People used to be nomadic. Families traveled from location to location building houses and following food. As time progressed, and technology blossomed, the need to be self-sustainable disappeared. However, due to the pandemic, COVID-19, society has catapulted backwards as stores closed and daily life changed. In today’s world, returning to homosapien roots and developing self-sustainable traits is more important than ever.

Schools, parents, and society are not teaching the new generation about self-sustainability. Consequently, people’s reliance on electronics have grown massively. Internet use has also climbed, with over three quarters of the world on the internet by 2016. Worldwide, mobile devices have become the preferred choice for communication and internet access. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, there were 4.6 billion mobile phone subscribers in 2009, a 39% increase from 1.8 billion in 2004. Now, in 2020, according to GSMA real-time intelligence data, there are exactly 5.13 billion people in the world who own mobile devices. That is 66.5% of the world’s population. Additionally, according to Statista.com, Facebook and Instagram have over 2.7 and 1 billion users respectively. With a third of the world’s population with mobile devices in their hands and over 27,000 people on the internet at any given time (ourworldindata.org), the world is in a desperate need of change, as a result of too much dependency on electronics.

Hope is not lost for us though! There are many ways to lower the dependency on electronics and how the general public can go about learning to be self-sustainable. First of all, students can write letters to their school districts to advocate for self-sustainable style classes; schools will acknowledge and implement more trade style classes and opportunities for students to learn life-skills, like gardening, wood making, etc.. Another way to lower dependency on electronics is to work with organizations like Forest Home, which is a camp in California that is a week of no-electronics, and offers many selections such as shelter-building, how to make a campfire, and outdoor survival. Teaching self-sustainability classes and advocating for change is how we can hold ourselves accountable.

In conclusion, though many people think that cell phones and the internet are a necessity to life, we should push back some of the temptation and learn to be self-sustainable and self-reliant. Offering self-sustainability classes such as camping, boating, problem solving and team building will first of all give kids an opportunity to connect with nature and spend time away from their electronics, but also provides a chance for kids to learn how to survive in the small chance that there is a massive power outage or catastrophe.

<Jayden Peng / Rancho San Joaquin Middle School 8th Gra>