Clean Lungs For The Youth
CNN's Call to Earth 2022
Introduction to Earth Day,
Jasmine Li
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LIQUID NICOTINE IS TOXIC.
Crystal Ye, hand-drawn
Artist's Note:
Liquid nicotine is toxic. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, as little as one teaspoon of nicotine can be fatal to a 26-pound child. So how we can we justify cigarette and vape waste in our oceans, dumped by the thousands?
Studies have shown that even the smallest quantity of nicotine of cigarette butts in ocean water can be fatal to marine organisms and fish.
Each year, billions of cigarette butts are found on our beaches, oceans, lakes, and rivers, and now vaping has only compounded to this issue, contributing to not only toxic waste but by also putting plastic into the stomach of sea animals.
You're not doing less damage to the earth by vaping. It's time to wake up.
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Mother is dying.
Can you see it? Can you see the pallor on her face? The ashy color of her skin, threatening to crumble right off her bones. Every breath she takes rattles her ribcage, and leaves through her mouth in a cloud of smoke. She cries and she cries, her tears streaking black on her cracked cheeks.
She burns with rage and storms with sorrow as she watches her children die, as they are suffocated, poisoned, hunted. She turns and stares at you, green eyes dull from sickness.
Do you see it? Do you see the betrayal in her eyes, in her very soul? The despair? She has loved you so much, given everything to you, and yet, and yet…
You stare back with apathy, bringing your weapon to your mouth. You blow a plume of fruit-flavored smoke in her face. She collapses on her knees and screams, anguished.
She calls for you, her child, her Morningstar, and begs you to stop, to open your eyes and look around, look what you’ve done, look what you’re doing, you’re killing me. You’ll die too.
You look down at her. “More,” you say. “I want more.”
Harmony Liu, short story
Bury
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Helen Hui, digital art
Artist's Note:
Bury aims to raise awareness about the devastating impacts of vaping on the environment. The chemicals of the vape harm not only the user but also our mother Earth. Here, plumes of smoke envelop a distressed Earth.
Oh, The Ocean
Oh, the ocean.
My vision begins to blur,
As my eyes start to shut,
I let my body wander the boundless infinite ocean.
Oh, the bright blue ocean.
The waves whisper to me,
As the coldness crashes against my skin.
Oh, the bright orange fish.
I swim,
As the fish call for me.
I swim deeper and deeper,
Until my body begins to stop.
Until I can longer breathe.
I open my eyes,
Except,
There is no bright ocean.
There is no bright fish.
Only now is there the fish that swim,
With eyes filled with fear,
And a stomach filled with cigarettes.
Only now is there the white cigarettes,
That float along the dark ocean shore.
Oh, the ocean.
Zoya Kareem, poem
The Sick Sea
At twelve years old, I participated in my first ocean cleanup. My friends and I roamed the coast of California on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, the breeze light and harboring the unmistakable scent of the sea.
As I walked through the sand, I began to keep count of how many of each item I found. Bottles, 5, Food wrappers, 15, Straws 8…
Cigarette butts: 53.
I picked up the assortment of dark orange and white cigarettes, sometimes lingering a second longer to take a look at the ashes that fell loosely from the end. Sometimes the tip inconspicuously stuck out of the powdery white sand, other times they were carelessly strewn on the shore, barely used. But they were endless. Each one I picked up seemed to turn up ten more. It felt like I was trying to collect the sand itself.
By the end of the cleanup, I was thoroughly disheartened. I wielded my bag of trash not like a prize but instead as a burden, guilt weighing me down as I alone was responsible for what I had collected. The baggage clanked and rustled behind me as I found my friends.
As I emptied my container, all I could think about was how we were simply eating our trash- polluting our sustenance and then ingesting it all over it again through fish. Yet we continued to throw out our garbage on sidewalks and street gutters, in parking lots and rivers. And then claimed to love our earth.
--
The summer before I turned seventeen, I returned back to the same beach with Alex, one of my friends who had helped with the cleanup. We walked along the shore.
When I looked to the matted sand, I was greeted with the familiar view of cigarette butts that brought me back to many years ago, but among them there were vape cartridges. At my foot, I spotted a mini container with a sickly yellow liquid, untouched by the environment and sticking out like a sore thumb against the pale background.
Oh, how things had changed from bad to worse.
I couldn’t help it; I picked up the cartridge, which was already washed clean by the water. Alex looked at me in disgust, as if I had just taken a dead animal into my hand.
Yet, I could not help but wonder: If picking up trash was dirty, why did we not mind putting it in our bodies, day by day, hour by hour?
Justin Lai, short story
Emersyn Wang, cartoon
11th grade, 15 years old from Jericho High School
Smoke
You force smoke into
Your lungs, blackened
Hardly breathing
Anymore.
Do you really
Want it?
When you bring your hand up
High, to your mouth
And kiss
Death on the lips
Is it you in control?
Your fingers
Tremble
As they near.
Is that hesitation
Or addiction?
Regret
Or devastation?
These days
You lower your hand
But still taste
Smoke.
You are contagious.
The angels fall, intoxicated
On second-hand smoke.
The mermaids drown, overdosed
On plastic nicotine.
You force smoke into
Their lungs, polluted
Hardly breathing
Anymore.
Harmony Liu, poem
Jennifer Kim An, drawing