Addie Woltil

The cities and the skyscrapers dull in comparison to the mountains and valleys of Earth.

The irrevocable eloquence of nature has been something that I’ve always admired.

I remember soaring through the air when I was eight on my neighbor’s tire swing, looking up at the light ardently filtered through the vivaciously green leaves and wondering if life could ever be better. I thought every green, red, orange, and yellow hue the leaves took on was the most gorgeous thing on the planet.

I remember when I was six, and I founded a bug club with my friends for the sole purpose of saving (capturing) and relocating (moving three feet) every bug in my near vicinity. I convinced my parents to buy a bug-capturing set, and I even bought a t-shirt with a bug design to wear at all of the club meetings. I was assured that I could never lose compassion for a living thing and vowed then to become a zoologist.

I remember when I was eleven, and I learned the effect that cattle farming had on the rainforests. From then on, I was absolutely, 100% sure that we wouldn’t make it to 2050 with the state of the environment. I was then a vegetarian for six months before I remembered how much I liked ground beef and swiftly gave up.

From a young age, I have had a pure, unbreakable affinity for nature and all of its creations. Even though I had a hatred of wasps and an immense fear of butterflies, I never once doubted that I would always be trying my absolute hardest to save it. However, in the past few years, my love and compassion have slipped.

I ceased to look for my formerly essential prerequisite that the brands I bought from supported the environment; I no longer stopped to pick up every piece of trash I saw littered across the ground, and at a certain point, I stopped caring. 

Maybe it was one too many statistics and graphs telling me I was born into a world that was doomed from the beginning, or maybe it was that I simply lacked the time, energy, and self-restraint that was required to truly make a difference. It’s hard to feel like what I do matters when it seems like no one around me is trying.

I could decrease my carbon footprint, but what difference does it make if celebrities and commercial airlines are pumping out thousands of tonnes of CO2 every day?

I could go vegetarian again, but what difference does it make if my family purchases the same amount of meat? 

I could pick up every piece of trash I see, but what does it matter if every other person is dropping five times more than what I’m picking up?

I know everyone always says that one person can make a difference, or I can be the change I want to see in the world, but it feels impossible to have the weight of the world on my shoulders when it feels like no one else cares. So it seems like that is what I’ve resorted to: not caring. 

It’s a lot easier to ignore issues than face them head-on, and it’s so much easier to pretend I’m not responsible for everyone else than to fight to make a change. I want to try, but I’m afraid.

Afraid that it’s too late, afraid that I am nowhere near enough to tackle a problem as large as this, and afraid that I will again slip into the repeated pattern of carelessness.

We are all careless people, but only some are self-aware. I wish to be the change that will let the leaves keep their perfect hue and the change that will let my little sister grow up with the same pristine view of mother nature that I once held. 

So I will try my best to make ten-year-old me proud and ensure that some butterfly around the world will be able to flap its wings and make another little girl just like me care just a little bit more.