I’ve cared about the environment ever since childhood, when the majority of my days were spent adventuring on the waves and rocks of Waikiki, Hawaii. In a few decades, my homeland might be under water because of sea-level rise. That’s terrifying enough. But climate change is already destroying my new home, right here in California. There’s a lot of things I can do to save this planet, and I’m realizing that one of the most important things is something a lot of us haven’t really thought about: voting.
Today, I live with my grandparents in the vibrancy of Los Angeles’ Koreatown. But even as Los Angeles thrives, the city and the state of California as a whole are becoming increasingly vulnerable to drought. Southern California has to import more than half of its water supply, because our natural resources are not enough to sustain the large populations living down here. Right now, abnormal dryness and drought affect 93% of California's overall population. That is over 34,000,000 people. We are consistently in a varying state of a drought, and it’s only getting worse.
Abnormally dry climates propel severe consequences. In 2017, I survived a two-acre brush fire near the edges of Occidental Campus in northern Los Angeles. It was incredibly frightening to witness such a large fire so close to my campus, and I felt a real fear of wildfires from that point on. Now, wildfires are actually becoming an increasingly likely reality.
Usually when you hear about natural disasters like these, you don’t think that it’s going to happen to you. You think, ‘oh, that happened to someone else’, and disassociate from the events. Climate change and its effects are then compartmentalized into vague, vast, and unrelatable concepts. But the truth is, we are destroying our planet so severely that these disasters are becoming the reality for millions of us around the world.
Since living through the effects of climate change and really educating myself about it, I’ve come to realize just how much I want to prevent it. Whenever I can, I choose to ride my bike for transit. Instead of eating meat, I make the majority of my meals vegetarian and vegan. As the associate director of my college’s food energy and sustainability team, I work to teach and inspire others to develop these individual sustainable practices, too. We host movie nights for students to share movies related to environmental causes, conduct environmental sustainability workshops, and provide students with the tools and resources to grow their own food.
And although it’s important that we make individual efforts to affect systemic change, we also need people who lead that system to support and strengthen our change. Right now, there are a lot of people in our government who have repeatedly sided with polluters and profits over the environment and the people who live in it. When I am choosing which elected leaders to support, I choose the person whose policies will prioritize this planet over polluters. In the same way that we can each minimize our carbon footprint to prevent climate change, each of our choices can give power to those who will do the same.
I’ve been an environmental advocate for a while now. This year, I’m even more than that - I’m picking elected officials who will support pro-climate policies. If you care about the lives of present and future generations, one of the most vital things you can do is to do the same. Our world is counting on you.