by Sofie Miller
Got your attention, right? Well, within twelve years we will have so totally f****d up our future that no amount of praying or half-hearted recycling will be able to help.
When I was six, I asked my mum what I could be when I grew up, and she answered that I could be anything, and I decided that I would be a professional rugby player who also raises goats in a windmill somewhere near Wales.
Now I wonder again about what I’m going to be, and instead of dreaming of all the endless possibilities, I begin to panic, not only because my life is a mess (ahhhhh!), but because I don’t know what sort of future I’m going to have, or what sort of future all of my potential children, or grandchildren will have. Has the human race messed up so badly that all we leave behind is chaos? We are in the middle of an unprecedented global emergency.
The Secretary General of the UN has stated that life on earth faces a “direct existential threat”:
“Life on Earth is in crisis: scientists agree we have entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown, and we are in the midst of a mass extinction of our own making.”
I feel genuine panic when I begin to think about this. What can I do? It is all so utterly overwhelming, and our global leaders are doing nothing - they are failing in their duty to protect. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat - and the earth we live on - are all being corrupted and compromised by our economic systems, which support our modern consumer-driven lifestyles.
Our political leaders are so seemingly incompetent, that it has been left up to the world’s teenagers to try and get our point across. Geta Thunberg, a 16 year-old Swedish student, began a global movement, #SchoolStrike4Climate. Teenagers are banding together to fight the unfightable and as Greta says "we can’t change the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.”
I urge everyone not to just think about how cool it is to have plastic straws because they don’t droop halfway through your Frappuccino like paper ones do, and instead focus on the fact that we have to get our act together and start to take action. This is our world and we have to defend it.
Here are some links to the climate change cause where you can donate anything. Use your privilege to do some good before money stops mattering and we’re surrounded by rafts of plastic bottles.
Greenpeace: https://secure.greenpeace.org.uk/page/contribute/greenpeace-main?source=wb&subsource=6E153
Environment Defence Fund: https://www.edf.org
Extinction Rebellion: https://rebellion.earth/donate/