Just us against the world

When I was in first grade, I learned that the world was going to die.
I had just settled into my seat in a movie theater when the screen flickered to life and a rapid series of terrifying images flashed past my eyes. Fiery explosions flattened forests. Monstrous waves crashed into cities, crushing buildings as if they were dominos. People struggled to walk through thick clouds of gray smog. Then, the screen faded to black.

On the car ride home, my dad explained that what I had seen was a warning about global warming. Although I barely understood his explanation, I knew that I wanted to prevent what I had seen. For the next couple years, I nagged my family about recycling paper, turning lights off, and saving water. However, nobody ever responded with the same enthusiasm, and I was constantly told to focus on events that would impact me directly. Gradually, I realized that the people around me didn’t feel that global warming was an issue that deserved much attention.

At first, I refused to believe that climate change wasn’t an imminent problem. However, I soon began to doubt my faith in climate change’s disastrous impacts, since it didn’t seem to be threatening me or those around me. After listening to educational assemblies about rising temperatures, I lost the sense of urgency that I had felt during the movie. I also lost the feeling that anything I was doing could help. Every learning opportunity about climate change was about how we could only avert “future disasters” if all of us adopted healthy habits.

If nobody around me would change their ways because of a possible disaster, it seemed useless to do the same. What could I, one person out of the hundreds in my school, do to stop climate change if nobody else would try? Besides, I told myself, climate change wouldn’t happen anytime soon. Letting down my guard a little couldn’t change the course of nature. I started taking longer showers. I would leave lights on by accident. I stopped pestering my parents about recycling and composting.

Occasionally, I would read headlines about rising sea levels or pollution and feel a twinge of guilt. But then I would tell myself that my twenty minute showers, the extra minutes that the lights were on and those few pieces of paper that were accidentally shoved into the trash instead of the recycling couldn’t have caused any drastic changes. Although I never stopped believing that climate change was a problem, its importance dwindled over time. Climate change felt like something that could wait two years, or 10, or 20.

After a few years, my lifestyle was set. I had stopped consciously observing whether my actions would help or hurt the earth long ago, and climate change still seemed as distant as ever. According to a 2013 study by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, most Americans see global warming as a distant threat as well. Only 17% of Americans believe that climate change will impact their families, while 47% believe that it will impact future generations.
Now, as a young Californian resident hearing news about forest fires and the recent drought, I realize that climate change has come much faster than I expected. However, my daily routine is fixed now. Changing my habits now would not help reverse the impacts of climate change, especially when everybody around me is still indifferent to its consequences.

I am only one person out of millions of Americans, many of whom believe that climate change will not impact them personally. Although I know that there are people who actively take action against climate change, everybody in my family and most people who live near me still go on with their lives without giving it much thought. Any action that I take against climate change seems useless, now that its effects are already upon us. After all, what can I do when the whole of nature is working against me?