postcard #5: a belated earth day to all
I was cleaning out my notes app this weekend and I stumbled upon my favorite thing that has ever been written. When I was a teacher one of the final assignments of the year was for the students to write about why we should save the arctic. One of my favorite students wrote this.
There are so many reasons we should all be focusing on conservation and preservation but I don’t know if there is a better way to explain it than she did. I too love the fish and want the ocean to stay blue and I love watching things grow and I want there to be enough food for everyone and I love walking barefoot in the grass and I too do not want to move to Mars.
The kids understand that the simplest pleasures are the most meaningful and sometimes we get so caught up in the adult life of it all that we forget to do these things. We forget to sign letters “from, sincerely, love” even though all those things are true and we forget to love the little planet we live on that has given us a home. We go to work and school and come home and sit on our computers on couches or if we’re lucky on the balcony or the roof or the little green square that has been dubbed a “park” and it is so easy for us to forget about the world out there and what is happening to nature. I won’t make this another political essay but as funding goes towards militaries and billionaires it goes away from other things like education, people, and important here, the planet.
This winter has been brutal, D.C. has been drowned under snowfall after snowfall and hurricanes have hit multiple cities and now as it turns to spring fires have cropped up in LA and the UK and the world is falling apart. They called it Global Warming and Global Warming kind of sounded good, I would love a warmer planet. It seemed like the bad stuff would be a problem for the future but now we watch natural disasters happen one after the other and just hope they don’t reach where we live. We recycle sometimes, and online shop and use plastic water bottles and bags and people use AI because it is easier, and we do these things that make our lives “easier” at the cost of our planet. I do it too and it is so hard to stop because we convince ourselves that there is nothing any one person can do to stop this because companies are quite literally pouring oil into oceans and setting off bombs and destroying forests. And so we all try a little less, because it seems futile. But this earth day I made a commitment to stop ordering clothes online (even if I really want something) because while I can’t do everything I can do something. And if we all do a little something every day, every year, maybe we can coexist with this planet a little more mutually.
Anyways, I am not a climate change expert so I will leave you just with this sweet little letter from my sweet little girl. I hope you do something good for the earth today and take a second to remember how lovely she is (and i hope you also did this last week when it was actually earth day haha).
