Dear Future Me,

Hopefully by the time you read this birds are chirping a little louder. The air is crisper and snow comes more frequently. I hope you have gone a year or more without a major disaster, and the air you breathe is the cleanest your lungs have ever felt. I hope our children experience snow days where they can play with the neighborhood kids and sled around. I hope they get Christmases with snow and we decorate our snowmen with Santa hats.

I hope that all of those things are able to occur because the extent of the world’s damage is slowly getting better. If not getting better I just hope it is not getting worse. Its hard imagining a world like that and the way I envision it. As only a student in college I feel helpless in my ability to save our beautiful planet. It gives me anxiety, makes me panic, and honestly worries me how even with all the science people will always put money over everything else. After taking Global Environment I realized that maybe I am not as useless as I thought in the fight to save our planet. My little missions of making sure my college dorm room recycles, that neither my family nor I use plastic toothbrushes can help even though they are small acts. The main aspect I have learned is that every action matters in the long run. If you take your roommates water bottle out of the trash to recycle, that’s one less plastic water bottle going into the ocean. If you tell your friend to stop using plastic straws or drinking from the plastic cups at school enough times, hopefully they’ll change. Even if they don’t change right away you will still be a nagging presence in the back of their head anytime they use single use plastic. The action that I find most important and what I have taken from this class is that education is key. With every sad, world ending, “we are destroying our planet” fact I told the people around me, I saw their worry increase slowly but surely. I hope me educating people and encouraging them on how their little actions matter has made life a better place for our kids and us. On a larger scale I would like to be apart of more climate change marches and movements that really take my little voice into something larger. I hope this is enough to save our home and make it better for you and our kids.
Education, activism and slowly changing bad habits are the best way to help our planet. I definitely do not expect you to be reading this and sitting in the middle of some utopian woods with a doctorate in climate change. But I do see you having reusable Ziploc bags, no plastic water bottles, a hybrid car, and having lowered your carbon footprint on this planet as much as possible. I see your kids also educating others on the importance of maintain healthy habits that protect our environment. You’re doing the best you can regardless of the situation we are in whenever you are reading this. Just keep fighting and educating and eventually people will catch up.

Yours Truly,
Your struggling college self

P.S. I hope we get that degree and have no more college debt