The sun shines brighter than ever through your window as you wake up on a mid summer morning. You get dressed and step outside to find that it’s over one-hundred degrees! The air is dry and you feel your skin burning as the sun’s rays hit your arm. Your mother rushes outside and tells you to come inside immediately since there’s an ozone alert. As you walk back inside, you watch a garbage truck stop to pick up the trash placed at the end of your driveway. You notice the grayish, black, puff of smoke coming out of the truck rise into the air like a black cloud and the distinct, unpleasant fumes fill your nose as you begin to feel light-headed. You walk into the kitchen and see the water running from the faucet and your mother having no intention of turning it off. You make your way back to your room and pass your sister blow drying her hair which she had been doing for almost an hour already. Your head hits the pillow on your bed, but suddenly you look up and hear a gas-guzzling car make its way up your street. All of these things are signs of global warming. They are signs that Earth is changing, and yet we still do nothing about it. So why should you or I care? We should care because this is where we live and this is where our children will live and even our grandchildren. So as the Earth changes, so should we.

People just don’t care what’s happening to our environment. No one puts out enough effort to make change. It just goes to show how lazy humans have become. There are many simple ways to make changes and save our planet. One of them is to change the way you eat and to eat organic food instead of chemically-processed food. Though it may not sound simple or appetizing, eating organic food is healthy for you and the environment. Eating organic food is better for our environment because chemically-processed food, which a majority of people eat, is grown with pesticides and other harmful chemicals to our environment. Pesticides are poisonous and may be linked to some cancers. As pesticides are sprayed on crops, such as fruits and vegetables, they become a part of Earth’s atmosphere and soil. Eating organic food is a great way to help you and the environment stay healthy.

When you drink a can of soda, do you recycle when you’re finished drinking it or do you just throw it in the trash? A lot of people recycle paper materials, plastic containers, and aluminum cans. Thus, recycling is another good way to be “green” and help keep our environment clean. Recycling reduces the amount of waste in our landfill and when we recycle we can reuse things over and over again. Since a majority of people do not take the time to recycle, there should be required recycling especially in schools. I know this from experience because my school had a pop party for students who had achieved a recommended goal in our school and there were tons and tons of kids just throwing away pop cans when they were done drinking. I kept thinking how the soda cans could’ve been reused if they were recycled. The reason for this is because there are no recycling bins in our cafeteria and our school only requires classes to recycle paper. I believe it is time for our schools to require recycling bins in the cafeteria and other appropriate places for recycling. If your school doesn’t already have recycling bins in your lunch room, you should ask the student council what they think and if they can help make the change. If everyone helps, change can happen.

Everyone has to take a shower. There’s no doubt it’s just part of healthy hygiene. However, the amount of time you take in the shower is a problem. Some people take up to an hour in the shower. Think of how much water is wasted during that period of an hour, when in reality, a five to ten minute shower is just enough time to wash your hair and clean with soap. A way to fix this is to take shorter showers. If you notice that someone in your family is taking a long time in the shower, talk to them and explain to them how taking shorter showers is a good way to conserve our water resources.

Usually when people take showers or baths their hair gets wet. A lot of people dry their hair using a blow dryer, but think about it. If someone blow-dries their hair every day, that’s a lot of energy wasted. Now imagine millions of people blow-drying their hair every day. Instead, people could let their hair dry on its own. Though, some people take showers in the morning before they go to school or work and don’t have enough time to wait for their hair to dry. To fix this they could take a shower the night before so their hair has enough time to dry and they don’t have to use the blow dryer the next morning.

Probably one of the biggest problems in our environment is carbon pollution. Hybrid cars are becoming more and more popular which can reduce carbon pollution in the atmosphere. Another way to reduce carbon pollution is don’t use the car when you don’t need to. Riding a bike is good exercise and doesn’t require the use of carbon energy from cars. And, so is walking. It’s a win-win!

Change is something we all need to make happen. If we don’t contribute to change, global warming could get worse. It’s easy to make change if all of us try. No one is perfect, but the way we go about our daily living really needs to change in order to live in a better environment. We can’t change the past, but we can try to change the future.