As part of my final project, I was asked, “What line is our society dangerously close to crossing that would push us into a real-life dystopian world?”. For me, this was an easy question to answer considering I have been living in harsh climatic conditions in my city, Cali, Colombia. Our city has been experiencing droughts and floods constantly, with temperatures ranging from 34ºC to 18ºC. Having read the Handmaid’s tale, which deals with oppression and sexism being the cause of the dystopia they live in, I realized that people overlook how limited our resources in this planet are.

According to Nasa, we are at 400 PPM of CO2 in 2018, which is 100 parts more than what has been recorded since 3.5 million years ago, in the Pliocene era. This means that around 30% of the CO2 we are releasing into our atmosphere is being absorbed by the ocean, making the acidity in the ocean rise dramatically. This is causing corals to slowly start dissolving, and many shelled creatures to not be able to form their shells. If we don't have corals, fish and many organisms do not have an environment to live in, causing a rapid extinction of these animals. Oysters have not been able to reproduce in the wild, without getting destroyed by the acidic waters we have created. Many scientists of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization have been looking for more evidence, but always encounter a problem, people don’t seem to care.

You might be asking yourself, why should I care? Here is why you should care, if our planet is ruined, and all plants and animals die off, where will we go? Up to 2018, there is nowhere we can escape to from our own catastrophic choices. With the melting ice caps, our temperatures keep rising, making the heat unbearable in many regions. According to Nasa, our sea levels rise 3.2 mm per year, which put sea level cities such as Miami and New York, along with many islands and indigenous communities in danger. If people from these communities suddenly have nowhere to go and the fields in which our food is no longer viable for planting due to the high temperatures, where will we go? When we can no longer breathe the air outside our house because of the pollution, what will you breathe? When there is no more drinkable water, will you die of dehydration?

Unfortunately, these questions already have answers. People from Indian cities such as Gwalior and Allahabad can no longer breathe the air in their cities, all coming from factories. According to Water.org, 844 million people do not have access to clean water, with one in nine people around the world lacking the access to safe, drinkable water. Many people keep pushing the deadline and believe that the impact we are having on our environment will only come when they are no longer alive, when in reality we are already seeing the damage, and in less than 50 years we'll all be affected by our mistakes unless we do something about it now.