Dear Before The Flood team,

I personally wanted to thank you all for the work you have accomplished through your documentary Before the Flood. Last November, I had the chance to see it thanks to the free access and it really had a positive impact on my life and the decisions I have been making since. Through your documentary, I have come to realize the fact that we are living in a fiction, a dream that was built at the expense of our planet’s health. Sadly, that illusion has tended to become the standard of reality in our society, but the truth is, even if we try to avoid it, that the dream is coming to an end and reality is catching up.

Over the past years, even if I was aware of the issue, I have been focusing on my personal achievements. Going to college, starting a new relationship and leaving my parents home, brought me in what we like to call the “adult life.” This life where daily tasks, obligations and activities seem to occupy all of our time, making us forget about the issue to concentrate on other things that we think important. Your documentary made me questioned, “ What is the point of fulfilling our personal goals if we have no planet to cherish and value what we have accomplished?” That is when I remembered and realized who I was and who I wanted to be, that I would not sit back and wait for something to happen, I would take action no matter what because I prefer to dedicate my life trying to be part of the solution rather than contributing to the problem. Luckily, I have a passion for a career that can help to make a significant difference and I want to seize this opportunity. I am a student in architecture and I want to bring sustainability in people’s home and lives for a healthier way of life in harmony with our planet.

The challenge is indeed the biggest of our time; even I must admit that sometimes I am pessimistic about the issue. Through the daily life, we tend to forget about the environmental crisis instead of taking action. We are so preoccupied with the challenges and struggles of daily life in our society nowadays that we fail to see that none of this will matter if we do not act. We simply do not have or want to take the time. Maybe the reason is we do not want to concede what we have gained at the expense of our planet during the last decades and are now used to. On the other hand, I wonder why we often worry about our personal health, but not the one of the planet. We often forget that the two are bound together, our health is our planet’s health, and even if we exclude this fact, what good is growing old if we have nothing to live in. Overall, the thing is not about conceding or losing, it’s about replacing with something that has the utmost value: natural life. To let it take back the essential place it always had in our lives.

In order to initiate sustainable actions, I plan on working by example as well as sharing my work and knowledge with others. The difficulty about changing is that the only thing, which can ensure change will last in time, is our own personal will. In that matter, maybe my actions can ignite that interior flame in other people, which has the power to change the world we are living in. Of course, we cannot all elaborate the solutions to this crisis, but we can all be aware and sensitized to the problem, so that we are ready to embrace the solutions that will come our way. In doing so, we can all be part of the solution.

At last, I decided to write this letter to let you know that your efforts had a positive and decisive impact on at least one person, but something tells me that I am not the only one. As such, if each one of us that had their environmental conscious awakens by you, are able to do the same to others, then, maybe at a certain point, we will have done enough to ignite real change to our world.

With admiration,

Karl Greschner