Dear tomorrow,

One of my favorite parts of summer were our family reunions. Thinking about it right now even brings me back to the smell of a campfire with roasting marshmallows, sweating my way up a strenuous hike to a lookout point in the Cascade’s, or picking blackberries from bushes along a river bank. Washington state is full of beautiful parks, and I can only hope that you will see the same beauty some day. I’m currently finishing up my second year of college, and for several months now I’ve been feeling so very restless. I can’t quite pinpoint why or elaborate on it, but something about this world, our world, makes me uneasy.

I’ve been weary of climate change for a while now, and throughout high school I was very active and passionate in doing what I felt was my part of building a sustainable future. The thing is, the realities of climate change really fricken scare me, and millions of others too. How could it not scare you when the Earth’s future looks so bleak? Sea levels are rising, the ozone is depleting, the oceans are full of plastic, the skies are full of pollution, our forests are being torn down, our climate is rising, our glaciers melting, and our president doesn’t believe it’s real. But it is real, and it will ruin our beautiful planet unless we think of ways to solve it.

My hopes for the future are that entire islands of cultures are not submerged underwater, there are no longer plastic islands in the oceans, people in urban cities can go outside without oxygen masks, the glaciers stopped melting, polar bears have a home, deserts don’t expand, droughts don’t deplete our agriculture, and slums aren’t full of pollution and without plumbing.

My hopes are that we find ways to build ourselves a world here on Earth that can sustain itself.  I promise to keep true to myself, to keep my dreams in sight, and to keep fighting for this planet.

Biggest hugs, yesterday.