For my final topic, I chose to do the question “How Does Climate Change Impact the Current Generation?” The process of choosing this wasn’t problematic or a difficult process. I am very in tune with myself and I am aware of the things in my life that have happened to me to make me who I am today. I self reflect every night to make sure I know I am being me and like to look inward to make sure I am staying true to who I know I am. I know when I do or say something what drove me to do that whether I look back at it with a positive feeling or negative. Climate change I know is something that always has just been so fascinating to me and I felt like I was more educated then the average teenage about the issue, but still don’t know it all and all the solutions. To actually come up with the full research question not just the topic was a little bit of a longer process.
The research process was a little different for me. When I figured out my research question I was really invested and starting by watching youtube videos and debates, then I had a harder time falling asleep. I think that happened because I was really anxious thinking about how to condense so much information into one project and the facts of what was happening to our world were really devastating and were horrendous to think about in statistics. The first person I really came across with a very political view was Greta Thunberg, she spoke the facts of what we know, and how leaders know all the statistics but justify it by not being real because of the cost so solve the problems at hand. Greta is a 16 year old girl, my age, with Aspergers, which makes it even more amazing that she’s talking about this issue.
Climate change has always been something that appeals to me, interests me and always catches my attention. I have more knowledge on the issue then the most of the people my age yet I always see my peers posting to their stories about it without actually further understanding the issue and it is such a pet peeve of mine. Media is a huge influence to political issues for my generation, they share it and have beliefs based on headlines but not furthering researching for themselves by actually learning about the issues in hand. I want to see how many teenagers are influenced through media, and what they think about climate change and teens perception of climate change being what they think it is vs the reality of it. I feel like the ones who do actually understand climate change and where it stems from knowing that plastic pollution is not equal to climate change will have a lot of fear for the future, giving them anxiety and giving them other mental and physical issues stemming from the “what if’s” of climate change.
I am still in early stages of how I am going to outline this big topic into only three sections. This being such a big, broad topic, it is going to be hard on how to make the subtopics because of how large scale this is on media. For my product I want to make an informative video and interview my friends and peers who are in my generation on what they know/think about climate change, the future of it and what they do to impact it. Doing that is understanding what they know and then I will research the effects it is leaving on our youth and the fears for our future of it.Paragraph
This is an awesome topic because we know that this is a very hot topic right now in the media and we know its affects to the earth, to the oceans and forests, and we know how it is affecting animals and ecosystems, yet we never really step back and think about how its affecting us, the humans. Young people like teenagers are so influenced and affected by the smallest things and we never really have thought about us, the people, in this issue. Climate change as a whole is so much things all put into one big category, it is so complex and such a sad topic that I am so excited to break down and find out the impact it has on my friends and peers.
The first thing I did to help with climate change is eliminate single use plastic in my life. From plastic grocery bags at when I go shopping to bringing my own cut to Starbucks. I educated myself on how much fossil fuel impacts the world in such a negative way, I walk when I can and when it is so far to walk I try to car pool. I think that electric cars are such an amazing creation that could help so much but they are just way too expensive for the average persons income with makes me really upset. The most recent things I have done is make my cycle zero waste, and become vegetarian. I feel more healthy, motivated to start my day and have way more energy from eliminating meat. Educating myself on how much of an impact this really had to climate change scared me and I feel like this was a major step I took in my personal life for my future in so many aspects. Educating yourself in topics like this is key and my goal is to know enough to educate my peers to help them make a difference themselves as well.
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