The world seemed to stop when the coronavirus began to spread across the globe.
Now that this crisis seems to be slipping away, another global crisis that seems to have slipped the minds of many has arisen with a new vengeance — climate change.
Ironically enough, The Plainsman Editorial Board was planning to do an environmental edition a couple months before the pandemic hit.
Now that we have lived through one global crisis we realized waiting another day could be a mistake.
According to NASA’s “Climate Change: How Do We Know?”, trends of global warming have been documented since the 1940s. While there have been movements around environmentalism since, this crisis continues to be something we collectively tune out.
Climate change is a big scary issue and the purpose of this edition isn’t to scare people into action.
It’s to call to light this issue we ignore and to showcase how people are helping and how we as individuals can be a part of the solution.
So as you read through this edition we would like to encourage you to take a risk.
Read these stories and let them affect you.
As students, we have a habit of coping by being apathetic. There is already so much we need to worry about, so much that demands our attention at all times. The Earth is already here, it already takes care of us. So, having to muster up the energy to care for the Earth can feel like another chore — just another thing on our list to worry about.
However, we need to feel those not-so-pretty emotions and use them as fuel. While it is easier to distance our emotions so that we can focus on solving the problem, what this problem needs is for people to sit with it and feel the effects.
From there, the drive we need to keep going with true action can be guided from care.
We understand we cannot always open ourselves up to empathy around global issues.
There is always so much happening, and all at once. However, we can cultivate our feelings and direct it to the right place. We can focus on the one big thing we can do, instead of the things we can’t do.
And in that same vein, we can also respect the things that others can do, because we all have different abilities, resources and access when it comes to how we can contribute to caring for the Earth.
We can’t, or shouldn’t, shame people for not being able to make environmentally-conscious changes in their lives.
So there are three things we hope our readers will take away from this edition: care for yourself, care for others and care for the environment. We hope this will inspire you to be part of the change for a healthier planet.
A brighter, cleaner, healthier future can be ours — we just have to leave our bad habits behind.
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