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The Teen Take: Act now to preserve world for future generations

Creston Grade 9 student Emily Ritter-Riegling encourages readers to do their part to stop global warming...
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Emily Ritter-Riegling is a Grade 9 student at Prince Charles Secondary School.

From what I see and hear it sounds like our world is dying. And that is a terrifying thought. We are polluting our air, tearing down our forests and turning the oceans into garbage heaps. The fact is that in the last few years, we have seen some ups and downs with crazy weather, burning droughts and massive storms.

Last summer, it seemed like the whole of western North America was on fire but now some places are having the coldest temperatures in years. Everything seems to have gone to extremes. In a lot of places where water is already scarce, rainfall could decrease, causing devastating droughts. However, other places may have the opposite problem. The number of floods is estimated to increase due to crazy weather patterns.

On top of that, we all know that the glaciers are melting, causing a huge rise in sea level. This leaves many animals with nowhere to go, endangering many of them to near extinction. The north and south poles are getting smaller with every year, and we can see the disastrous effects it has been having.

A lot of this stuff can lead back to global warming, which can then possibly be traced back to humans polluting the earth, but the garbage in the oceans is solely humanity’s fault. My second grade teacher told me how, when he was little, everyone would just dump their garbage in the ocean and it was completely normal. I was, of course, appalled. Now we know different but it doesn’t stop a lot of garbage still ending up in the oceans. It’s horrifying to think of the endless heaps of plastic, floating out there like islands.

There have been, and still are, plans to clean up the oceans and I try to stay optimistic but sometimes I really have to wonder what the world will be like in 20 years. And when I do, it doesn’t look too good.

And that’s not even it. The forests, our rain forests especially, are being cut down and burned as if no one had a care in the world. Animals have gone extinct because their habitats have been completely destroyed by mankind. And for what, a few nice pieces of wood or extra land?

This world is falling apart because of us but it seems like no one cares enough to do anything. Because we’ve been told to recycle but we’ll still throw away plastics, and we’ve been told to bike but we still drive two blocks over. There are so many other problems our world has to face; if we could try and solve this we could greatly improve the lives of the generations to come.

So, I really do encourage you to recycle what you can, buy local foods, donate to charity and walk to work. Whatever you can do to make this world just a tiny but better and safer and cleaner, can make a difference if we all do something.

Emily Ritter-Riegling is a Grade 9 student at Prince Charles Secondary School. The Teen Take is a column co-ordinated by the Teen Action Committee.