Earth, Globe, World, Universe, Cosmos- All these words encapsulate the planet we call home. But what they don’t properly encapsulate are the roaring rivers, tall mountains, endless plains, sprawling forests, and infinite oceans that make up Earth. With all this beauty, the natural inclination is to protect it. But humans for centuries have poisoned nature and its wildlife with relentless chemicals, and have hunted species to extinction and made hundreds of thousands more vulnerable. Oceans are rising, wildlife is disappearing, and it’s because of the mass production of products made with single use plastic and forever chemicals that hurt our earth.
While the words listed at the start of the first paragraph all casually refer to this planet, two of them have very different meanings: Globe and Planet. Globe focuses on an anthropocentristic, or human-centric, view of the world, which starts with the first human, focuses on humans’ civilizations, and tells history through the eyes of man. Planet decenters the human, this noun refers to the history of nature and its domains, wildlife and their stories, as well as human involvement. In order to fight against climate change, we must be referring to the earth as our planet and recognize our small part in its biodiversity, and our potentially catastrophic impact on it today.
Why should you care? Well, humans are dependent on their environment to live, for sports, work, shelter, fun and almost every daily act we carry out. Doing your laundry or washing the dishes is dependent on a water source, taking the bus to work is dependent on the gas drilled up that the bus runs on, watching a soccer game depends on the grass underneath the players’ feet, breathing air is dependent on the oceans and plants that produce oxygen. And yet, we’ve repaid the environment horribly. To stop this massacre of other life on our planet, every one must make the conscious choice to protect our world.
What does making the choice to save our earth look like? There are multiple ways to fight back against climate change, with the most effective one today being advocacy because it has the capacity to affect more people. But there are personal choices that you can make that save our planet little by little. For example, choosing to bring your own bags to the grocery store and buying products that don’t contain forever chemicals.
