Ethan W. Wisconsin

Our Enviroment

Dear Future President...

Our Country has the best Economy in the world, but our environmental situation could use a little work. The U.S is responsible for a lot of the world's solid waste, air, and water pollution, so we need to give our fair share of help to the environmental situation.

Solid Waste

Items like plastic bags and water bottles often find their way to a landfill or they just can't be recycled. If you're lazy, you might find yourself throwing that garbage in your pocket in the bushes at your local park. Using biodegradable materials for such products will lower the solid waste stream tenfold. It also doesn't have to be just the choice for the consumer. Encouraging the use of biodegradables will ensure that biodegradables will be used by consumers. 

Biodegradables have also become much cheaper within the twenty-first century. You can now buy an organic cotton mattress at Wallmart for under $40. So consider going into the environmentalist direction with this problem.

Air Pollution

Global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels has lent a hand in Droughts, melting ice caps, and lesser air quality. Our country is one of the largest consumers of coal and oil in the world which means that we are very much dependent on fossil fuels for electricity. Consequently, this has lead to the global warming crisis we have today.

This has lead to the 6th mass extinction on earth. Shifts in the earth's climate make's environments around the globe unsuitable for the species who live there to continue living there. Global warming has also increased the amount of forest fires around the world, which leaves many forests lifeless in the aftermath.

Water Pollution

Solid waste isn't just on land! garbage in the ocean collects in massive piles of plastic and other waste in islands that can be tens of miles long. These large islands of trash are a huge hazard to the local wildlife. animals such as turtles often mistake this trash for food, choke on it, and die because of it. Also, Water polution isn't limited to just the Ocean. The fairly recent surge in hydrofracking has lead to many cases of groundwater contamination from leaks in the wells. Of course, these instances aren't very common, but they shouldn't be happening at all. These rare instances cause vegetation to die in the area around contaminations and cause tap water to be unsuitable for drinking\using.