. We don’t have time to wait, and the time to act is now. So what can we be doing to get closer to this goal of a cleaner, healthier world?
Plastic pollution: Plastic pollution is an issue in the environment that leads to more problems. Plastic is produced, which creates an extremely large amount of air pollution. The plastic gets lost in bodies of water and on land, where it can be eaten by animals which harms them greatly. Or, the chemicals in it are leached into the environment which pollutes the area around them. Finally, it prevents ecosystems from functioning well because it changes the animals’ and environments’ dynamics. Luckily, plastic pollution is one of the easiest issues in the environment to prevent. All we have to do is not buy plastic items and instead switch to eco-friendly materials.
Phase out of fossil fuels: The reason why oil prices are going up is because we have not phased out of fossil fuels yet. Because we are trying to limit how much oil we are using after the OPEC+ decision, the prices are rising.1 So, phasing out of fossil fuels would mean spending less money on fuel, and it would be better for the environment because we would be limiting a large amount of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere. To put this into perspective, the average car emits 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year.2 If you multiply this by thousands of people, you can imagine how much pollution this creates. So, imagine how much cleaner the earth would be if it didn’t have all of this waste in it. It is possible, but we need to transition anything that runs on fossil fuels to clean energy. This won’t happen overnight, but the sooner we start the sooner we start the sooner we can achieve this.
Land cleanup/ Planting more trees/wildlife restoration: Like plastic pollution, trash on the land can lead to many other issues. Once we clean up trash that is on land, we will have more space to plant trees and restore areas that have been destroyed. After we create more protected areas, animals can come back and restore the ecosystem.
There are so many problems that are occurring in the environment right now, and to prevent them we will all need to do our part and work together. Climate change is caused by all of us, and it can only be stopped if we all work to stop it.
Image: Cornelissen, Hendrik. “time-lapse photography of river” Unsplash, 28 May 2018, https://unsplash.com/photos/-qrcOR33ErA
