Last term, I was fortunate enough to take an environmental science class. Although the class was a part of the FIG I was in and had no interest in majoring in the field, the class provided a much needed dose of reality for me. While I was aware of most of the global crises occurring in our world today, the class covered almost every problem in just a few weeks. As you can imagine it was very overwhelming and for the first time I realized the serious danger humans were putting themselves in. Especially with global warming, people are very blind to what they don’t want to hear, but the facts are real and global warming doesn’t seem to be a concern to anyone.

I relate the class very much to the story “Diary of An Interesting Year”, by Helen Simpson. For most of the class, we focused a lot on only the facts of what was happening and did very little on thinking of possible solutions. The students even addressed this issue to the teacher because it was depressing everyone. My teacher responded with saying that yes we were focusing on only the problem, but felt that focusing more on the problem would give us a greater insight into the significance of finding the solutions later. Much like in the “Diary of an Interesting Year” the whole story is mostly pessimistic. There are unhygienic conditions, society has pretty much collapsed, and many people die in the story. However, in the end the narrator does eventually escape her boyfriend’s murderer and becomes free.

She also wraps her journal in six plastic bags even though she doesn’t think anyone will ever read it. I believe that that ending contained a glimmer of hope in it, not just from the narrator but for the readers as well. The narrator takes extra care into preserving her journal that hints that she herself believes maybe someday someone will read it. Much like my environmental science class, the term was very bleak and filled with despair. However at the end of the term we got to write an essay on how we would fix an environmental problem of our choice. I wrote about the Citarum River, the largest and most polluted river in West Java, Indonesia. It has a huge task of supplying water to the people of West Java for agriculture and drinking water, but is unfit for consumption as it is used for sewerage. I reviewed the issue and planned a program that would help the people integrate a healthy waste system into their province and stop textile factories for using the river as their dumping grounds. My paper was well received by my GTF and in the end it gave me some hope about solving our global issues, much like the ending of “Diary of an Interesting Year”.

Global warming will not be solved with a student paper, but it is still something we can prevent or at least stall for a much longer period of time. We know what is causing it. We know that carbon emissions must be reduced. All we have to do now is think of that solution with the little hope we have left.