Contrary to popular belief, the environment can heal itself

It can be depressing to read the news because humans seem to have an obsession with focusing only on the negatives. Wars are raging. Innocent people are dying from Ebola. Terrorists are beheading captured journalists. Jellyfish are even taking over the oceans, destroying the marine ecosystems!

But this way of thinking can lead to people giving up entirely, convinced that there is nothing they can do that will change the current situation of our planet.

The truth is, good things really do happen, and it is important that we embrace them as a source of hope. The past few months, for example, have proven that we can change our bad habits and that environmental damage thought to be irreversible can be healed.

NASA reported that the hole in the ozone layer looming over Antarctica is actually shrinking. This news is monumental since scientists thought that it would take hundreds of years for the damage to even come close to recovering.

The ozone layer protects us from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which leads to skin cancer and dramatic changes in the world’s food supply. This particularly big hole was caused by chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were used in the 1970s by refrigerators and air conditioning systems. Considering how many countries used air conditioning, a huge number of CFCs were released.

Luckily scientists around the world caught the problem in time, and in the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the world agreed to phase out CFCs. Since then, the hole has been decreasing in size at a rate that suggests that it will be back to the size it used to be by 2050.

Wait … the world agreed on something and it worked? As cliché as it sounds, the Montreal Protocol proves that if everyone works together, we can make a difference. Yes, humans have screwed up royally, but we can fix many problems. And it is not too late.

Encouraged by NASA’s discovery, 120 UN countries met on Sept. 23 in New York City to discuss the carbon emissions. Demanding that the meeting be as effective as possible, about 400,000 people joined together in New York City for a 4-mile march.

It’s good to know that average citizens have realized that global warming is a problem and support doing something about it. And that march was just one out of 2,646 other events that took place around the world. Now that’s what I call working together!

So now that we know that the environment can heal itself, and that hundreds of thousands of others are on the right side of history, there’s no excuse to sit around doing nothing.

Let’s pick up where we are now and do something about our world’s current condition. Working together, we can ensure the world will be beautiful for the generations to come. Now that would be a great news story.