Our generation considers the oil spill by the Gulf of Mexico one of the worst environmental disasters caused by man. However, we never considered that the damage on the environment made by that oil spill is far more less than the damage we humans inflict when going through our daily routines.

Modern humans have only been in this earth for about 200,000 years out of the 4.5 billion years of the earth, but our impact in that short amount of time has been devastating. Since the industrial revolution, humans have been pumping so much harmful gases to our atmosphere that we are starting to drive to extinction a large amount of species. A large amount of these species can be found in our oceans. This is because our oceans take in a large amount of the carbon dioxide in the air. The downside of this is that is makes our oceans more and more acidic therefore making survival of marine life very difficult.

In countries like the US, there are some efforts to save animals like the oysters. This is because baby oysters have been having a hard time to grow because the oceans are so acidic that the rate-of-growth of the shells of baby oysters are much more slower than the rate that they dissolve. If we let this acidification of the oceans due to carbon dioxide continue, we will be forced to change our choices of food because of the marine life we will lose.

What is worse is besides our sources of food in our oceans, livestock in the US alone has created major problems to the earth. Cows have been known to let out methane - a gas even worse than carbon dioxide – at insane amounts, which are even bigger than the whole transportation sector of the US.

In the other side of the world, the Chinese government has published a book containing different "Chinese medicines".  There was a decrease in shark populations so they looked for different animals to use. One of the animals in the book published is the majestic manta ray. That is why some many manta rays were being slaughtered in Asian countries like Indonesia for their gills because there were Chinese buyers who would buy them for thousands of dollars. However, the manta ray is now part of the endangered list thanks to a group of people who fought hard to put them on the list. Also, the consumption of Shark's Fin soup has gone down by 70% because of conservation efforts by international groups lobbying against it.

These unsustainable lifestyles of ours have been slowly but surely killing our planet. We have been rapidly increasing global warming and climate change, and with it, the sea level rise. Besides the sea level rise, climate change has also affected the plankton in our oceans, the primary source of breathable air on the earth which supplies us with half of all our oxygen. What makes this hard is that most of us do not care as much for plankton rather than, for example, a monkey, mainly because we cannot even see plankton.  Therefore we do not have a strong emotional connection when we find out what they are dying off. That is why we must do something because "If we lose the small things, everything else fails."  Right now, the effects of climate change has caused the world to lose, more or less, 40% of all plankton.  

We live in a very visual world, that is why we have to do our part in showing others how beautiful the earth is and the species that live in it. We humans have to start appreciating what species we have now, big or small, because "animals are the best works of art, even better than anything Picasso had made." We may think the small things we do like posting about saving the environment, sharing a picture of an endangered animal or putting our candy wrappers will not do much. But we must keep in mind that "every little bit helps."

Mass extinctions have killed almost 90 percent of all species that have lived in our planet most of these are still unsolved. So let's focus on solving them first before creating another one and end up taking away the rights of future generations from enjoying the beauty of the earth and all it has to offer.