Turn off lights. Own one phone instead of three. Throw your rubbish in a recycling bin and not a normal one. Come on, people-if we all made the slightest bit of effort, our planet would survive for centuries more into the future, whereas the way we’re going, the world as we know it will be unrecognizable in just a matter of decades. I can hardly believe taking an extra few steps to a recycling bin is so exhausting for young people of today. I don’t think we have to give up everything we have, but there is certainly no point staying lazy the way we are. In my opinion, saving the planet is much more significant than improving individual life. This is why:
Firstly, the planet is our home. Would you fill your own personal house with destructive gases, disgusting litter and nuclear fumes? I doubt it. So why do that to the planet, which is vital to our well-being. If planet Earth is no more, all of our individual assets will be destroyed in the process, so if we want to keep having our cushy life on Earth, we must at least respect the planet the way we would our own home. It’s not because we share it that it isn’t crucial to our survival. I think people are very selfish about what they take care of, which is ridiculous, because if we all made an effort to save the planet, our lives would be much more comfortable anyway. I mean, imagine a world where, when you step outside your door, you see beautiful emerald-colored hills rolling into the distance instead of scorched soil and dead grass. Imagine knowing that the air we breathe is healthy and beneficial and not full of cancerous chemicals. Imagine eating food that isn’t contaminated because of the pollution in factories. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to make an effort to, in the long-run, improve our quality of life, instead of ruining our own lives.
Secondly, the planet will be home to our children, their children and our great great great great grand children in hundreds of years from now. Would you like your family to survivre through time or would you rather your children drown horrifically in a world under water because we were so selfish and let the icebergs melt without doing anything about it? Personally, I would like to find my soul mate one day, have children and found a family in the knowledge that their lives will be as wonderful as possible. I am prepared to make an effort if it means ensuring that my kids will someday be able to know a beautiful world, the way it once was. I don’t think we can reverse the damage we have already done, but we can put a drastic stop to the destruction we are doing now. My hope is that we can return the world to its former glory, not necessarily by undoing the past but by improving the future.
Thirdly, there are easy alternatives to wrecking the planet. There is no need to destroy the one natural home we have, because there are a multitude of good ways to avoid doing this. So, effectively, those who do it anyway don’t deserve to improve their own individual living standards. Technology today is impressive and we have solar panels, green houses, phyto-purification, energy-saving lightbulbs, free-range farms and much more. In this day and age, there is no need to be using up non-renewable sources of energy and polluting the atmosphere. It is easily avoidable. Yes, it may be expensive to install solar panels, for example, but it is well worth it. We should also all install phyto-purification basins in our sewage systems in the hope of purifying the water that leaves our houses. If the whole world just stopped thinking of themselves we would all be fine.
So, I think saving the planet is definitely more important that improving individual living standards, because the planet is our one and only home. We need it to survive, so not protecting it would just be ridiculous.