“What does sustainability mean to you?”
I remember hearing about the term ‘Climate Change’ from my Dad when he would watch the news. I never really paid much attention to it then because I thought it was just another term he wanted me to add to my vocabulary bank. In Hong Kong, where I grew up, no one talked about the environment or the importance of sustainability. No one knew what global warming was doing to the world since it hadn’t been prominent when it first appeared. I hadn’t heard of the word ‘sustainability’ until I moved to San Francisco for college. What’s crazy to me is that even now when natural disasters are getting more and more disastrous, like the Los Angeles wildfires, frequent heatwaves, and floods, people still aren’t motivated to take action. When will people start taking it seriously?
The time when I started to understand the calamity that our actions have brought us into was after listening to Greta Thunberg’s speech during the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. She is a Swedish environmental activist who started the School Strike for Climate. She scolded government officials and past generations for putting the burden on young people to solve the problems that they have created. Something she said that stuck with me was, “how dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.” In other words the message she’s trying to send is that we cannot just keep living the lives we are living; that is the whole problem. If we don’t do something, greenhouse gas emissions will skyrocket, and global warming will hit records we could have never even imagined. Who knows what the end of the world would look like? I sure don’t want to know. You may think this is an over-exaggeration but trust me, we have no idea what is coming.
When we say that it’s time to do something about it, we don’t just refer to governments and countries, we also mean you. Your daily habits are also a contributing factor to climate change, so here are some examples on what you can do to be more sustainable and lower your carbon footprint:
- Cut down the amount of meat you eat. Fun fact: beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of edible protein than common plant proteins, such as beans (World Resources Institute)
- Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle! Make it a habit to use reusable bags and reusable bottles, reduce single-use plastics, and recycle all cans and bottles as well as clean paper and cardboard!
- If you are able to compost, do it!
- Quit smoking! You are harming yourself, the people, and the environment around you! According to the Truth Initiative, discarded cigarette butts carried by runoff flow to drains and from there to rivers, beaches, and oceans. Organic compounds from cigarettes seep into aquatic ecosystems, becoming acutely toxic to fish and microorganisms!
- And there’s so much more that you can do! Do research and educate yourself on how to be a sustainable being!
Many people still wonder why it is important to recycle and compost. Why is it so crucial that we be as sustainable as we can? Well, the truth is, if we want a future, this is what we have to do. Global warming is real. Climate change is happening. With President Trump withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, our climate goals will unfortunately be pushed back. That’s why to compensate for the hard work that has been lost, we must come in unity to reduce our carbon emissions. Just as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states, by committing to reducing waste and sorting your trash properly, you can “prevent pollution caused by reducing the need to harvest new raw materials, reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global climate change, help sustain the environment for future generations, and reduce the amount of waste that will need to be recycled or sent to landfills and incinerators.”
Taking action and knowing that I am doing my best on my part to keep this world healthy makes me feel accomplished. Of course, I wasn’t always a sustainable person with green habits. To this day, I still make mistakes and am trying to get rid of habits that I am not proud of. But I am trying. It’s indeed hard to stop something that you have been doing for your whole life, but as long as we give it a shot, we’ll be one step closer to our climate goal than we were yesterday. The photo above shows a few of my fellow members from my organization ECO in high school. We are holding an award after winning the best pitch for a sustainable future, and by winning we received 10,000 HKD to make our pitch a reality. That’s how ECO came to life. It was a green organization piloted by a couple of college students hoping to educate kindergarteners on how to be sustainable citizens. We taught them how to plant, how to sort their trash, how to substitute green habits into their lives, and so much more. Our thought was that if they start young, it’ll be second nature to them when they grow older. Unfortunately, ECO disbanded after we graduated since we all went our separate ways. However, my journey of sustainability didn’t end there.
Now, I am a Sustainability Specialist at the University of San Francisco working to spread awareness about taking action and making a difference in this world when it comes to being sustainable. I also recently got accepted as a researcher in the environmental chemistry department. So we’ll be looking into the impact of greenhouse gas emissions in the real world, collecting data and actual statistics to show the damage that has been done to our precious planet. If you asked me, “what does sustainability mean to you?”, I would say, “it means everything. As the younger generation, our future is on the line. The time to change is now. Like Greta Thunberg said, ‘right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.’ The question is, are you in?”
References
Waite, R., Searchinger, T., Ranganathan, J., & Zionts, J. (2022, March 7). 6 pressing questions about beef and climate change, answered. World Resources Institute. https://www.wri.org/insights/6-pressing-questions-about-beef-and-climate-change-answered
Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). EPA. https://www.epa.gov/recycle/reducing-and-reusing-basics
Staff, N. (2019, September 23). Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s speech at the U.N. climate Action summit. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit
Tobacco and the environment. Truth Initiative. (n.d.). https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/harmful-effects-tobacco/tobacco-and-environment#:~:text=Cigarette%20butts%20cause%20pollution%20by,toxic%20to%20fish%20and%20microorganisms.
