Posted on December, 08 2006

I'm a 17-year-old junior in high school in Pickerington, Ohio, and I've been interested in wildlife and our planet since I was a kid. (I blame it on too many Bill Nye episodes on PBS.)

I was always running around the creek near my house covered in mud and water. At that age it was perfectly fine for a seven-year-old girl to play in the mud and on the creek bed all day. What puzzles the people around me is how I never grew out of it.

Being an environmentalist is difficult — people my age would rather worry about their hair and clothes than about global warming or deforestation. I'm a little spacey like that too sometimes, but what worries me is the sheer ignorance so many of my classmates have toward what's happening to our beautiful planet.

I look around me and I see the increasing temperatures, the grown intensity of storms and the threat of deforestation...and I'm worried.

If this generation doesn't take the nessecary steps toward improving the life of our planet, nobody will.

When I have children, I don't want them growing up in a world that's miserable to live in.

I want my future children to have the same amazing childhood as I did.

I want them to play and learn and love this planet for every bit of beauty that it has.

So my call to action?

• Do everything you can to make a difference — every little thing counts.
• Urge the people around you to see Earth for what she really is: home to hundreds of thousands of planets and animals, completely unique to her — a virtual paradise in the middle of the universe, and the only haven that we as humans have.
• Protect our beautiful planet.
• Leave a big, positive impression on the world by creating as little negative depression as possible.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”  — Ralph Waldo Emerson