Reflection

Reflection

I remember growing up in love with the blue skies and smooth air that occupied the land outside my home- the clouds were white and the wind crisp like a linen taut over the hill’s sweet yellow grass. But one cool night I went to sleep and I woke to our red California hills on fire, the sky alive and bleeding. The fire chased my family down the mountains- 4.3 million acres of California burned in 2020 alone. There was no rain that season. This digital painting was inspired by the red sky and the heat that came with the california wildfires of 2020. Fortunately, nothing of mine was lost, though thousands of other families can't say the same, over 10 thousand houses burned. The dry grass and cracking dirt spread the fire quicker than it could be contained, and by the way things are going, such conditions will only worsen. These massive fires released 127 million megatons of greenhouse gasses, and PM 2.5 emissions surged up to 38 times their average. At the beginning of the year, I could only wonder if anything I, a singular sixteen year old girl, could do would matter. However, as time wore on, the more I learned, I was inspired. I joined my school's green team, cut down on my meat consumption, and have limited my yearly purchases of non necessities. There are many issues with our modern world, politically, economically, and socially, but none of that will matter if we don’t have a world at all. In 2020 my whole world was on fire, and there was nothing I knew how to do that could have put it out. I don’t want to be complicit, especially when no one has to be.