“Conservation is humanity caring for the future.”
Nancy Newhall
My husband and I dropped our youngest child at college last month, and decided to celebrate this next phase or our lives by taking a road trip. We made our way from North Carolina to Montana, and are surprisingly still speaking to one another. Every single state offered up something astounding. Seeing so much of this beautiful country makes me want to have a conversation about conservation.
Merriam Webster defines conservation as:
- a careful preservation and protection of something; especially: planned management of a natural resource to prevent exploitation, destruction, or neglect
- the preservation of a physical quality during transformation or reactions
I’m not what you would consider an especially outdoorsy person, unless you include having a drink on the porch. But it’s impossible to see the overwhelming natural beauty of our country and not want to preserve it, and all of its creatures, for future generations. Conserving nature and our ecosystem is closely aligned with solving climate change. The rising temperatures caused by burning fossil fuels is damaging to every inch of the natural world.
Climate change has been grabbing our attention recently with extreme heat, storms, and flooding. Meanwhile, our National Parks have been quietly suffering the effects for a while now. Because many of these parks are located in the West and Alaska, they are experiencing even more warming than the country as a whole. Melting glaciers, increases in wildfires, and accelerated sea level rise are some of the many changes taking place in our parks, and each of these has ripple effects on the animals inhabiting them.
What can we do?
Do you love the outdoors and enjoy seeing and experiencing the natural beauty of our country? If these things are important to you, and you feel they are worth conserving, the most powerful tool you have is your voice. Have conversations with other people. Talking about how to protect our Earth is the first step to doing just that.
Let’s do something about climate change. Learn about it. Think about it. Talk about it.