Sierra Garcia

Our stories are unique, but our thirst for change is not. Each of us have vastly different backgrounds, career goals, and focal issues, but we share a common purpose that gets us out of bed each morning and keeps us up at night. That goal is a healthy ocean for ourselves, our communities, and our fellow 1.8 billion youth who are so often brushed aside while others shape the world we’ll inherit.

The international recycling market was thrown into turmoil in January when China officially banned foreign imports of most common types of recycling. Since then, many of the products that the United States has shipped overseas for decades — including up to half of all mixed paper, plastics, and metals — have been piling up in temporary storage areas and landfills in the United States, like the 290 tons of recyclables Sacramento County dumped into a landfill last month. This lack of a final destination could be a harbinger of environmental doom—or a golden opportunity.

What Trump has so masterfully achieved by blaming only the shortcomings of forest management, while pointedly ignoring the other issues at play, is igniting the worst of our partisan instincts in exactly the moments when we most desperately need cooperation. In railing against California’s lazy forest “sweeping,” his supporters hear confirmation that the elitist environmentalists running the state care more about saving some trees than protecting their rural homes and towns. His opponents hear a stunningly willful ignorance to the complexities of fire management, and a smug indifference to further tragedy befalling a state that will never support him. Both sides reflexively shut down, effectively killing the chance to communicate that only urgent climate action and major shifts in land management can hope to keep the next wildfire catastrophe in check.