Howard High School-10th grade

Why We Should Love & Care for Our Planet Essay 

The Earth is 4.543 billion years old. It has gone through many changes. It started from dust and now it’s the beautiful planet that we know now. This beautiful planet has a lot of diversity of plants and animals, and it is so great that it allows us to live on it. We should all appreciate the Earth for this and show our care for it. But unfortunately, we have not been doing that all over the world. There is global warming, littering, deforestation, and so much more damage to our planet. This isn’t good at all, the damage to our planet will later be damaged to us and our future generations. If we continue this, Earth will be damaged so much that it will be too toxic to live in. This is why we should show our appreciation and take care of the Earth.

We should be taking care of the Earth because we live on it. Humans have been living on Earth for about 190,000 B.C.E. That is a very long time for us and, sadly, we can live on a planet for so long, but we are destroying it. It is not good for us to destroy the only planet that we can live on. Where are we going to go when we cover our planet in liters? Where are we going to go when we are in the air? Am I fully polluted? Where are we going to go when all our trees are gone? We should be thinking of this when we make factories that pollute our air, litter our streets, and cut down all our trees. As people who live on Earth, we need to reverse the damage that has been done to the Earth before it gets worse. 

We reverse the damage that we do by starting with the basic thing, stop littering and picking up trash from the ground. Litter causes land, air, and ocean pollution. We need to get rid of this pollution because not only do we keep our planet clean by doing that, but these pollutants are very dangerous and toxic. The pollutants from the litter can kill plants and animals. As stated by, conserveturtles.org, “Over 1 million marine animals (including mammals, fish, sharks, turtles, and birds) are killed each year due to plastic debris in the ocean (UNESCO Facts & Figures on Marine Pollution). Currently, it is estimated that there are 100 million tons of plastic in oceans around the world.”(Sea Turtle Conservancy, 2022) Plants and animals should’ve been dying from our cause and there shouldn’t be that much litter in the ocean. so it’s best to keep our Earth healthy. To have a healthy Earth, we need to have a clean Earth. Stopping trash from being on the ground is one of the basic ways to keep the Earth clean. With the reduction of litter, we are not only showing our love and care for our planet, but we are also showing that we can reverse the damage we caused. 

Another way that we can care for our planet is the reduction of deforestation. Trees play a very important role in our lives by taking up CO2 and releasing Oxygen for us. When we cut them down, more CO2 gets put out for us to breathe, and breathing CO2 is not good for us. Trees also play a big part in our atmosphere. They remove air pollutants and greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Removing those pollutants and greenhouse gases is important for our atmosphere to remain healthy. With these benefits of trees, we should be reducing the number of trees that we’re cutting. Sure, we do need to cut trees to build our houses, but we don’t need to do it in excessive amounts as we do. The excessive and unnecessary number of trees being cut down is not good at all. Ourworldindata.org states, “Globally we deforest around ten million hectares of forest every year. That’s an area the size of Portugal every year. Around half of this deforestation is offset by regrowing forests, so overall we lose around five million hectares each year.” (Ritchie, 2/4/21, section 14) Cutting half of Portugal’s worth of forest isn’t good and shouldn’t continue. It is also important to replant the trees after cutting them. That way we keep the number of trees in our world relatively the same and regrowing forests are still able to be regrowing forests. and it allows the cycle that trees go through with CO2 and oxygen the same. With the reduction of deforestation, we will be ensured to have healthy oxygen and a healthy atmosphere. 

The final two problems that I want to address to make our planet better are global warming and climate change. People treat these two problems as if they are nothing, but they are very big and they hurt and affect us a lot. These problems are making water a scarcer resource, affecting the way animals must live and survive, changing the weather pattern, and are the main cause of wildfires. None of this is good or natural for us and our planet. These problems are what’s truly going to be the doom of planet Earth. Our climate is very important and should be prioritized by everyone everywhere. One of the main causes of these problems is temperature. It has increased by so much from what it originally was. As shown in the data of the global average surface temperatures from climate.gov shows that the surface temperature went from -0.08 degrees Celsius in 1900 to 0.43 degrees Celsius in 2000 to 1.18 degrees Celsius in 2023. A jump like that is very huge and isn’t good. That means that it has gotten way hotter than it originally was. A rise in heat like this has many bad side effects. As stated by urn.org, “Global warming can result in many serious alterations to the environment, eventually impacting human health. It can also cause a rise in sea level, leading to the loss of coastal land, a change in precipitation patterns, increased risks of droughts and floods, and threats to biodiversity.”(Vol. XLIV, 2007) As shown, these effects are really dangerous and need to be handled. So how do we stop them? We can stop the rising temperatures by reducing the amount of industrialization and fossil fuel usage we have created. Industrialization and fossil fuel usage are the main causes of making our planet so much warmer. This is due to the fact they aren’t natural and they’re non-renewable resources. The emissions that they also produce are very toxic for us. If we stop fossil fuel usage and find clean, natural, and renewable resources, we will be able to reduce global warming and climate change. Global warming and climate change should be everyone’s priority.

With all of the facts, everyone should open their eyes and realize how important Earth is to us and how we are hurting it. We live on, this planet, hurting it will not do it or us any good. We need to prioritize saving our planet before the unnatural changes of our planet get worse and we leave our future generation with nothing. If you find yourself, your family, the people around you, and everyone on Earth important then you should also be addressing these issues because it’s affecting everyone. “The land was not given to us by our parents it was lent to us by our children.-  African proverb. Let’s be proper residents of Earth and bring it back to its former glory of beauty and diversity.