Sustainability
1 min
Winner - 2026 Sustainability Short Story Contest
Melissa Y. - 6th Grade
Imagine a land of blue and green, a land with clear, sparkling rivers and diverse, lush forests. The air crisp, the cool breeze fresh...
Below your bare feet the soil feels warm from the gentle sun. You feel like you can just stand there forever, enjoying the warm sun, the soothing soil, the clean air.
But no. You're stuck here, in this depleting world, where survival itself is a challenge.
The room was packed, people standing shoulder to shoulder, their backs bent, eyes wide and pleading as they lined up for food.
Nowadays, a sack of potatoes is worth more than a phone. The world has watched multimillion dollar tech companies collapse as the only thing that mattered anymore was food.
When we wasted our resources on things like social media, we failed to fulfill our most basic survival needs. We threw away our resources like they were trash, spending more energy on efficiency than we did on survival. Soon, the things that we really needed were gone, and when the world realized, it was too late.
There are people so hungry, another skipped meal may mean possible death. They all wonder, what happened to all our resources when we needed it the most?
The answer was sustainability. But that opportunity was way past.
Sustainability is not hard. All it takes is to recycle a bottle, or to minimize waste. It's something we can all do.
But when we thought we were in our golden age, when we threw away our resources like they were worth nothing, our most basic needs were forgotten. The disaster didn't just... happen. It was what had been coming the entire time. We were just too blind to realize.
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