Dear Mr. Trump,

As the president for the next four years you have a big responsibility to the environment, because, right now, the environment is at its most vulnerable. I have heard that you don’t believe in climate change. I really hope that isn’t true because the state of our world is in your hands. You have the power to make irreversibly damaging decisions, or you can be the change we need and not only make America great again, but make our environment great again.

The past few years have each been the hottest year on record, and 2015 was the hottest year by the widest margin, not to mention every month this year has been the hottest month on record. The IPCC (intergovernmental panel on climate change) says that climate change is “unequivocal” and “unprecedented”. This means that we have never seen climate change this much this fast, and there is no doubt that it is happening. And guess what, it is 100% anthropogenic, a fancy word meaning human caused. A major cause of the heating of our earth is the concentration of CO2s in our atmosphere. Scientists are concerned that the effects will be irreversible past concentration of 350 parts per million and rights now we are at over 400 parts per million. Although the word taxes may sound scary, a tax on carbon is needed. Carbontax.org describes the carbon tax as “ a fee intended to make users of fossil fuels pay for climate damage their fuel use imposes by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and also to motivate switches to cleaner energy”. I think that sounds like pretty easy and reasonable way to reduce our carbon.

But why should we care if the atmosphere is getting hotter right? I mean, I hate the cold as much as the next guy. What people might not know is that we are currently in a mass extinction and scientists are worried about reaching planetary boundaries. But lets discuss the mass extinction first. Right now we are in the sixth extinction. This is the sixth mass extinction ever in the history of our planet. A mass extinction is characterized by the full wipe out of more than 70% of all species in a short time (thousands of years). The extinction that we are currently in is said to have started at the beginning of the Holocene epoch, other wise known as the epoch where humans started thriving. This extinction is completely human caused. We have caused over 800 known extinctions. Species are going extinct at extreme rates and extinction has sky rocketed recently.

WWF and ZSL produce a report on our current wildlife. From 1970-2010 there was a 52% population decline. This is per species. So lets say there were 100 elephants in 1970, in 2010 there would only be 48 left. But if we break this down, it gets even worse. Terrestrial species decreased by 39%, Freshwater organisms by 76% (freshwater organism were down to 81% in 2012), marine organisms by 39%.

This isn’t just an extinction of species; the current mass extinction we are in is an extinction of entire biomes. They are being wiped out, so if you’re sitting here thinking: “Well this still doesn’t directly affect me, so why should I care?” this is where it starts directly affecting you. If entire biomes (types of environments, i.e. rainforests, deserts, oceans etc) get destroyed, then humans won’t have the things they need to sustain our growing population. Which brings us to our planetary boundaries. If we reach our boundaries it could mean possible famine, loss of clean water, loss of proper sanitation, and a low quality of life (say goodbye to your cozy life style with only #firstworldproblems)

(Some fun facts: temperate rain forests are 90% destroyed, tropical rain forests are 50% destroyed, there is less then 1% tall grasslands remaining, deserts are expanding: in china alone deserts are expanding at an annual rate of 1300 square miles, wetlands are 50% destroyed, in 2003 1/3 of fish stocks crashed, we are 39% over fished, and 29% at the limits of sustainability, yep, that means no more California or spicy tuna rolls. Ready to make some changes yet?)

So what can we do? We can create more national parks, and enforce them. If we don’t enforce national parks people will continue to hunt, fish, log, etc on natural park land making them into paper parks (only a national park on paper and not in practice) unless we have some kind of enforcement on the land. We also need to work with other countries that we share oceans with to make fishing regulations and to stop over-harvesting our resources.

There are a tons of other environmental issues going on that I haven’t mentioned, like the fact that we are using up our non renewable water sources, we’re in a major drought, and a billion other things that I haven’t learned about in the few months that I have been through at college. But that makes me more scared, I am a first semester freshman, I haven’t even reached finals of my first environmental sustainability class, and I’m already panicking over the state of our world. Imagine all the things that are going wrong that I haven’t yet learned about.

Mr. Trump, I am sure you are smarter then a first semester freshman and you can come up with many awesome ways to save our planet. We have all put our trust in you. This is our home, the earth has given us so much, and I don’t want to see her completely destroyed in my lifetime, or at all. All of the issues that I have mentioned are human caused, and therefore can be reversed or stopped by human actions as well. The earth and all the millions of species on it exist for their own reasons; they do not exist just for human use. If you don’t care about issues unless they affect you directly, then realize if we keep draining all the earth’s resources, we will have none left. Please don’t let the earth and everyone living on it down. Make change, “Make the Environment Great Again”.

Sincerely, an Environmental Sustainability major.