Our World

By Molly Pattinson from the UK.

I love the world I live in. There’s something magical about stepping out of your door, turning on your iPod to listen to music, sending messages via electromagnetic waves to your friends so that you can meet up, eating at a classy restaurant in order to have a lovely meal of slaughtered animal and soda drinks made from chemicals toxic enough to kill an entire river of fish, and then going to the movies, buying some make-up that was most likely tested on animals despite what the companies say, buying new clothes at your favorite shop and carrying them back to your car in large plastic bags, starting up the petrol-burning engine, waiting for the stop light to turn green, heading over to the sweet factory your aunt and uncle work at and sampling their latest treats, before going home, watching TV, having a large warm bath, soaking off all your imaginary stress in the last of the world’s drinking water and then turning on your energy-consuming night-light before finally going to bed. What’s not to love? It’s simple, easy and allows us to pretend we have problems to make up for the fact that the real problem is what we are doing to our home: Earth.

If we don’t stop putting our individual lives in front of saving the planet, we will all die within the next century. Do any of us realize this? No. Will any of us make a real difference? No.

It sounds horrible, but there is no point trying to make an effort now. After everything we have done to our planet, there isn’t really much we can do to stop the icebergs melting and killing the human race. I guess we deserve it, but it isn’t a particularly pleasant thought. Now, I think we need to make the most of it. There is no way (and trust me, I have thought about it a lot) to make up for the disaster we have ultimately caused, because our society, today, is not capable of suddenly stopping everything we do. We would not be capable of dramatically changing our lives over night and returning to our primitive ways. It isn’t possible. If we were extremely determined to banish all things developed and modern, we could perhaps all become cavemen within fifty years, but by then it would be too late anyway. We can’t save the planet now, because of what we have done. We are all doomed, so make the most of what you have. Enjoy your new technology, but also take the time to look out of your window every so often and think about what a beautiful planet we have. Peer out of your energy-guzzling home and look at the grass, the planets, the gorgeous rolling hills and charismatic mountains folding into one another, the animals playing in the fields and communicating with one another, the magical and precious stretch of sapphire blue we encourage factories to dump oil into and tell our little siblings to excrete in, so that we don’t have to walk all the way back to the hotel, and the sky-the wonderful sky that gets more and more polluted every day because of the gaz we produce and the toxins we release into the air. Get a good look at all that before our consummation society destroys us and everything we know. When one day the icebergs melt and we are sitting in our retirement homes, unable to help our children who are drowning and dying, perhaps we will think about our actions. That seems to be the only way to make anyone notice anything.

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