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As you read this, someone just died, dozens have lost their homes, and entire communities have been pushed closer to losing everything they have ever known. Homes and lives disappear in seconds, cultures are erased, and the roots that held communities together for centuries are ripped from the ground. Why? Not because of some mysterious organisation slowly poisoning our planet, it’s because of us. Our greed, our gluttony for more, for newer, for faster, is what caused this. We have been poisoning the Earth for a better life, and in turn, the Earth is poisoning us as well.

Maybe someone asked you, “Are you sure? I haven’t seen this happen around me. It hasn’t affected my neighbourhood, my city, or me directly.” That is part of the problem. Many of us notice climate change only as hotter summers, unpredictable monsoons, or drier weather. We often forget that we live in developed areas with concrete buildings, air conditioning, and easy access to resources. For us, climate change can seem far away. But for people who contribute the least to it, the effects are often the worst. Rural communities, especially those living in simple homes made from local materials, face floods, droughts, heatwaves, and storms without the protections we take for granted. They don’t have reliable shelter, cooling systems, medical care, or emergency support. In fact, nearly 500,000 people die every year due to heat-related injuries in rural areas.

Overshoot Days and the Machinery of Overconsumption

Now that we know who’s affected, let’s talk about how our actions affect them. First, let’s discuss Overshoot Days. An overshoot day is the point when humanity’s demand for ecological resources exceeds what the Earth can regenerate in a year. These days matter because we’re using more resources than the planet can replace, and we’re reaching that limit sooner than we should. Why does this happen? Because we consume too much, too quickly, taking more from the Earth than it can restore.

We live in a world of overconsumption, normalised by influencers who tell us to buy, buy, buy, promoting trends that are expensive, unnecessary, and often detrimental to our planet.

Making these products requires vast amounts of resources, many of which are limited and hard to replace. Extracting and using these materials damages ecosystems, pollutes the environment, and adds to the climate crisis. To maintain demand and encourage constant consumption, companies often produce far more than people actually buy. Much of what isn’t bought gets thrown away, wasting the resources, energy, and labour used to create them.

E-Waste and the Fast Fashion Trap

Companies push products through ads, commercials, and partnerships to get us — the consumers — to buy more, spend more, and waste more. Companies like Apple constantly release new tech, making people feel the need to upgrade again and again. In fact, 1.5 billion smartphones are sold worldwide, and 5 billion phones are thrown away each year! Most of the time, when we throw something out, we imagine it disappearing into some magical place…but it doesn’t. Much of our electronic waste is improperly disposed of, and some of it ends up polluting oceans and other ecosystems. Our e-wastes can release dangerous chemicals that harm aquatic life and degrade ocean water quality and pH.

And it’s even worse with clothing brands, especially fast fashion companies. Fast fashion is clothing made at extreme speed—often in unethical ways and with cheap materials. New designs are pushed out every month or even every week, leading to huge amounts of waste. Much of this is dumped in landfills or ends up on beaches. And much of it gets eaten by innocent animals that mistake it for food. What doesn’t get eaten just lies there for centuries, slowly decomposing and continuing to harm the environment.

Corporate Greenwashing and Planned Obsolescence

This leads to yet another way companies push overconsumption: by trying to make their products seem more responsible than they really are. One tactic is “greenwashing,” where ads make a company look environmentally friendly so people feel better about buying from it. Another tactic is “planned obsolescence,” when companies design products to stop working or become outdated after a certain amount of time, forcing customers to replace them. Companies also make half-hearted attempts at solving environmental problems while barely touching the surface. For example, some tree-planting drives focus only on planting trees but not on caring for them afterwards. Or consider H&M’s clothing donation drives that might sound helpful but end up dumping much of the clothing in impoverished countries without proper disposal. These actions often pretend to be solutions, hiding the company’s much bigger impact on climate change.

All this waste continues to pile up and grow. With only 10% of the world’s waste getting recycled, the rest is dumped in landfills, burned, buried, or thrown into oceans. In landfills, waste slowly produces methane, over 86 per cent stronger than CO2. When waste is burned, it releases harmful gases into the atmosphere. When buried, it can seep microplastics into the soil and water, which eventually end up on our plates. And what gets thrown into oceans slowly poisons fish and contaminates the water, destroying marine ecosystems and slowly killing off our planet.

Planetary Response and Extreme Climate Shock

But the planet is fighting back. The increase in the greenhouse effect causes more wildfires, sea level rises, and marine submersion in coastal areas. Wildfires are happening everywhere now, including places they never did before. Before pollution got so bad, natural disasters like droughts and floods used to only happen once in a long while. Now, they happen almost every year, causing pain and suffering for many.

In 2024, Hurricane Helene struck the USA, and according to climate scientists, was strengthened by climate change by 500 times, because of the heating of the atmosphere. In India, in May 2024, a severe cyclone named Cyclone Remal wreaked havoc, devastating 195,000 acres of land. Disasters like these show how deeply climate change can affect people, communities, and the environment.

Throughout our days, we need to think about our carbon and waste footprints. We need to realise that buying that one extra pair of clothes that we didn’t need, or buying that phone we didn’t require, can still play its part in the problem. Even when we feel like we are doing nothing wrong, or that we are too small to matter, our choices can still do serious damage.

Now, 4 people have died, 80 households have been abandoned, and 4 communities have had to flee. This as we know, all because of us, because of our greed, our never-ending hunger for more, most of which is fed by the advertising, logos, and phasing out of the old. But we can fight back.

Rethinking Consumer Choices and Sustainable Alternatives

Personally, I believe we can start by consuming less. Ex-Amazon worker Maren Costa, who helped design systems that encouraged people to buy more, has said that before buying something, we should think about it for a month. If you still want it after a month, maybe it’s a need. With this mindset, we can take small steps together to slow down production and in turn waste. We could recycle as much waste as possible or compost our organic waste (but remember, when it comes to recycling, always segregate your waste well—improperly sorted waste often cannot be recycled). There are countless things we can do to reduce waste: reduce demand, reduce the extraction of materials, and help stop climate change, unethical labour practices, and much more. These problems will not disappear overnight, and neither will we be able to completely stop buying things. But we can try harder to be more mindful of what we buy and who we buy from.

Companies such as Patagonia, a clothing brand, have even started implementing plans to reduce the waste they create. For example, they run programs that let customers hand in old clothes to get them fixed or replaced. When it comes to recycling, we must always remember to segregate our waste properly since improperly sorted waste often can’t be recycled. There are many things we can do to reduce waste: reducing demand, reducing the extraction of materials, and helping limit climate change, unethical labor practices, and many other issues. These problems won’t disappear overnight, and we can’t entirely stop buying things, but we can be more mindful about what we buy and who we buy from. Companies like Patagonia, a clothing brand, have put in place plans to reduce the waste they create. For example, they run programs where customers can hand in their old clothes to be repaired or replaced.

Patagonia also stands out for its sustainable and fair-trade practices, such as its focus on ethical labor, farming, and planning for what happens to a product at the end of its life. Another example is Fairphone, a company which emphasises the use of recycled and ethically sourced materials.

These companies show that businesses don’t have to chase profit through deceitful tactics – instead, they can solve real problems, reduce harm, and make a positive statement in the world.

Climate change might seem distant to us – maybe it feels small, or invisible, or easy to ignore. But for others – people who have contributed the least to this crisis – it’s already destroying homes, families, cultures, and futures. While we continue to buy, waste, and look away, they’re the ones facing the floods, the fires, the heat, and the hunger. We can’t keep pretending that our choices don’t matter. No action is too small when the planet itself is crying for help. If we don’t stop now, the question won’t be ‘who is suffering because of climate change?’ – it will be ‘who is left?’

Together, we can stop the problem caused by Us.

WriteToWin Summer 2026

Official publication archive for the WriteToWin National Climate Literacy Competition – Summer 2026 Season. Showcasing top shortlisted essays and real-world environmental actions by young leaders across India.