As you rush through the airport and hop on your flight, the only thing running through your mind is going over your travel plans over and over again and hoping you will land early. You sit back, try and claim your space as your pushy neighbor elbows you ten times, and attempt to distract yourself. You try to sleep, read a magazine, listen to music, or even look out the window. As you look out the window you stare off into the puffy clouds and get lost into deep thought. A few hours later before you know it you are landed and off to go about the rest of your day. The only thing you will remember about that flight is the shrieking baby, the turbulence, or how tired and jet lagged you feel. No matter what you did on your flight and no matter what you remember about it, the truth is you are missing a major, highly important factor that you failed to notice while in the air.
Traveling is very important to the human soul. It broadens your horizons, educates your mind, it leaves you with lasting impressions. You may travel to visit certain places or people or to simply see the world. While flying to see the world next time or to see anything, I want you to see the world out of your plane window. You will notice if flying over land that all you see is buildings. Buildings all different shapes and sizes but they are covering the vast majority of the areas. You see lights shining off rooftops of those buildings and through windows, lights standing off of the streets. Cars drive by everywhere, one after another. Once in awhile you will see small patches of forests, heavy wooded areas, or open fields. That view does not last long because those small patches of land don’t have much to them anymore. Most of the time even when you see land that houses, buildings, or streets don’t stand on, the color brown dominates the color green. As you fly over coasts you notice small strips of sand because hotels and houses took over for their ocean views. Now you may be wondering why you should notice these things or if you don’t see a problem, you may be wondering what the problem is. If you fail to notice these things next time or if you fail to see the problem, you are failing to understand and try to help fix a problem at hand.
As I fly in a plane and look out my window at the world below me, I notice a problem. We humans are over consuming, taking, and destroying.We are over consuming our resources, taking for granted the natural life Earth gives us. We are taking land and homes from creatures, some who were even here before us. Most detrimentally, we are destroying lives. Humans are important species but we are not the only species that are important too.It saddens and disappoints me to see what our human race, a race with so much potential, is doing. The abundance of land that once lived is barely here anymore. The houses, buildings, streets, factories, cars, boats, and land chopped down to make more room for human needs has taken over. As we keep taking from nature, species lives are put into danger and they struggle to survive because we leave nothing left for them. What people don’t realize is if we keep consuming, taking, and destroying, soon there won’t be anything left for anyone. What we fail to notice is what we are oblivious too. Oblivion is our problem, what we are blind to notice is our problem. Next time you fly, look out the window and notice the world below you, notice what humans have done. Maybe when people start to notice, they will want to start making a change, making a difference.
