Our Dying Mother
By Bella Beachler: Staff Writer
The end of the world is near. Stampedes of animals flee the cities toward the unknown. Birds frantically fly across the darkening sky, abandoning any sense of formation, unlike the evenly spaced drones that zoom across the clouds. The sky is turning black, and the clouds are disappearing. Animals flee the ruined forests, running to future habitats that will benefit their offspring better than the decaying ones they were left with. Marine life dies as toxic electronic waste is dumped into rivers, ponds, lakes, and oceans. The coral reefs are destroyed beyond repair, leaving a habitat haunted by the beauty that once was. The darkened air feels thick, muddled with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as they are slowly released. Our mountains and our landscape have vast pits and holes carved deep into their surfaces, pillaged for precious minerals and metals. Our beautiful forests are no longer, trees giving way for more data centers to keep our addiction fueled. Amounts of drinkable water have diminished; the data centers that generate intelligence have used it all up to cool down their overheating systems. Yet humans forge on, their perception of the world muddled because of the weapons of mass destruction we keep in our pockets.
People wander the streets, never seeing how they've betrayed Mother Nature. They walk in circles, unsure of what to do with themselves until their artificial intelligence thinks for them. They forget how they lived before it was created. Beauty was inescapable, and critical thinking was not something valued beyond comparison. Future generations will be left with nothing: Only empty oceans filled with toxins and a ruined earth destroyed because of greed. They do not feel the air suffocating them or the sharp pains of hunger. They do not feel the inescapable feeling of failure or see the world that will never be the same. They refuse to see anything but the world they once had, then lost. They try their hardest to stay ignorant. The atmosphere will not be able to take this kind of damage for long. It has protected this planet for billions of years, yet within the last one hundred it has come to a breaking point. Oxygen leaks out of its unfixable holes, and humans will soon become extinct. Without our layer of protection, which we have taken for granted, the sun will boil us alive. As the ozone steadily depletes, I feel heat from the unshielded sun encasing my every pore, and heating my insides until they boil. I feel excruciating pain in my eyeballs. They start to po-
-I wake up sweat-soaked and hysterical. I stop panicking and calm myself. I slowly realize the nightmare is not my reality, at least not yet. Relief washes over me as I unplug my phone, shut off my alarm, pull up my most-used app, and shoot ChatGPT a quick prompt: What should I do with my day?