written by Tessa Scott, Year 7
As you drive to school in your car, spouting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, you watch as the trees on your street are felled for timber.
At the lights, a man with a cardboard sign and ragged clothes begs you for food. Your mum winds up the window and keeps on driving.
At school, you learn about semicolons and commas, algebra and physics, but you wonder why you need any of it.
Morning tea. You promptly forget everything you just learnt.
Back in class, you learn about sustainability, which could be used to change the world, but why would you want to do that? Famine, refugees and climate climate change don’t affect you. Do they?
At lunchtime, you chat to your friends while eating your Nutella sandwich, unaware of the slaves younger than you who are forced to harvest the hazelnuts and cocoa beans, so exhausted they could fall down dead any second. You then finish with a packet of cashews, probably picked and shelled by unpaid women or
prisoners, the hands of which will be ruined for life by the toxic oils and acid encasing your tasty snack. You then throw out the rest of your lunch, contributing to the tonnes of food waste dumped every year, and go to play soccer with a ball sewn by girls who must work, or die of hunger.
After school, you go home, feeling sorry for yourself that you aren’t allowed to go to the dairy like the rest of your friends. The fish and chips you have for dinner probably wouldn’t taste as good if you knew of the fishing methods used that are destroying the ocean floor, or that the plastic wrappers thrown into the ocean could well be part of what you’re eating right now.
Dumping the rest of your tea in the trash (again), you go to bed, blissfully unaware of how messed up the world has become.
We live on a broken Earth.
(c) Write On and Tessa
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