By Alex Kerravala, Staff Writer

The title pretty much says it all. For some unforeseen reason that can’t be explained scientifically at all, the Seine River in Paris is flooding for the first time since 1910. Streets throughout Paris look as if a hurricane passed through, and the Eiffel Tower is closed to tourism.

The Eiffel Tower isn’t the only piece of history threatened, as the flooding also threatens The Louvre, which holds some of the most valuable pieces of artwork in human history.

More than 1000 Parisians have been evacuated from their homes, and more than 1,200 others are living without power. In fact, two hospitals have been completely evacuated in preparation of the power outages.

Not only this, but Paris has one of the world’s most intricate and vital metro systems. The Paris Metro getting flooded could mean this is only the beginning of the disaster Paris will need to fix.

Now what could’ve caused such a tragedy? Is this a preventable hazard, that France could have stopped and is now paying for their arrogance with the time, money, and manpower to fix this catastrophe?

Well, yes and no. This was preventable, but Paris is not the party to blame.

Climate change is the first and last thought that came to my mind when I heard this tragic news from Paris. We as a world have been warned about the rising sea levels that comes with the melting of the Poles.

We’ve been warned about the dangers of greenhouse gases raising the temperature of the earth. We have been warned about every possible environmental threat that can be fixed with a push to renewable energy. Yet there are still those who would deny the necessity to change.

What makes it even more tragic is the location itself. It may be hard to remember, as it happened back in June and it seems twice a week there is some new Trump headline, but Trump had America leave the Paris Climate Agreement, a simple, modest, agreement among almost every first world country to better manage carbon emissions and greenhouse gases.

Of course Trump couldn’t do that to his sweet, beautiful, clean coal, and had the United States leave the agreement.

Streets across Paris are flooded, but it is far more important the US invest in a primitive and destructive source of energy.

So every other county is doing their absolute best to prevent what happened in Paris, where the U.S. willfully pollutes as it always has.

With almost every war since Korea, and now this, I guess the U.S. has gotten accustomed to others paying for their mistakes. No wonder Trump so desperately wants Mexico to pay for the wall.

So what can we do about it? We’re college students in a state run university in Massachusetts. There can’t possibly be something we can do to help, is there?

Well for starters you can watch your pollution; control your energy use, your waste production, anything to help control your carbon  footprint.

Along with that you can pay a closer attention during voting cycles. Keep an eye on policy during elections. Leaving the Paris Agreement is arguably the worst thing President Trump has done in his year in office, namely because he hasn’t done anything else, so voting against policy much lime that can be pivotal to the preservation of the earth.

Or you could send your thoughts and prayers to the victims. I am sure that will work about as well as it has in the past.

We as a civilisation have two choices moving forward: we can either make a simple change into renewable, less destructive energy sources, such as solar or wind, solving not only environmental catastrophes but also the U.S.’s incessant desire to interfere in the Middle East; or we can pretend this never happened, keep thriving on coal and oil, and combat a series of disasters like this.

Who needs a better world of tomorrow when I’ll die before I see it? Better I live wealthy than my children even have a world to call their own.