By: Ivy Stanley
OwlFeed Journalist

I’m sure at this point you’ve heard the French monumental cathedral, Notre Dame, has burned down. In under a week, over $1 billion dollars was donated to the revival of the building. To really put that in perspective, if you spend 1 dollar every second, it would take you over 31 years to spend it all.

I’m just as sad as anyone else about the fire, but the amount of money donated so fast from billionaires and multi-millionaires goes to show how easily we could clean our oceans. On the website onegreenplanet.org, “According to a study from Plymouth University, plastic pollution affects at least 700 marine species, while some estimates suggest that at least 100 million marine mammals are killed each year from plastic pollution.” Not to mention that traces of plastic have been found in the Mariana Trench, the lowest known point on earth.

We absolutely need the oceans. We don’t need to rebuild a church. There’s plenty of other churches out there and there’s plenty of other causes to donate your money to. We don’t need a cathedral, but we do need our oceans.

While some people may argue that we can do both, we should take care of the more pressing matter and get this part over with.

Inside of Notre Dame, there was nearly 200 thousand bees, luckily they all survived because they don’t have lungs and the fire just made them sleepy rather than suffocating them.

Bees are also vital to earth’s needs. According to greenpeace.org, “Typically, a bee hive or colony will decline by 5-10 percent over the winter, and replace those lost bees in the spring. In a bad year, a bee colony might lose 15-20 percent of its bees. In the U.S., winter losses have commonly reached 30-50 percent, in some cases more. In 2006, David Hackenberg — a beekeeper for 42 years — reported a 90 percent die-off among his 3,000 hives.”

Without bees and ocean life we lose our main sources of food. On Business Insider, scientists estimate we have until 2035 until the world is past the point of no return. Without food, we can’t necessarily continue living.

People are ruining the earth so fast that we really don’t have time to wait. As much as normal people turn a blind eye to this and say it’s all propaganda, scientists are right. According to pri.org, “You can think of global warming kind of like popping a bag of popcorn in the microwave. Anthropogenic, or human-caused, warming has been stoked by increasing amounts of heat-trapping pollution since the start of the industrial age more than 200 years ago. But that first hundred years or so was kind of like the first minute for that popcorn — no real sign of much happening. But then you get to that second minute, and the kernels really start doing their thing. And you can think of all those individual pops as extreme weather events — superstorms, extreme downpours, high-tide flooding, droughts, melting glaciers, ferocious wildfires.”

Needless to say, we are in that second minute. And like popcorn, even if you stop it right this second some kernels will still pop.

There’s plenty of things you can do to do your part in this. Urge your parents to vote for policies tackling global warming and climate change, or the cleaning the oceans, and making them major concerns for the government. You can donate to countless good causes too that I will link down below for you.

Everything is a mess but we can all do our part to help clean it.

Oceanic Recovery-

https://www.projectaware.org/

https://www.lonelywhale.org/

https://www.sealegacy.org/

https://www.oceandefenders.org/

https://www.ghostgear.org/

https://www.oceanrecov.org/

https://www.theoceancleanup.com/

Save the Bees-

https://thehoneybeeconservancy.org/

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/sustainable-agriculture/save-the-bees/

https://www.planetbee.org/

https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/west-country-buzz/