Kyla Scott   The Fight For Our Planet

Our earth is a beautiful place and we as a whole have become much more aware of our planet as time has gone on. The U.S. in particular has broken all kinds of ground in renewable energy and easier transportation, but our neglect up to this point has caused major harm to our earth. We see these negative affects in biodiversity, mass extinctions and the most famous one global warming. We as an American people are giving a hard shove towards disaster with simply not wanting to change.

 While the U.S. is a major power and has created all kinds of savvy ways to improve the environment we are not able to touch those frontiers because we are stuck in our way of life. Americans are major consumers used to all the trappings of life. While developing countries can build an environmental friendly society from the ground up we have to replace our old way of life, and as the saying goes it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I belive that we the people do want to improve our environment, but there are plenty of the 1% who are just a little to greedy to change.

The U. S. by itself, of course, is not the main cause for all of the problems we have experienced in past years. China has takes the cake for the country with the worst smog pollution. Smog in China is so bad that the Chinese government has begun to take drastic measures to save the Chinese lung. The government has started to shoot jets of water 2000 feet into the air to dispel smog, but to know avail. While Americans are far from the idea of choking when you walk outside with our current life styles we are well on the way to self destruction. The release of sulfur dioxide into our air by industry is

almost unreal. That's right America smokestacks are killing our air forcing plants to work 3x as hard to create the air we breath. We have tried to put our best foot forward with innovative new energy supplies besides the terrible energy plants, such as: solar panels, and wind turbines, but it is just not enough. Energy plants still produce over 70% of our electricity off of coal and fossil fuels, causing some bad breathing problems for America. At times our situations seems terrible, and some times it is. America has destroyed enough of our forest to have to come to a ultimatum. In America we use this method of cutting down trees and it is called clear-cutting. We try to stay above the fray but we have fallen short. While there is such thing as re-planting trees once they have been cut down we do not always practice what we preach. Soil erosion is also caused by clear cutting a large forest of trees. In Texas we all know what soil erosion cause, mud slides when it actually decides to rain and those aren't very good either. Of course, again America is not the worse when it comes to bad behavior, in China they do not even have air quality laws, in India they do not have a set up system of trash pick-up, and in Africa the government is just to care about their people much less their environment.

I hope in the near future the world as a whole comes to a head and realizes we can't breath money, so when all the trees are gone we won't, we can't make soil as rich as the Amazon so when the Amazon is gone so will over 1/3 of the worlds species, and we won't survive on the surface of the earth without the Ozone layer so when it is gone we will go with it. While America has broken many innovative frontiers in other fields we are forgetting the one field that matters our earth.