I attended a zoom meeting with my Environmental class as well as other environmental classes and we watched a movie and had a discussion pertaining to the effect that humans have on the environment. The movie was called The Human Element and it discussed how people had such a profound effect on the environment, that we as a species could be considered a fifth element in the natural system. The documentary showed interviews with people who had lost their homes due to climate change driven natural disasters such as rising sea levels. It also showed how towns had to keep spending millions of dollars to raise buildings, roads and dams in order to save the entire town from going underwater.

      The documentary also discussed steps that we could take as a species to try and help ourselves and our planet. One of those ways is putting funding towards actual solutions to these problems, like renewable or cleaner energy, instead of just trying to treat the symptoms of the strain that the human race has placed on earth. Putting more effort into solving the actual problem will not only help the people that are currently being affected, it will also be more economically beneficial in the long term. I learned that the extent to which people have an effect on the planet is straddling, but at the same time, we are also the ones that can actually do something about it. At the end of the showing, there was also a panel of professors at UNE that specialize in the environment, and from them, we learned a lot from a group discussion in how our generation feels about this crisis. They also gave us hope that our generation could do better than the previous one in this regard and they really believe that we can, in part because we grew up knowing that we would have to solve this issue.