JEREMY SCHWARTZ

My primary motivation for joining this challenge is to raise awareness about the human-induced causes of climate change, the mitigation of which is key to reducing this catastrophic crisis. While there are uncontrollable factors (such as the earth's inertia which causes sea levels to continue rising) that prevent us from completely stopping the inevitable damage of climate change, we have the power to mitigate the extent to which climate change increases over our lifetimes, by reducing our human emissions. Many individuals (particularly in developed countries) are ignorant of their reliance on the energy grid to sustain the habits of their daily lifestyles, a community that I was once part of. Before I became educated on the impact of daily activities on climate change, I often spent my days by playing video games for hours, showering for extended periods of time, and leaving lights on for a while, as they brought me satisfaction and comfort. When I was 16, I realized how much energy I spent simply by turning on a microwave every day, which led to a series of discoveries about the amount of emissions that came from the activities I indulged in every day. As these discoveries weighed on me, I felt a strong sense of shame over the longevity of my harmful activities, guilty for not looking up this information further. Over the last couple years, I have recognized my past patterns in the activities of my friends and other peers, as they do things such as taking lengthy car rides and overusing their electronic devices, two energy-wasting activities that are heavily normalized by society. While quite a few of them ignored my warnings on the impact of their behavior on climate change, I was able to convince a few of my peers to reconsider their daily activities, connecting with them through mutual concern over the potential of climate change in future decades for us and younger generations. This moderate success has given me hope that I can be of assistance to the climate change movement, by persuading others around me to find more energy-efficient ways to spend their days through open dialogue and understanding. This is a picture that I took at the ancient site of Olympia in Greece, showcasing the ruins of a once-great Peloponnesian town with bricks that are thousands of years old. To me, these bricks symbolize a certain resilience in face of a decline that has gone on for millenniums, a resilience that was only made possible through a long-term cultural preservation of the site enforced by human beings. Since we often think about how the climate crisis will drastically change our lives in the next decades, imagine how it will affect human nature in 2,000 years. Life will certainly become more difficult to sustain in context of blazing heat and less land from sea rise, but that does not mean that everything we currently value will be completely lost in time. With effort in persuading others to limit their daily human emissions, our small efforts may come together to assist in preserving various aspects of life and geography in spite of a warming climate. Whether it is successful or not, we owe it to the future of humanity to try.