Ten years ago, I wouldn’t believe you for the life of me if you told me the sun was going to burn out. If you told me that all continents, including the one we lived on, were on a head-on collision course. If you’d said that Earth might not last another century, I would have laughed. Of course it will. Earth wasn’t my home; it was just all there was. I didn’t think of it as a planet, but as my universe. After all, I was never going to see the real one, was I? Five years later I was skeptical. Grown-ups talked about this thing, global warming, like it was just a bad omen or something.

“It’s all the pollution. You know, from cars and volcanoes and stuff. Not my problem; I recycle.”

I’d heard it all. By the age of thirteen, I knew enough to have nightmares about drowning in my sleep. About the whole earth flooding, or being eaten alive by galactic flames. I know now that the end won’t come as a surprise. Who cares if you recycle? I can see the impact of our habits a little clearer every day. The fumes that melt off asphalt in the heat, the neurotic weather patterns: sun, then rain, then wind. And our forests: dead, crimson twigs, like splashes of blood on the map. And our map is becoming bloodier and bloodier. Pine beetles wreak havoc. Forest fires swallow entire ecosystems and those inhabiting them.

You probably think that kids don’t notice. In the past month there have been three helicopters bearing vibrant red buckets of water outside my window in the morning. Even now, the once heavily-forested heads of our mountains are patchy; carved and splashed with the fatal red. I see them every morning, and wonder where we went wrong. It’s not the same when instead of hiking through lush forests, you’re trekking over hard-packed earth. The sun has become like a light bulb that’s been screwed in too tight. I’ve been told it’s all the holes we’ve punched in the ozone layer. And then I look around me. At kids tossing plastic wrappers over their shoulders and smoking in the parking lot, and I think to myself, which generation is going to be the one to say no?