Coming from a developing world, I witness the environment suffering from human’s unaccountable actions. Trash piled up on the sidewalk, waiting to be collected. Sea of outdated vehicles thrust out clusters of dense emission; commuters were already used to wearing masks while traversing before the Covid-19 hit the country. At school, environmental teaching is not in the standardized curriculum; instead, parents explicitly advised their children to throw pieces of junk (candy wrap, plastic bottle,...) on the streets and let the garbage collectors do their job. To Lich river, once a splendid view by which family often gathered, has become a blackish stream of waste due to the unanimous attempt of nearby residents to dump the waste into the water.
I resent the collective ignorance of people that significantly contributes to environmental pollution and climate change. Therefore, I decided to enroll in an AP Environmental Science. The more I learn, the more I realize that humans only constitute a small part of numerous ecosystems but play a large role in damaging the environment. As people sacrifice long-term benefit for short-term convenience(fracking, burning fossil fuel,...), nature replies with its disasters: hurricane, flood, El Nino, and La Nina. The interconnection of ecosystems can easily exasperate the damage of human action to a larger and more unpredictable scale, resulting in irreversible effects.
As the class analyzes the population growth trend, I can see that we will soon exceed the resources that can be used to feed the human population, and massive die-off will entail. Since there are many countries still in the pre-industrial stage, where the birth rate and death rate remains relatively high, the problem is magnified.
However, there is still hope. Watching “A life on Our Planet” with my classmates, I understand it is imperative that people take action now if we do not want our future generations to suffer from our negligence. During the class, along with the hands-on experience of doing the lab, I hone my writing and reasoning skills as I craft an opposing argument to the implementation of genetically modified chestnut trees in wildlife. Although it is a long way, I strive to share the knowledge acquired in APES to raise people’s awareness of the problems that are rampaging different ecosystems, pushing endangered animals to the edge of extinction. My goal before and after enrolling in the class stays the same: to foster a sustainable and proliferating world.