A Future Less Vibrant
Millwood, NY
2019, Senior, Film
Reflection
When we think of the past, we usually think of a world less colorful than the one we live in today. We think of faded black-and-white photographs and dreary cities made up entirely of brown and grey tones. Meanwhile, color can be found nearly everywhere in our present–everything from our clothes to our buildings to the Internet adds color to our lives and makes the world we live in today seem almost like an entirely different Earth from the one our grandparents lived on. When we look into the future, what most people see is just a growth and continuation of the colors we see today. What struck me, however, as I was researching the bleaching of the coral reefs, is that the promise of color in our future is rapidly becoming more and more uncertain. As the pace of climate change and global warming accelerates, hundreds of colorful ocean species are suffering, and if nothing is done to stop this, many of the beautiful colors in our world will be gone. Many ocean ecosystems are dependent on color for survival. The clownfish, for example, is able to camouflage itself from predators in the colorful tentacles of an anemone, and so if the anemones were to bleach, it would likely die as well. If the symbiotic relationships between enough marine species fail, our ocean will become colorless and lifeless. Our future is fading, and every time a coral reef dies our ocean loses more of its color. We need to preserve the vibrancy of our precious ocean, so that we, and those that follow us, will be able to see its beauty as we have had the honor of doing.