Imagine by Ilona

Imagine by Ilona - February 2024 Scholarship Essay

Imagine the Empire City engulfed by ochre-colored smoke, smoke so thick that the towering skyscrapers are indiscernible from just across the Hudson. Imagine a tropical storm off the coast of Mexico turning into a category 5 hurricane in just 12 hours, ravaging the Southwest coast, destroying livelihoods, and taking lives. Imagine floods so powerful that they obliterate two massive dams in Libya, killing thousands, displacing thousands more, and rendering entire cities uninhabitable.
It should not be too difficult to imagine those scenarios as they have all occurred within the last year. If I attempted to list all of the natural disasters that occurred in the last few years, I would greatly exceed the space allotted for this essay. Having said that, rising global temperatures in recent years have created our new reality: increased likelihood and severity of storms, droughts, wildfires, and other natural disasters in all regions of the world. My adolescent years happened to coincide with these years of intense weather events and opened my eyes to the gravity and inevitability of climate change. As an adolescent, I also felt (and still feel) helpless to stop what seemed to be an unstoppable chain of events that would ultimately lead to the end of humanity as we know it. I felt as though my hours picking up trash or diligently sifting through my recycling were only barely scratching the surface of what needed to be done. Hearing about these events and seeing them on the evening news every day changed my perspective from one of naïve optimism to one of exigent realism. This change in my thinking is also what motivated me to turn my love for the natural world into a career.
The unfortunate, but inescapable, truth of the matter is that what is done is done – climate change is now thought to be irreversible. Centuries of greed and societal apathy towards the warning signs of environmental degradation are finally culminating in irreversible ruination. Furthermore, countries that are nonparticipants in industrialization are finding themselves at the mercy of more developed countries, unfairly and monumentally affected by their actions. Even if every country in the world agreed to make complete turnarounds with regards to energy usage and sustainability, we would still be unable to completely reverse the damage we have done.
Consequently, our only way forward is to prolong the worsening of the situation and help preserve the Earth so that it can support future generations. The best way to do that is addressing large-scale issues through legislation focused on smaller scale, though still wide-reaching, solutions. For instance, every structure with a flat roof should be required to have solar panels or foliage (as is already being done in France); every single toilet should be required to be low volume; all new buildings, depending on the region, should adhere to strict building codes regarding natural disaster prevention.
I have yet to decide whether I would like to make my contribution to the environment as a part of the political world, creating the legislation that the earth craves, the legal world, defending and upholding the legislation against those who seek to abuse it, the world of engineering, designing innovative solutions that promote sustainability, or a world I have yet to dream of. Regardless of what path I choose, I am determined to be part of the vanguard of environmental preservation and sustainability.