What Outrages You?

 I am absolutely outraged when people don't care about the environment, or worse, when they spite it. It seems that there are a good many people out there who think that they are above environmental issues or that they're not affected by it. This just blows my mind. Every single person lives on this Earth--it's the only thing that we all share. If we continue living the way that we are living now, we'll run out of natural resources very quickly. I am so frustrated when I see someone throw away a plastic bottle or a can or a stack of papers, and when I remind them that those can be recycled, they either say, "it doesn't matter" or "it's one bottle, what harm could it do?" While it's so easy to fall into the trap of saying, in a world of seven billion people, throwing away one bottle couldn't have that big of an effect. In a sense that is true, but we must remember Gandhi's quote, which goes something like, "what you do probably won't change the world. But it is extremely important that you do it." Besides all of the benefits of recycling a single plastic bottle, by recycling you're also spreading the message that this is an important thing for everyone to be doing. 

There seem to be very few colleges that ask interesting enough questions in their applications. There are a few that do, however, as if evident from the fact that I actually want to write responses to their questions. Today I'll be writing on two of the short answer prompts that Wake Forest asks in their supplement: 

"What outrages you? What are you doing about it?"

Apathy about the environment won't only increase climate change and over-fish our seas and use all of the freshwater on this planet but will destroy our health as we continue to pollute our air and use toxic materials to make products. This is the only cause out there that affects every person on earth. If we don't do something about it now, it'll soon create terrible destruction.

For all of these reasons and many, many more, I've been an active member of my school's Campus Conservation Corps (CCC) since I was a freshman. I've been president both my junior and senior years, and everyday I spend hours trying to help the club raise awareness around campus and make our school more sustainable. Educating the students is crucial to the success of our cause since we hope that the students will take what they learn home and help their families develop green habits. Being in the CCC has not only allowed me to lead my peers in the cause that is most important to me but is the way that I meet amazing people who are making differences in our school, community, and nation, and I learn so much from these people. I hope to double-major in Environmental Science and Journalism so that I can write about environmental topics and make the cause known.