Procrastinating with Pollution

I like to go on walks along a creek near my house. Occasionally I’ll see some trash in the water, usually plastic bottles or containers, sometimes filled with unknown liquids. My mom would make scheduled times to clean up trash in our town. I never wanted to go; I wanted to do what I wanted to do. “Maybe later?” I would say. I knew it was the right thing to do, but would it really help that much? Why waste my energy on something I didn’t want to do? My mom was always the optimistic type though, and disappointing her didn’t seem like an option. So I went. The walks would be long, and my legs would get tired walking around for hours, picking up things we hadn’t put down. We would come back with big filled bags and have to wash our hands to get the germs off.

It’s been a year since we did that. Our schedule is pretty full now; we don’t have a lot of extra time on our plates, and I guess I can’t focus on helping the planet because I have to learn about stuff I’ll probably forget in the future. Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t think I know enough about this topic to say enough useful things about it. And that’s a problem. The fact is that there is something slowly killing our planet and environments, and we don’t even learn enough about it in school. Well, to tell the full truth, I did learn about the climate in school; that’s one reason I’m here, why I’m writing this. But even though I don’t feel I know every little detail about climate change, I know how the earth is increasingly getting hotter each year, and places are experiencing floods, droughts, and forest fires. People are affected by this. Maybe not you, maybe not me, but I can tell that the winters were getting warmer. When the temperature was reaching up to 56 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of February, it felt like summer.

I can understand on a personal level that procrastination is a horrible monster. But putting off something that will not only have a big impact on the human race but on all the other animals and living things we have on this earth, as well as our ecosystem, is not a responsible thing to do. Whenever I procrastinate about something, I always think, “I’ll do it later,” or I think of some excuse not to do it. But for something that is destroying our earth? We need to think now. We need to realize now. We need to act now, because now is the only time we have.