My name is Zander Cleveland and the reason I’m passionate about the Earth’s environment is because I was inspired by the Kratt Brothers who are cohosts of the PBS Kids TV series, “Wild Kratts”. In every episode I watched, I learn something new about every animal they encounter. In one of the episodes I watched, the Kratts brothers encountered a herd of American bison and were daydreaming that they were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their expedition. What I learned from the episode is that bisons play an important role in their prairie habitat by keeping the grass healthy for other prairie animals. Most importantly, there were once millions of bisons in North America and the Great Plains covered the middle of the country ever since Lewis and Clark first exploring the landscape. But by the mid to late 19th century, the American bisons were almost hunted to extinction. Luckily, bisons still exist today thanks to people who care about them. However, the Great Plains are now existed in small pockets in North America due to human expansion. Before I watched Wild Kratts, I watched many movies and nature documentaries that features some of my favorite animals and addresses many environmental threats we’re facing today in our community. One of the movie I loved watching was an award winning movie, “Happy Feet.” The movie takes place in Antarctica when a tap dancing emperor penguin was banished from his colony for being wrongly accused of causing a shortage of fish in the ocean. So, he and his friends set out on a journey to find out what was causing the fish shortage. In the end of the movie, the penguin learned that it’s the humans who are responsible for the fish shortage and the world leaders agreed to ban all fishing around Antarctica. Everyone loves seafood but we need to be careful about how much seafood we collected from the ocean. African penguins are endangered because of the mass harvesting of anchovies and sardines. If there is not enough food for them or their chicks, then they will be forced to hunt squid and crustaceans. While the oceans can benefit all of us, we need to make smarter decisions that are better for our health and the oceans and educate others about the dangers of overfishing. Another movie I watched was the Pixar movie called “WALL E.” In the beginning of the movie, the Earth had became a polluted wasteland without nature, fresh air, or clean water. The humans never converted to cleaner energy or cleaned the environment until it was too late. So they create robots to clean up the environment and moved to outer space in their ship, the Axiom. About 700 years later, the humans have returned to Earth with the help of 2 robots, WALL E and EVE. During the end credits of the movie, the humans and robots worked together to make the Earth beautiful again. Today our planet is still beautiful but is facing many environmental issues like pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change. While the future is a mystery, the health of the Earth should matter every day. In conclusion, we may not be a perfect species but we can all make decisions that can help heal the Earth. Barack Obama once said in a nature documentary that the decisions we make in everyday can impact the future and the world that we live in. So, the health of our planet and what kind of world we want our children and grandchildren to live in is up to all of us.