Dear Tomorrow or my future children,

First of all I would like to say hello, I hope climate change is not affecting you as much as it was affecting my generation.

Hopefully the world has come together to work and solve sustainability and you have more appreciation of the Earth and the many wonderful things it can provide you. Growing up I saw the effects of climate change on a global level, the temperature rises all the time making summers in Chicago a pain. Floods are more prone in my community because of heavy rainfall over a short period of time. More and more animals are becoming extinct because we have been cutting down more forest and polluting more areas.

Even though all of these events have been going around for years, people don’t really want to change their ways. I live in a consumer country where we don’t really have a say in how things are produced and often times items are made just for the profit and not for a better world. Many people in my generation are very into material wealth making sure they have everything that everyone else has. This means we have been producing more and more products. Yet, most of everything ends up in the trash or landfills.

Personally I haven’t done much about climate change other than the fact that I am vegan. I also try not to use my car or buy too many products that I will not use. I donate a lot of materials so that they can be reused. I have been recycling my whole life and will do so for the rest of my life.

I would love to do more for the planet but right now I am in college and it’s hard to buy local organic produce, have an electric car, and live in a solar powered home. I also don’t have every much time on my hands to do everything I can to help out the planet. I try to do as many little actions and teach you in the future on how you can live more sustainable in your life. Later on in life I want to live in an area where we can have a lot of land and live off of it. I want to plant my own garden in a greenhouse, have an electric car which I hope will become less expensive to buy over time, and have a home that runs on itself so I don’t contribute to using fossil fuels.

Before you read this letter I believe I can make all of this happen and most likely more so that we can live in a better world. I will teach you from early on to have respect for animals (which is a large contributor to our CO2 problems), respect for your earth by planting trees and plants that we can enjoy together, hopefully we can drive a electric car that is powered by our home which will only use solar panels. They just invented new solar panels that look like “old style” roofs. They come out in 2017, so hopefully when I end school and start up my life they will be more widely available.

I do hope you will be interested in a vegan lifestyle so that we can save as many animals as we can in order to keep our air clean. I wish you have a more sustainable life than I have had in the past.

Hopefully the world will come together and make laws that protect you from doing harm to our Earth. I hope you enjoy nature as much as I do and explore the amazing world that we have.

Love you and can’t wait to bring you up the way I wish I had been raised,

Weronika Zaleska