This summer, I was lucky enough to be able to travel throughout Europe and expose myself to new cultures, languages, food, and adventures. One of the countries I visited was Switzerland. Switzerland was an amazing experience and the country was absolutely gorgeous. One of the activities we did were going on top of Mount Titlis. On the top, we were able to play in the snow and go tubing down the mountain. When we were there, I learned something that took me by shock- because of climate change issues, sometimes the Swiss people have to import snow to the mountain for people to enjoy because there's not enough snow on the top anymore.
I always knew climate change was happening but it didn't hit me this hard till I saw it with my own eyes. I've always seen it on social media that we need to save our planet because of all the drastic changes our planet is going through. But, when I saw it happen directly around me, it was like a whole new moment of realization that I've never faced before. The fact that they had to import snow almost more than 10,000 feet high because it's still not cold enough was crazy to me. It all came down to climate change and how there are so many things contributing to that and not enough action is being taken to do so.
Another insane thing was that to keep whatever snow they have on the mountain from melting, they had to have special, extremely expensive sheets of "cooling blankets" to cover the snow and keep it cold. This stopped the snow from melting even though you would think that 10,000 feet high would be a nice, cold environment for there to be snow and not have to take these extreme measures.
Seeing this happening with my own eyes made it even worse. It made me realize that all the thousands of people who go as tourists, the people who work there, the people who live there know about these problems that climate change is causing to the mountains and the area- but no one is doing anything drastic to help this. No one, not only the people there, but everyone around the world, acknowledges this problem enough to make any kind of positive changes to help alleviate this problem.
This is our planet. Our home. We can't also be the ones to destroy our home either. There's always going to be small things we can do together to make the situation better. You can always use less paper, try to not rely on automobiles or any pollution releasing mobiles for transportation. This experience was extremely eye-opening and the only thing we can do to help this situation is to do these small, simple actions. People are having to take drastic measures to save what the world came with. To save our nature and the beauty that the world provides us. There might not be a full, holistic solution to completely get rid of the problems that climate change comes with but doing simple actions that take only about a couple minutes out of your day can make a huge difference. You might think that one person's actions can't change the effects of climate change, but if everyone pitches in, the results will be astonishing.
