Emily Qian is a rising high school senior at Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, OH. She has been involved in her school's Green Team since sophomore year. This year, she will be taking over as one of the team's co-presidents.
We’re protecting green spaces. Woodlands filled with elegant white-tailed deer and scampering brown squirrels; streams where colorful minnows dart around smoothed over rocks and uncountable aquatic insects flit over the water’s reflective surface; protected parks crisscrossed by trodden trails and community hikers. These are places of gentle nature where trees grow and flowers bloom, where parents take their children on sunny afternoons, where artists draw inspiration, and where people think. Places uninterrupted by the harsh asphalt and glinting metal of mankind’s “progress.”
We’re protecting our planet’s resources. Not only the plants and animals which surround us, but elements so integrated into our concept of comfortable living that to be without them seems unimaginable. Those such as energy, where we must act not only as faithful guardians of what remains, but innovators of new technology to ensure sustained delivery for decades to come. We seek to preserve that which is not merely convenient, but essential to human survival: access to oxygen-rich unpolluted air, a nutritious and plentiful food supply, and water uncontaminated by lead, algae, and salt.
We’re protecting global health. As our climate changes, so too does its impact on our population. Steady temperature increases, sea level rises, more frequent and catastrophic natural disasters, and dangerous air pollution represent only a mere fraction of the challenges facing our world community. These mean consequences for global nutrition as crop yield decreases and marine fisheries suffer; for global infections as water-borne and vector-borne diseases adapt; for global migration as people flee from their now uninhabitable homes. It’s the immunocompromised, the asthmatic, the heart-diseased, and the pregnant. It’s the children, the elderly, and everyone else. This is who will bear the repercussions.
We’re protecting social equity. The climate crisis is anything but a great equalizer. While we all will be affected, it’s the poor and destitute – those who have contributed least to our environmental problems – who will face a disproportionate brunt of the ramifications. Their health, their jobs, and their livelihoods are threatened by the very conditions that the well-off can easily avoid by cranking the AC and paying off medical bills. The climate fight is a social justice fight. A social justice fight is a human fight.
We’re protecting future generations. The youth – my peers – we are the ones who have unwillingly inherited the buildup of decades of reckless, selfish, and ignorant living. We are the recipients of an unwelcome coming of age present thrust into hands who have yet to be allowed to vote on a presidential ballot. Us, our children, and those who follow, face uncertain futures tainted by the possibilities of an earth distorted utterly different than the one our parents were born into.
Our world is changing in ways that are unexpected, terrifying, and in some cases unavoidable. We’ve seen the damage that’s been done and can only imagine what is to come if we continue as we have. But it’s not too difficult, too expensive, too late to change the trajectory. For the people who are fighting, we can’t lose focus. We are climate activists, and this is what we’re protecting.