It has become painfully clear that we are damaging our environment to the point of irreversibility. Because of the irresponsibility of corporations, government, and the people themselves, we are making our world a lesser place for our children and other future generations to live in. We must use our resources to take care of this ONE planet we live on called Earth.
There’s nothing more important to protect than our water supply. As we have seen in Florida, agricultural runoff from Big Sugar has polluted Lake Okeechobee so much that the runoff from it has affected the beaches on both coasts of Florida. This causes much environmental damage to our estuaries and costs our tourism and fishing industries untold amounts of economic damage that will affect the jobs of many.
Also, we need to take care of our atmosphere. As we have seen with the changing rain patterns and rising seas, the centuries of us dumping fossil fuel emissions into the air have affected our climate patterns. These have caused areas like Lousiana to experience massive flooding and also caused coastlines in other areas to suffer from severe erosion.
Garbage and trash itself is another issue. Here in America, we have filled so many landfills full of recyclable and non-recyclable garbage and trash that there are actually mountains of them outside some urban areas. Also, this trash and garbage end up in our oceans. This actually causes large patches of trash to conglomerate into the Pacific Ocean in amounts that entangle marine animals. This is not how you take care of your environment for future generations!
Now that we have identified the problems, how can we help save our world for the future? We can start by working on more environmentally safe ways to farm. We can also reduce our reliance of fossil fuels so that we can reduce how much our world is warming. Also, we can reduce packaging on our consumer products so that we create less trash than we are right now.
It is highly important that we start to implement methods that will help to reduce our negative impact on the environment. Our world is telling us that it cannot tolerate more damage without our ways of life-changing drastically. We owe it to our children and further generations to leave them an Earth than they can live on and enjoy.