PERREAULT Magazine MARCH | APRIL 2016 | Page 29

That’s how we breathe! At an amazing rate, we have lost an amazing amount of our rain forests, we are acidifying our oceans which are the lungs of our planet, we are destroying our coral reefs. We are destroying our environment, species are disappearing at an amazing rate that we have never seen before and we are in this global crisis. We sit here in this beautiful place (gestures around to the creek and trees around us) and people are just walking around and doing their thing and they go to work and have kids and do their family thing –and around us, what we don’t see in the United States is the planet is collapsing! Every living system on our planet is threatened by one thing or another, and if it is not under distress right now, it will be because of climate change.

Climate change threatens PEOPLE. Climate change threatens lifestyles.

Climate change threatens how we get our food, how we drink our water. You can sit and argue all day about whether climate change is real or not, and by the time it gets to your front door it’s going to be too late!! And what we can understand is that NOW is the most urgent time to take action. Because we sit amongst the greatest crisis we have ever faced as a society on this planet, because it is so global, so what better time to be born than now because the people on the planet today get to change EVERYTHING.

We have this opportunity where we can either let things continue on a path and either the planet will die out or humans will. Either way, we lose. We have to realize-what better time to take action than now, because now is when we can make an impact. Before it is too late. It’s not too late-YET- but it will be soon. I really believe it will be too late soon. People ask me what my goal is. I want to pass the planet on to my children better than I found it. I’ve heard that said a million times, but I believe that more than anything. Cause the world I was born into, the world I am living in now sucks. My life is beautiful- I have blessings upon blessings in my life. But the world as a whole is falling apart. And what I want to pass on to my generation, to the next generation, is a world far better than the one I live in right now.

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"Climate change is the most important global issue we face today. It’s not an environmental issue, it is a HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE."

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