Nancy Dong is a Sophomore at Stony Brook University from Flushing, NY .

Almost all parents have an innate desire for the next generation to live a better life than their own. It has worked well for the past few centuries, with technological and medical advances improving people’s life generation after generation. But what about this generation and after? Hidden in all the happiness and convenience that modern life brings is the toll on the environment. Large corporations so consumed with profits, people stubborn in their comfortable, unsustainable habits, and a short-sighted government has sickened our environment. This is a slow ticking time bomb, one that has not warranted enough action and attention the way COVID-19 has.

The measures that the government has taken for COVID-19 suggest that we have the ability to change our systems for what we perceive as threatening. Will it be too late to take action when we realize that the world we leave behind will be worse than the world that generations before lived in? To decrease the rate at which Earth’s temperature is increasing and to decrease the air and marine pollution that threatens biodiversity as well as our own health, we must push to implement policies that will reduce our carbon footprint. This includes a bill that requires net zero greenhouse gas emissions and the use of 100% renewable energy as well as a pollution fee on companies that choose not to be sustainable, either through their solid waste production or emissions.