It’s time to stop passing around the blame for climate change and take accountability for our own actions, says Mia Morgan, 16, from Thomas Gainsborough School in Sudbury.
You’re killing the planet. It’s a hard truth nobody wants to hear. I can try to make you see what we’re doing to the planet – polluting the oceans, killing the wildlife, greenhouse emissions, rising global temperatures, melting ice caps and rising sea levels. We’ve all heard it. Everybody knows what’s going on here. But you ignore it. Why? I’m not sure. Everyone has this mentality that someone else is doing their fair share of the work we all need to put in, but when not a couple of people, but millions of people have the same thought – that someone else will take care of things – nothing ever happens. Nothing can happen. And you just sit there, watching your crisps packet roll away in the wind. “Someone else will pick that up”. They won’t though. Each person that passes that packet thinks the same thing. They’ll see it nestled in a bush, long faded from the sun and everyone else walking over it, muse about how sad littering is, and then continue on about their day. It doesn’t cross their mind again. A report by Keep Britain Tidy tells us that 52% of people think that littering has become normal behaviour. Over half think it’s normal for our wildlife to have to live with your leftover rubbish you couldn’t be bothered to pick up, to build their nests with, or even eat it because all of the other things we’ve done have killed off the food they need to survive.
You matter. Your actions matter, your voice matters, every single thing you do while on this planet matters. And yes, you may be able to get away with not doing anything to help our planet. Watch the world go by as it slowly deteriorates in front of your eyes. Maybe in your little corner of the world you’re safe. Still cool enough that a heatwave will last maybe two weeks in the summer and high enough above the sea that floods only come after a bad spot of rain, but others aren’t. By not doing anything, by continuing with your actions, you are making their lives worse. Eventually it’s going to come back around, and you’re going to regret not changing now, when we all told you to. When I told you to. When Jane Goodall, Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough told you to. We are all trying to tell you.
We can redirect the blame to anybody here. It’s the manufacturing companies’ fault for making things with plastic, it’s the factories’ fault for releasing too many greenhouse gases and causing global warming, and it’s your fault for sitting there and doing nothing when we all need to work together to stop this. Because the planet will still exist after we’ve gone, but as far as we’re aware, it’ll be because of us that any intelligent life in the universe will be gone too.
Please. All you need to do is try, the simple things you do have the biggest impact.
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