My son is counting on me. Your child is counting on you. Our nieces and nephews and grandchildren are counting on us. We must stop letting them down, we must stop throwing away their future.
10 Years to Change the World
And yes, I know we need a system change rather than individual change.
Greta Thunberg
But you can not have one without the other.
We aren’t taking this seriously enough. Ecosystem collapse may sound like a fancy word about something that might distantly affect us, but it’s actually describing a current crisis. Everything we depend on for our daily life itself depends on the natural ecosystems of the earth. From food and water to the air we breathe, the planet is providing us with the means of life. And we’re using the life we’ve been given to tear the planet apart.
Species extinction isn’t just sad, it’s scary because it’s happening at an alarming rate and hitting key species for ecosystems we rely on for everything. For example if we lose the bees, we lose a lot:
Without pollinators, many of us would not be able to enjoy chocolate, coffee and vanilla ice cream, or healthy foods like blueberries and brazil nuts… The value of pollinators goes way beyond this. People’s livelihoods and culture are intimately linked with pollinators around the world.
Lynn Dicks, a research fellow at Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology
That’s just the topic of what we lose, there’s also the chaos we create. Think that immigration is a hot topic now? Imagine when climate refugees all over the planet start flooding the first world nations.
People are trying to adapt to the changing environment, but many are being forcibly displaced from their homes by the effects of climate change and disasters, or are relocating in order to survive. New displacement patterns, and competition over depleted natural resources can spark conflict between communities or compound pre-existing vulnerabilities.
UNHCR
This is serious business, and we all needed to take action yesterday. So we really better do it now.
From our personal habits to the systems which harvest natural resources and distribute them, everything must change. We must each start by changing ourselves. This means not only our consumption habits, but also our voting habits, whether we’re voting with our dollar or at the ballot box. We must use ourselves as tools of change to shift the system, or we’re driving off the cliff into dystopia.
We must make this change not only for ourselves, but for our children, and all the future generations to come. It’s time to be selfish by being selfless.
Cause they’re counting on us.
Thank you to Greta Thunberg for reminding us of that!
