This is a post by Tara Chattoraj, a student at Wheaton Warrenville South High School and a co-president of Verterra, the Action Team at WWS.

Everybody loves that extra hour of sleep they get ever year as winter approaches – and whether you’re working, a student, or somewhere in the middle, everybody needs that extra dream time! Some people dream of monsters in their closets, while other people dream of Megan Fox… and then there’s people like me who dream of the environment!

Okay, so cheesy? Definitely. But true? Well, yeah. I mean, as I settle down to sleep, looking up at the stars through my window, I can’t help but wonder what the world’s future will be. I remember the times when I could see the whole Milky Way on a clear day – in the past 5 years the only place I’ve seen the stars that beautiful is in the middle of Wyoming. I remember when I’d go to India and there would be cows roaming the streets, and garbage was literally a gigantic compost heap, that now, hardly a decade later, has been developed into extensive gardens and rolling fields of crops. Those were the days when global warming wasn’t a dinner table discussion, and wind power was a hippie idea.

But times have changed – the world has changed. And unfortunately, we haven’t changed with it. Not fast enough anyways. We were the cause of this reaction, and now we must live with the product of it all. Now global warming is a hot topic discussed by everyone, everywhere. Now garbage dumps are toxic monsters just waiting to explode and poison our water supply, our soil, and our food. Now there is so much light pollution that little kids don’t even know what their own galaxy looks like, and they don’t really care. The love we once harbored for our world is gone, the awe it brought to each of us just a distant memory.

I lie there, and I wonder what will happen to the future if we don’t change. What about our kids? Our grandchildren? Even our nieces and nephews? I wish they could see the world in all its former glory. I wish I could too. I’m not saying we should live in the past, I’m saying we should dive into the future without throwing caution to the wind, to remember that every action has its consequences. 7 billion people in this world and counting, with our current resources already having an eminent end, already petering out, we are going to have to make a change.

Forty-nine years ago, a man said “I have a dream.” He said “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” That still rings true today – because I have a dream. A dream that one day, we will all live in a world run by renewable energy. That we will restore the earth to its former beauty, and live in concert with Mother Nature. That every child will have an inherent love of nature that continues throughout their life. That every child will be able see the Milky Way. That every future generation can love the world more than the last. That the environment will be safe once more.

It’s not a hard dream to realize. We all just have to take the little steps: embrace the world, make it better one day at a time. Switching to green energy, finding better transportation, eating local produce more often, recycling and reusing more, using localized light… there’s a million easy things that we can all do in our lives to help the world.

This is what I think of as I drift off to sleep: my hopes and my dreams for a better tomorrow. And with a whole extra hour to do it, I know that each of us can have a dream, and each of us can make a difference.

So now it’s off to sleep perchance to dream.