Dear Mother Earth
A letter addressing the earth detailing natural disasters of 2022, progress in sustainability, etc.
Dear Mother Earth,
This year has not been kind to you, I realize.
You’ve cried: rushing, roaring rapids that consume entire countries, states, and along with them, livelihoods and lives themselves. “Record Breaking Floods in Bangladesh.” “Torrential Rain in Bengaluru, India.” “In Pakistan, Villages Become Islands.” Thousands of villages drowned, parts of countries submerged. Your suffering beckoned the suffering of thousands–millions–of people, and to that, I began to feel a hopeless dread, that maybe you are past consolable.
Sometimes you’ve fevered with anger: reaching reeling temperatures that burn away crops and the people they sustain. Excessive heat waves plague countries from South Asia to Europe to North America, reigning heavily on our vulnerable children and elders, our poor folk and farmers. Running water and A/C may soothe the effects of your temper, but do nothing to prepare for your next lashing. Your anger, it seems, is universal in its destruction, and to that, I began to seek any way out of your firestorm.
However, all of my soul-searching and solution-seeking has never led me astray in loving you. Perhaps, against my better judgment, my peers and I beg for politicians, corporations, and their greedy CEOs to stop. To look around the world and see the evidence of your dying. To raise their gavels and their heavy-stoned hands and call for an emergency.
Because an emergency it is.
When entire species are dwindling and our most vulnerable populations suffer from heat and floods, why do we still refuse to call climate change what it is? Why do we pretend action is being taken, when in fact nothing is being done? Why do people not panic in the immense danger and hardship we have faced, are facing, and will face?
I disagree with Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s quote: “The time for action is now. It’s never too late to do something.”
On the issue of climate change, we grow later every day.
Signed,
The youth who must spend the rest of their days on a dying Earth, the people affected by record-high temperatures and severe flooding, and just anyone who gives a damn.
Editors: Nicole O., Leandra S., Joyce S., Chris F.