Our Earth
(Original in Japanese)

Miyuki Horii
(Age 11, Japan <Living in USA>)
Pleasant Hill School, Illinois

What are the problems facing the world today? There are many, but among them, I am especially concerned about global warming and about children in Africa.

If global warming progresses further, there will be some serious problems. First of all, the sea level will rise. If the sea level rises, low-lying lands, such as the Netherlands, will be submerged. There will also be a significant change in the way the rain falls. It is said that areas that receive a small amount of rainfall will have less rain, and on the other hand, areas that receive a large amount of rainfall will have more rain in the future. Climate changes like this will have grave influences on agriculture, forestry, and fishery.

Global warming will affect Africa as well. Even now, people living in Africa are suffering enough. I read a book titled Totto-Chan’s Children, and I learned for the first time how much African people are suffering. Africa is facing serious food shortages due to droughts, and there are many people who do not have enough to eat. The quality of available food is not good either, and many children are malnourished. Water is muddy, and when children drink the muddy water and become sick, they cannot receive sufficient treatment because there are not many hospitals. Innumerable people die through lack of proper medical treatment. So, if global warming progresses further and plants stop growing due to less rain, what will happen to Africa?

Despite this fact, people in the United States where I live use a lot of electricity as if they do not care. In summer, schools and supermarkets are air-conditioned excessively. Americans seem to be fine, but it’s unbearably cold for me, so I need to carry around a jacket. Also, people in the United States do not recycle things as much as they do in Japan. Paper and plastic bottles are the only things they recycle. In my school, we have one day every month when we recycle as much trash from school lunches as possible. My class examined things that were recycled through this program and we found out that many aluminum lunch plates were recovered. It made us realize that our school had been discarding such a large amount of aluminum. If all the schools in the United States are doing this, they are wasting a large amount of aluminum that is essentially recyclable.

My idea to solve this problem is to sell this aluminum to companies that buy metals for recycling. Instead of collecting aluminum only once a month, we should do it everyday so that we can recycle more aluminum. If it becomes successful, I think we can make a difference in preventing global warming even if only slightly.

Also, we can help children in Africa with the money we get from recycling. In Africa, thousands of children lose their lives everyday because they cannot afford to buy a vaccine that costs only 20 yen. The amount of aluminum we collect in our school is worth about 5 dollars a day, so if we collect it everyday, it will be 900 dollars a year. If we buy vaccines with that amount of money, we can save as many as 4,500 lives. It’s scary to think that so many lives are being lost because we are not taking action.