Fighting Global Warming through Straw-less Fridays

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Fighting Global Warming through Straw-less Fridays
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Two years ago, I attended a forum on Global warming and climate change near our campus. Back then, however, I only wanted to attend the seminar because our high school instructor says that we could get extra points for doing so. However, as I entered venue I noticed that the event seems to have a lot of attendees, which I initially thought was only for students on our campus. Before the seminar itself, the tons of booths that offer merchandise and stalls that sell food piqued my interest and completely made me forget about the real reason that I’m here. That is to learn more about how our actions, both big and small, contribute to the worsening problem that could potentially erase humans in the near future. After almost an hour walking at the corridor, I saw throngs of people going into the auditorium. As I followed them, I quickly realized that the talk is already ongoing and that almost everyone in this big but cramped room is persistently listening to what the speaker has to say. Although I didn’t pay much attention at first, the surprising calmness of the crowd and their inclination to participate in the activities being instructed by the speaker made follow him too. In one of these activities, he instructed all of us to shut our eyes, while he is making us visualize the very specific details of our daily activities, such as the utensils that we use when we eat, the amount of candy wrapper that we dispose, and even the number of papers that we utilize to write our own essays. As this goes on, he reached a point where he asks all of us to close our eyes and raise the hands of people who use “more than two plastics straws a day”. As he instructed us to open our eyes, I was astounded as more than half of the participants are still holding their hands up. People of any age, ethnicity, and Socio-economic status have had their hands raised up like a scene that I only saw in the movies. Immediately afterwards, he told us that an Average American would use about 38,000 straws between the age of 5 to 65, and that every day, almost 500 million drinking straws are being used. Adding to the fact plastic straws take up about 200 years before it decomposes, I realized that what we take for granted, is not something that we should take lightly.
In the next parts of the activity, other speakers went up the stage and talk more about the worsening conditions of our planet. There are even portions when the audience were asked to share their own stories and strategies on how to lessen their own carbon footprints. This, for me, has been unique for its seems like being in a therapy session, where there are hundreds of people and that all of them could participate in one way or another. Nevertheless, what I realized by the end of the seminar is that ever since a lot of these people have not realized that Global Warming is real, and that it would severely affect our planet in the long-run. What’s worse is that the very fact that almost every time that it snows, some people posits statements such as “If Global Warming is real, then why is it sn...