Dear President,

My name is Jairo Velasquez. I’m from Peru and I go to Brooklyn International High School in Brooklyn. I’m writing this letter to talk about an issue that influences everyone and is affecting our world, to teach and show the people how the government and individuals can cooperate to protect our global environment.

During this summer 2016, I went to a camp in Maine to stay away from the city for a while, and in this camp I met with people from different countries, from England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and from here in the US. We had an awesome summer. We were living in cabins around trees and a river, we didn’t have electricity, cell phones, not even hot water, but was a really good new experience for us. During the camp we had a day of just talking about important issues that were happening in our world, and one of those issues was the climate change. We were talking about how can we try to show and teach people how to stop it, or at least try to, because we didn’t want the next people that were going to the same camp to see the trees dying or the river dry.

When my teacher this year told me that I have to write a letter to the president about some issues, I was really bored about it, but when she said that we could also talk about the environment or the climate change, that make me change my mind, and that made me focus on things that I like and love: nature, the animals, a sunrise, the ocean, those beautiful things of our world.

During my research, I read 3 articles that called my attention to how we causing the next mass extinction of on the earth, taking the habitats of the animals and making their extinction, especially the big animals like the tiger, elephants, whales and other animals. We have also killed the baiji, a dolphin from the Yangtze River; the river is contaminated and is overfished. And the exploitation of the mineral of the earth is causing fast changes on the weather, making our glaciers melt, and if the glaciers melt, the coast of the countries will disappear because of all the rising water.

To try to stop the sixth mass extinction on earth we will have to be more conservative. I know that sometimes we are too lazy to change our way of thinking or the way we do things, but the change that I’m saying is for the good of everyone. For the good of all the things that we love about mother nature, we have show and teach people what global warming is and what is going on in our world, what destruction we are making. We don’t even know it. There are a lot of people that don't even know what global warming is, they don’t even know what animals are in danger, and won't realize until those animals are extinct.

This is our planet, these are our animals, that is our ocean, this is our culture, these are our friends, this is the place where everyone lives, and we have to take care of it, no matter who you are because we live here and because…this is our home.

sincerely

Jairo Velasquez

References

https://newsela.com/articles/sixth-mass-extinction/id/5272/ 

https://newsela.com/articles/opinion-climate-change-education/id/19361/ 

https://newsela.com/articles/ice-experts-antarctica/id/23247/