Santa Barbara’s winter storms have brought years worth of water–in the form of both rain and snow–to our parched California landscape. But despite ensuring a safe reserve of our most precious resource, the crisis has laid bare the fundamental realities of our ecological crisis.

Though California has received enough water in the last few months to sustain decades of drought almost all of it has disappeared and has been swept through our waterways into the ocean. Our state’s water infrastructure didn’t have capacity to capture the massive volume and lawmakers are only now considering investing into projects to make the most of future storms. But all that water is now wasted, and we’re still in a drought emergency that is sapping the reserves of our deepest wells.

In the coming decades, droughts and floods will only increase in intensity and in frequency. While analysts would have once described our recent storms as “once in a century,” in the coming years forecasts project many similar-sized cyclones occurring. California is falling into a destructive feedback loop of droughts, fires, and floods that erase our land’s fertility and livability.

Though we prize our lifestyle as Santa Barbarans, and we appreciate our city’s natural beauty and environment, our actions speak louder than our words. Climate change is fundamentally altering the world around us down to the minute level. Our pollution, our carbon footprints, our choices all make a sizable difference in the world around us, even if we can’t see it in our naked eyes.

It’s time to put our money where our mouth is. We cannot stand on the sidelines and watch as our future crumbles to climate catastrophe. Whether it’s choosing a “green” bank that doesn’t invest in the fossil fuel industry, or deciding not to accept a sponsorship from a polluting corporate behemoth, or deciding against flying 40 minutes to San Francisco, there’s a multitude of easy choices we can make to do an outside impact on making the world a better place.

Oftentimes, students at Laguna fall into a mental trap in regards to climate activism. Because we don’t think climate change directly impacts us, we forget how our actions affect climate change. Our personal carbon footprints are greater than almost everyone else on the planet, and so our individual power to do good as a consumer is so much greater.

When we look at the devastation our own community has suffered, it doesn’t take an ample imagination to visualize the millions of others that will be impacted by climate change. Our environment is all we have. There is no Planet B. Years in the future, we want to be able to look back on Santa Barbara and see that our choices left it a better place than we found it. Who knows? Maybe our planet depends on it.