In my senior year of high school for an environmental science course, I had to find, read and report on an environmentally related article I found. I cracked open a new National Geographic magazine and found an article entitled “Last Ice”. The article detailed how the ice caps of the North Pole are melting at a rapid rate and how the formerly large sheet of ice could be reduced to a small island of ice by 2050. The article featured majestic photos of polar bears, narwhals, and other polar animals of the sort and after each photo, the article would describe how these animals are being endangered by the rapidly declining ice and global warming. Needless to say, the article was sad, but for me personally, the article just broke me. I sat in my dining room crying and thinking of every way that the way I lived my life was killing these majestic creatures and thinking of how if nothing were done by the middle of my life so much of the polar region could be gone and so much of the world’s wildlife extinct. I tried to put my devastation into words for my teacher and that only brought more anger and tears. At that point, I decided that I wanted to be a part of the solution. I didn’t feel like I could sit idly by as humans wrecked the beautiful natural world, and from that point I’ve stressed being environmentally friendly in my own life and in what I choose to become later in life. It’s a lot of why I’m becoming an ecological engineer, to try to be a part of the solution and help save the world from the death grip that climate change holds over the natural world as we know it.